55th District CourtKaizen EventDaniel W. Linna Jr., Kenneth A. Grady, and Tamara TodorovicMichigan State University College of Law, LegalRnD–The Center for Legal Services Innovation∗

November 2015

Stories from Michigan court clerks andjudges suggest that self-represented lit-igants experience many issues when fil-

ing lawsuits. This kaizen event studied self-represented landlord lawsuit filings in the55th District Court clerks’ office. The kaizenteam implemented a visual aid, which re-sulted, during the event and data gatheringperiod, in self-represented litigants experienc-ing a 100% reduction in rejected filings andhaving 10% fewer questions about which formto use in filing a lawsuit.1

Problem Identification

55th District Court

The 55th District Court has jurisdiction in InghamCounty, Michigan (with the exception of the citiesof Lansing and East Lansing). It is one of ap-proximately 100 district courts in Michigan. Re-ferred to as the “people’s court,” the Court hears allmisdemeanor criminal cases, most traffic violations,civil claims up to $25,000, and landlord-tenant caseswithin its jurisdiction. Landlord-tenant cases com-prise approximately 7.7% of total new case filingsand approximately 89.8% of new general civil casefilings in the Court.

Self-Represented Litigants

Self-represented litigants often file lawsuits in theCourt. Court records show that self-represented

landlords (“SRLs”) filed 11.4% (49 out of 440 filingsbetween April, 1, 2015 and July 1,2015) of landlord-initiated lawsuits.2 SRLs include traditional andother landlords, including “accidental landlords” andlandlords who want to evict ex-partners.3 Courtclerks and judges believe self-represented litigantsface challenges when filing lawsuits because they are

∗LegalRnD thanks the Michigan Bar Foundation and itsExecutive Director Linda Rexer for supporting this project.LegalRnD and the Michigan Bar Foundation provided fundsto cover the costs of this project.

1. The kaizen team included three members of the 55thDistrict Court civil division clerks’ office, Court Services Su-pervisor Pam Pfeifer and her colleagues Teresa Ballance andRenee Smtih, and the following individuals affiliated with theMSU Law College LegalRnD program: Professor of Law in Res-idence and Director of LegalRnD Daniel W. Linna Jr. (TeamLeader); Adjunct Professor and LegalRnD Faculty KennethA. Grady (Team Sensei); Graduate Innovation Counsel AndyNinh; LegalRnD Innovation Assistants Gary Gonzalez andIrene Mo; and students Jonathan Arias and Tamara Todor-ovic. LegalRnD thanks Chief Judge Thomas P. Boyd andJudge Donald L. Allen Jr. for offering it the opportunity toconduct the event, and Court Administrator Michael J. Dillonfor his assistance and support during the event. LegalRnDalso thanks all Court personnel for their assistance during theevent.

2. E-mail from Michael J. Dillon, Court Administrator, 55thJudicial District Court of Michigan, to Gary Gonzalez, Student,Michigan State University College of Law (Sept. 8, 2016, 10:25AM EST) (on file with author).

3. During the kaizen event, two individuals–one woman,one man–approached the civil clerk’s window to explain thattheir respective relationships with their partners had ended,but their partners refused to leave. These individuals foundthat they needed to procedd as if they were self-representedlandlords.

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not familiar with court processes and legal claimsrelevant to their lawsuits. While clerks attempt toassist SRLs, court rules prohibit court personnel fromgiving SRLs legal advice. For example, clerks maygive a litigant the proper form to file a lawsuit oncethe litigant identifies the type of lawsuit it wants tofile, but clerks may not advise the litigant about thetype or scope of lawsuit to file.4

SRL Experiences with the Court

Court personnel believe that SRLs face more chal-lenges when filing lawsuits than landlords representedby lawyers. According to the clerks, SRLs ask morequestions, the questions take longer to resolve, andSRL filings require more rework, than questions andfilings from lawyers representing landlords. Accord-ing to the judges, SRLs also face more challengeswith the lawsuits. Again, when compared to land-lords represented by lawyers, SRLs have more is-sues during courtroom proceedings, include moreincorrect or incomplete claims in lawsuits, and morefrequently abandon lawsuits or start replacementlawsuits. Court personnel were looking for ways toreduce SRLs’ challenges when interacting with theCourt.

