The Unpaid Workforce: How America’s Justice System Exploits the People It Fails

Courts and legislatures built a system most people cannot navigate alone, then left the explaining to whoever survived it. The labor did not disappear. It moved onto victims, families, and advocates, and over time, even with the best intentions, some of that help starts to feel expected.

I run an investigative publication about Michigan courts. Most weeks, the messages that reach me are not news tips. They are requests. Can you look at my case. Can you get on a call. Can you tell me what this order means. Can you write about what happened to me. Most are gracious. Many are urgent. And some people are understandably disappointed when I can’t cover their story, often because it closely resembles so many others I have received.

Nearly all of them come from people the system genuinely failed. That is what makes this piece hard to write. It is also why it has to be written.

The American justice system does not simply fail people. It transfers the cost of its failures onto the people it fails, and then onto anyone who learns enough to help them. Courts and legislatures have built a shadow workforce of unpaid legal navigators, researchers, document reviewers, and crisis counselors. The harder second half of the story is that the expectation of free labor does not come only from institutions. Sometimes, without anyone meaning it, it grows inside the communities trying to help each other.

The Courthouse Outsourced the Explaining

Civil court in America is no longer a place where two lawyers argue on behalf of two clients. In 2015, the National Center for State Courts examined civil cases disposed of over a year in ten urban counties and found that at least one party was self-represented in 76 percent of them, usually the defendant. The Legal Services Corporation’s 2022 Justice Gap study found that 74 percent of low-income households had experienced at least one civil legal problem in the prior year, that they sought legal help for only a quarter of the problems that substantially affected them, and that they received no or inadequate help for 92 percent of those problems. Nearly half of those who did not seek help cited cost.

Michigan’s numbers are stated in the Supreme Court’s own words. In adopting Administrative Order 2025-1, the Court wrote that more than one in six Michiganders qualifies for free legal aid and that there is one legal aid attorney for every 5,401 qualifying people. Many who do not qualify still cannot afford a lawyer. The Court created the Justice for All Commission in 2021 with a goal of 100 percent access to the civil justice system, and Michigan Legal Help is widely regarded as a national leader in online self-help. Those efforts are real. They have not closed the gap.

Meanwhile, the rules keep coming. Legislatures write statutes, courts write procedural rules to implement them, and the result is a body of deadlines, filing formats, service requirements, and preservation rules that lawyers spend three years of school and a career learning. Nobody designed that system to be read by a person who just got served while working a shift job and caring for a parent. When that person stands at the counter, the labor of translation does not vanish. It moves.

The sociologist Arlene Kaplan Daniels named this phenomenon in 1987. Her concept of invisible work described labor that keeps institutions running but goes unrecognized as work because it is unpaid and happens outside formal roles. Court navigation fits that description precisely. Someone explains what a show-cause hearing is. Someone points out that the response deadline runs from service, not from the hearing date. Someone shows a frightened parent how to request the transcript. That someone is rarely on a payroll.

From Victim to Unpaid Expert

The transformation follows a recognizable arc. A person experiences an injustice: a wrongful charge, a custody ruling built on a one-sided record, a family member lost to an unaccountable guardianship, a public records request ignored. They cannot afford counsel, or counsel fails them. So they learn. They learn court rules, statutes, evidentiary standards, appellate procedure, public records law, and how oversight bodies actually work as opposed to how their websites say they work.

Over months and years, that knowledge becomes valuable to other people. Some who acquire it become independent journalists, watchdogs, researchers, or organizers. Word gets around that they understand the system. What follows is rarely a decision. Nobody sits down and agrees to become an informal legal research department, crisis line, document reviewer, investigative consultant, and emotional support resource. It accretes one favor at a time.

What gets lost in that accretion is ownership. Expertise acquired through adversity is still expertise. The hours spent acquiring it were paid for in lost income, lost sleep, and lost peace. The fact that the knowledge emerged from personal harm does not convert it into community property.

When Help Becomes Something Owed

The way help turns into expectation is simple, and it almost never involves bad intent. An advocate helps one person. That person tells others. The advocate becomes known as knowledgeable, reachable, and willing to fight. Requests multiply, and somewhere in that multiplication the tone shifts. The first message asked whether the advocate might have time. Later messages assume it.

The patterns are familiar to anyone who has done this work. Repeated requests for calls, case reviews, or research, sent without much sense of what else the recipient is holding. An assumption that because someone helped last month, they will help again. An expectation that a stranger’s legal emergency will move to the front of an advocate’s week. A delayed reply read as indifference, and a boundary felt as rejection. A hope for an explanation of why help is unavailable. A belief that a person who writes publicly about justice has assumed personal responsibility for every case that resembles what they cover, and frustration when one story out of many similar ones is not chosen.

It helps to separate four things that often get blurred. Appreciation is gratitude for help given. Reciprocity is an exchange, whether money, labor, referrals, or support flowing back. Dependence is reliance, which can be healthy when both sides agree to it. Entitlement is the belief that help is owed and that withholding it is a wrong. The first three can sustain a community. The fourth drains it, because it converts every act of generosity into a new baseline that the giver is then expected to maintain.

The core error is treating a public commitment as a private obligation. Someone who believes deeply in justice has not thereby agreed to deliver it, personally and for free, to everyone who asks. Public service does not create unlimited personal liability for the needs of others. A person does not incur a personal debt to the public by choosing to help someone once, or a hundred times.

When a Crisis Narrows the View

There is a very human dynamic underneath many of these requests. When you are in the middle of a crisis, it fills the whole frame. The deadline really is urgent. The pain really is real. From inside that, it is hard to see that the person you are asking may be managing a medical issue, raising children, holding down a job, finishing a degree, or fighting litigation of their own.

Research on scarcity offers a partial explanation without offering an excuse. In a 2013 study published in Science, Anandi Mani, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, and Jiaying Zhao found that financial pressure itself measurably reduced cognitive performance among low-income participants, and concluded that poverty-related concerns consume mental resources that would otherwise be available for other tasks. Mullainathan and Shafir’s broader work describes how scarcity of any kind narrows attention toward the immediate need, a pattern they call tunneling. Someone facing eviction, a custody loss, or a loved one’s incarceration is living inside exactly that kind of scarcity. It makes sense that their field of vision shrinks to the crisis in front of them.

Understanding that does not change what we owe each other. Being harmed by a system does not exempt any of us from considering the people around us. It is an easy pattern to slip into, and most people who slip into it would never want to: the system took their time without asking, and in a hard moment that same habit gets passed along to the next person. Recognizing it is how we stop it.

As an Essie Sister, one of the core things we say is “I am aware of what I carry.” It is a statement about self-knowledge: knowing your own weight, your own limits, and what you bring into a room. But awareness that stops at yourself is only half of it. Everyone who reaches out for help is carrying something, and so is the person they are reaching out to. The advocate on the other end of the message may be holding a diagnosis, a sick parent, a second job, a dissertation, or a court date of their own. Knowing what you carry is the beginning. Knowing that others carry just as much, and often more than you can see, is what makes asking for help an act of respect instead of a demand.

The Myth of the Quick Phone Call

Almost every request arrives framed as small. Fifteen minutes. One look at a document. A quick question. Individually, each one is modest. The person asking sees one request, theirs. The advocate sees all of them at once.

A “quick call” is never just the call. There is reading whatever was sent ahead of time, because a call without context is useless. There is the call itself, which tends to run long because the problem is never as simple as the first message suggested. There is the follow-up: the link that was promised, the resource that needs to be found, the note to remember what was discussed. Then there is the second call. The table below shows how quickly this compounds using deliberately conservative assumptions.

The point of the arithmetic is opportunity cost. Every hour spent on uncompensated individual assistance is an hour unavailable for paid work, for family, for investigative reporting, for building the organization, or for sleep. A request can be small to the person making it and enormously expensive to the person receiving it.

Public Visibility Is Not Personal Accessibility

Social media collapses the distance between reading someone’s work and feeling close to the person who wrote it. A person follows an advocate’s reporting for a year, comments on posts, shares articles, and begins to feel a connection to the person behind it. That familiarity is understandable. It is also one-directional. The advocate may have no idea who that reader is.

Independent journalists and small advocacy organizations feel this most sharply because they lack the buffers institutions have: no front desk, no intake staff, no switchboard. Every message lands in the same inbox. Some of those messages are legitimate public engagement. Some are news tips, which are part of the job. Some are professional inquiries. And some are requests for substantial individualized work that arrive alongside all the rest.

The news-tip category carries its own version of the problem. A tip is information offered for possible reporting. It is not a commission. An investigative outlet decides what to cover based on public interest, documentation, and whether a story reveals something about how a system works, and many submissions describe experiences that are painful, real, and structurally similar to one another: the same kind of custody ruling, the same kind of ignored grievance, the same kind of unanswered records request. A publication with one reporter cannot write each one as its own piece. Declining a story is an editorial judgment about scope, not a verdict on whether the person was wronged. It is completely understandable for that to sting. It is not a sign that anyone stopped caring.

Those categories deserve different responses, and treating them differently is a matter of capacity, not coldness. Publishing work for public benefit is not an open invitation to unlimited private consultation. Reading an investigation creates a relationship with the work, not a claim on the person who produced it.