LegalRnD Perspective

LegalRnD–The Center for Legal Services Innovation(LegalRnD) at Michigan State University College ofLaw is dedicated to improving legal-services deliv-ery and access to services across the legal industry.LegalRnD accomplishes its mission through:

1. research and development of efficient, high-quality legal-services delivery tools and systems;

2. teaching students and lawyers the philosophiesand methods of disciplines such as lean thinking,project management, and quantitative analytics;and

3. engaging with the community to improve accessto civil justice.

Kaizen Event

LegalRnD offered to lead a one-week kaizen event toaddress issues arising when SRLs interact with theCourt. Ideally, prior to the kaizen event, the teamwould have gathered data and assessed court person-nel beliefs, the impact of process issues connected to

SRLs on court operational efficiency, and the SRLexperience interacting with the Court. That wasnot possible, so the team decided to move forwardwith the event as a training exercise for team mem-bers and to learn what challenges the team wouldencounter doing kaizen events in an operating courtsetting.5

Event Scope

The team assumed for purposes of the kaizen eventthat SRLs have more issues than landlords repre-sented by lawyers when interacting with the Court.As a general question across courts, however, it isunclear whether self-represented litigants impede ef-ficient court operations or whether self-representedlitigants achieve worse outcomes than litigants repre-sented by lawyers.6 Nevertheless, the stories providedby court personnel and observations of court oper-ations conducted prior to the event gave the teamconfidence that opportunities existed for process im-provements in court operations. The team decided tomove forward with the event even though it did nothave data supporting court personnel beliefs aboutSRL impact on operational efficiency.

Event Goals

The general goal of a kaizen event is to use lean tech-niques to remove waste from a process. Removingwaste improves process efficiency. It also improvesquality (e.g., mistakes, corrections, rework are allforms of waste). A kaizen event aims to make in-cremental improvements, which can be substantial,ranging from double-digit to several hundred percentimprovements. The team for the 55th District Courtevent identified three specific goals for the event:

1. conduct kaizen event training for team memberswho had never participated in a kaizen event;

2. document procedures for SRLs to file lawsuitsagainst tenants; and

4. See http://courts.mi.gov/self-help/center/pages/default.aspx and see http://dc.ingham.org/JudicialManagement/LegalAdvice.aspx.

5. The opportunity to do the kaizen event arose during thesummer of 2015 when student team members were on break.The kaizen event had to be completed before the studentsreturned to school.

6. See, e.g., John M. Greacen, “Self Represented Litigantsand Court and Legal Services Responses to Their Needs:What We Know,” Prepared for the Center for Families,Children & the Courts California Administrative Office ofthe Courts. http://www.courts.ca.gov/partners/documents/SRLwhatweknow.pdf.

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3. reduce filing errors by SRLs by at least 33%.

Planning and Data Gathering

The team began by creating a process map of thelandlord-tenant litigation process. While makingthe process map (an interim step in the mappingprocess is shown in Figure 1), the team gathereddata, including lead times (beginning to end time foreach step in the process), the sequence of tasks inthe process, tools used (e.g. forms), and problemsencountered by the clerks (e.g. SRLs submittingincomplete documents or incorrect information).

The team focused on in-person SRL visits to theclerks’ office. Although the clerks had indicated thata significant percentage of the questions they receivedwere by telephone, data gathered during the eventshowed that most questions were received in-personat the clerks’ office (30% by phone versus 70% inperson).

Figure 1: Process Mapping

Using charts similar to the one shown in Figure2, the team collected data on SRL visits and cate-gorized the interactions to determine process issuesand frequencies. The team used the map and datato select SRL lawsuit filing as the process to focuson during the kaizen event.