No Is a Complete Answer

Advocates who decline requests often find that a simple no feels incomplete to the person hearing it. The natural follow-up is to ask why, or what changed. Underneath that is a common, unspoken assumption: that a boundary needs a good enough reason attached before it counts.

That assumption is hard on everyone. It turns every refusal into a disclosure, and it forces the person declining to prove, with private details, that their own time is already spoken for. Many advocates are carrying exactly the burdens a requester might demand to hear about: medical concerns, caregiving, multiple jobs, their own cases. They should not have to recite them.

I won’t list what fills my own week here, and I shouldn’t have to. Neither should anyone else. No one should have to disclose their family’s medical circumstances, their finances, or their private hardships to establish that their time belongs to them. The legitimacy of a boundary does not depend on whether the person setting it can produce an acceptable excuse.

Compassion Is Not a Labor Contract

The professional helping fields have studied what sustained exposure to other people’s crises does to the helper. Charles Figley’s 1995 volume, Compassion Fatigue: Coping with Secondary Traumatic Stress Disorder in Those Who Treat the Traumatized, described compassion fatigue as a natural and disruptive byproduct of working with traumatized people, drawing on research with therapists, crisis counselors, nurses, and emergency workers. Christina Maslach and Michael Leiter’s 2016 review in World Psychiatry summarized decades of burnout research built around three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism or detachment, and a reduced sense of efficacy. In 2019 the World Health Organization included burnout in the ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon. Arlie Hochschild’s 1983 study The Managed Heart introduced emotional labor, the work of managing one’s own feelings to produce a required emotional state in someone else.

That research was built on paid professionals with supervisors, training, caseload limits, and, at least in theory, institutional support. Informal advocates have none of those protections, and the mechanisms the research describes do not depend on a paycheck. Repeated exposure to traumatic stories, constant availability, and the expectation of calm reassurance accumulate the same way whether or not anyone is paying for them.

The pressure is heavier for advocates who survived institutional harm themselves. Many feel a moral obligation to keep others from going through what they did. That sense of duty is admirable, and it is precisely what makes boundaries so hard to hold. The most capable, responsive person in any community becomes the default problem solver, and the default problem solver is the first one to break. Compassion is a value. It is not an unlimited labor contract.

Who Gets Paid to Do Justice

The justice system is not short of paid professionals. According to the Michigan House Fiscal Agency, in fiscal year 2025-26 a Michigan Court of Appeals judge earns $201,493 and a circuit, probate, or district court judge earns $186,163. Supreme Court justices, whose pay is set through a separate constitutional process, earn $181,483. The state budgeted $110.4 million that year for the salaries of 7 justices, 25 Court of Appeals judges, 223 circuit judges, 104 probate judges, and 232 district judges, before benefits and before the cost of clerks, administrators, prosecutors, and court staff.

None of that is evidence of wrongdoing. Judges should be paid well, and Michigan’s own Supreme Court has argued for years that its justices are underpaid relative to peers. The point is allocation. Public institutions fund the people who decide cases. They fund far less of the work of helping ordinary people understand and participate in those cases, and the remainder falls to volunteers who frequently cover their own costs: public records fees, mileage to hearings, transcript charges, software, and the hours spent producing documents that institutions themselves did not make understandable.

The contradiction is cultural as much as budgetary. Most people would never expect an attorney, a private investigator, or a consultant to review their case for free. Yet many assume a community advocate with comparable knowledge should. Part of the reason is that monetization is often seen as incompatible with public-interest work, as if charging for expertise proves insufficient commitment. That framing traps independent journalists and small justice organizations in a bind: give the work away and burn out, or charge for it and be accused of selling out. An advocate should not have to choose between financial survival and being perceived as sufficiently committed to justice.

One Case or a Thousand Readers

There is a sustainability paradox at the center of advocacy work. An advocate can spend five hours analyzing one person’s case. Or the same five hours can produce a public guide, an investigative report, a searchable database, or an explainer that reaches thousands of people facing the same problem. Neither choice is morally superior. Individual help matters, and some cases deserve it. But when time is scarce, the difference is enormous.

Audiences tend to value direct personal attention far more than the less visible work of building lasting public resources. A one-on-one call feels like help. A guide that quietly helps five hundred strangers can feel distant to the one person who hoped for a call. That emotional asymmetry pushes advocates toward the least scalable form of their work.

The nonprofit sector has a name for the financial version of this trap. In a 2009 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard described the nonprofit starvation cycle: funders underestimate what it costs to run an organization, nonprofits underreport those costs to meet expectations, and infrastructure is starved until the organization can barely function. Grassroots justice projects face a sharper version, because the expectation of free service often comes directly from the people they serve. Sustainable organizations need predictable income, clear priorities, and the ability to decline work outside their mission. The goal of advocacy should not be to create another exhausted person on whom everyone depends. It should be to build systems that reduce that dependence.