SRL Lawsuits

SRLs file several types of lawsuits against tenants,but this kaizen event focused on SRL lawsuits in-tended to (1) recover overdue rent from a tenant,(2) evict a tenant, or (3) obtain both forms of relief.When filing a lawsuit, SRLs use multi-part forms pro-vided by the clerks’ office. Although there are threetypes of relief, the clerks’ office uses two forms: onea “7-day notice form” and a “30-day notice form.”

Figure 2: Sample Data Collection Chart

The SRL should use a 7-day notice form whenseeking to require a tenant to pay overdue rent ormove out, and a 30-day notice form when seeking toevict a tenant and recover possession of real property.The SRL completes the form, which consists of fillingin information about the SRL, the tenant, the basisfor the lawsuit, the relief sought, and other basicinformation. Then, the SRL must serve the tenantwith the form. Service consists of delivering a pagefrom the form to the tenant using one of severalprescribed methods for service of process in landlord-tenant lawsuits. The SRL then completes a sectionof the form attesting to proper service and returnsthe form to the clerks’ office.

For the filing process to work correctly, the SRLmust (1) select the type of relief being sought, and(2) obtain, complete, serve, and return to the clerks’office the form for that type of relief. The datashowed that SRLs often did not know which formto use in a particular situation. The clerks had toask SRLs the same questions several times to try tohelp them while, at the same time, adhering to therequirement that they not provide legal advice to theSRLs. As shown in Figure 3, the data demonstratedthat 9% of clerks’ office interactions with SRLs oc-curred when an SRL attempted to file an incompleteform or wrong form (“rejected form”).

Implementation

The team considered ways to reduce the number oferrors in the SRL filing process.7 The team decided

7. The Michigan State Court Administrative Office has doc-uments available to SRLs that explain which form to usedepending on the relief sought. The team learned that SRLstypically were unaware of, or did not read through, the docu-

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Figure 3: Incomplete or Wrong Filing Rate, n=40

that a visual aid might assist SRLs in deciding whichcause of action to file against the tenant and whichform fit what the SRLs’ goals. The team createdthe visual aid shown in Figure 4. It was designedto give SRLs simple instructions explaining whenthey should use the 7-day notice form and when theyshould use the 30-day notice form.

Figure 4: Visual Aid

During the kaizen event, the team learned thatSRL filings occur erratically and unpredictably. Thishindered the team’s ability to collect data duringthe event on SRL interactions with the clerks’ officebefore and after implementation of the visual aid.

The team continued collecting data after the kaizenevent week giving the team more data on the effectof the visual aid.

The team then used information provided by theclerks and judges to develop a data gathering pro-tocol for the clerks to use when interacting withSRLs. The team put in place a process for gath-ering additional data using the protocol. Beforepermanently implementing the sign, the team hadthe clerks gather SRL interruption data for 30 days.Then, the team placed the sign near the clerks’ officeand the clerks continued gathering data on SRL in-teractions. The team analyzed SRL interactions withthe clerks’ office before and after use of the visualaid to assess the impact of the visual aid. The datashowed a 100% reduction in SRLs filing incompleteforms or the wrong form and a 10% reduction in SRLquestions about which form to use in filing a lawsuit.

Lessons Learned

The team identified two significant challenges forkaizen events involving Court processes. First, be-cause the key participants in the process were self-represented landlords, each of whom would use theprocess infrequently and unpredictably, the teamfound it challenging to develop and test a processstep or operation. Once a landlord was exposed toprocess improvements implemented by the team, heor she became “educated” and could not provide theteam with the view of a novice user.

Second, the team found conflicting guidance onwhat was “legal advice” and what was permissiblecounseling. The team erred on the side of permissiblecounseling when creating the visual aid and consid-ering other options. But, by doing so, the team waslimited in its ability to decrease SRL interactionswith clerks the decreased clerks’ office efficiency.

For future kaizen events involving Court processes,the team recommends that kaizen teams spend signif-icant (at least one and possibly up to three months)time gathering data on interactions with court per-sonnel and operations before conducting a kaizenevent. The team also recommends that further workbe done on clarifying what constitutes legal advice bycourt personnel so that future teams will have betterguidance on what process improvements would bepermissible.

ments before arriving at the clerks’ office.

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