What Advocates Actually Owe

None of this is an argument against generosity, volunteerism, or mutual aid. It is an argument for informed consent and proportional expectations.

Some obligations are real. Someone who accepts an assignment, enters an agreement, takes payment, or formally commits to specific work has taken on a duty. An advocate who publishes also has genuine responsibilities to the public: accuracy, integrity, prompt corrections, and honesty about what their work is and is not. Those obligations are voluntarily assumed and clearly bounded.

A supposed duty to provide unlimited private assistance to anyone who asks is fundamentally different. People are entitled to fair treatment from public institutions. That is different from a claim on another private citizen’s unpaid time. A referral to an appropriate attorney, a link to a published guide, or a pointer to legal aid is meaningful help. Someone who provides it has not assumed responsibility for the case. Communities can respect and support advocacy without claiming ownership over the advocate.

The System Is Comfortable With This

When procedures are confusing, someone outside the courthouse explains them. When records are hard to obtain, a volunteer teaches others how to request them. When legal help is unavailable, a grassroots advocate points people toward whatever resources exist. Each of those acts is good. Collectively, they absorb the consequences of institutional shortfalls and reduce the visible pressure on institutions to fix them.

That is a structural incentive, not a conspiracy. There is no need to believe that any official intends to exhaust advocates in order to see the effect. When the cost of inadequate public services lands on people outside the institutions responsible for them, those institutions feel less of it. Complaints are softened before they reach the clerk’s window. Mistakes are caught by volunteers before they become appeals. Failures that would otherwise generate data, pressure, and budget requests are quietly patched by unpaid hands.

Michigan’s Supreme Court has acknowledged the underlying problem more directly than most. Administrative Order 2025-1 created a pilot allowing trained, registered non-lawyers, supervised through approved agencies, to accompany self-represented people in civil proceedings. The order provides that providers “may not charge a Client a fee for Accompaniment Services,” which sensibly protects vulnerable litigants. It also expressly permits compensation from third parties, including granting agencies. In other words, the state’s own model concedes the point: this work has value, and someone other than the person in crisis should pay for it. The question is whether anyone will.

So the central question for any court system is blunt. What incentive does a system have to become more accessible when unpaid people are continually expected to compensate for its failures?

Band Together

I am grateful every time someone trusts Clutch with what happened to them. I mean that. But I am one person, and one person cannot carry every case that lands in an inbox. The people best positioned to change a broken process are often the people who keep running into it, and there are far more of them than there are advocates.

That is not a brush-off. It is where the leverage actually is. A single complaint about a court, an agency, or an official is easy to treat as one unhappy litigant. Ten complaints that describe the same practice, each with its own dates and documents, are a pattern, and patterns are what oversight bodies, legislators, and newsrooms respond to. Many of the messages I receive describe experiences that closely resemble each other. The people sending them rarely know the others exist.

The first step is finding each other and comparing notes. People dealing with the same court, the same agency, or the same kind of proceeding can build a shared timeline: what happened, on what date, in which case, and what document proves it. Shared does not mean merged. Each person keeps their own records and tells only their own story, accurately, but a side-by-side chronology shows what no single account can.

From there, the work divides naturally. Each person can file their own documented complaint with the body that actually has jurisdiction, whether that is the Judicial Tenure Commission, the Attorney Grievance Commission, or the State Court Administrative Office, and say plainly that they know of others with similar experiences. A group can split the cost and labor of public records requests so no one person is paying every fee or reading every response. People can take turns attending hearings and public meetings and writing down what they observe. They can submit public comments on court rules and administrative orders, including Administrative Order 2025-1, whose comment period runs through January 1, 2027. They can request meetings with their state representatives and senators as a group, which carries more weight than any one constituent’s letter. And when they bring a pattern to a newsroom, one consolidated, documented tip from several people is far more useful to a reporter than a dozen separate requests to cover individual cases, because it is the pattern that makes the story.

Existing organizations are part of this too. Legal aid offices, court self-help centers, bar referral services, and established advocacy groups already exist to absorb some of this work, and they are stronger when the people they serve show up, give feedback, and say publicly what they need.

None of this is fast. The system did not end up this way overnight. When the National Center for State Courts published its 2015 study, its president described a civil caseload dramatically changed from the one courts had two decades earlier. Michigan’s Supreme Court convened its Justice for All Task Force in 2019, created the commission in 2021, and adopted the accompaniment pilot in 2025, and the justice gap it measured is still there. Problems built over decades of procedure, budgets, and habit do not unwind in one news cycle or one lawsuit. They change through steady, organized, documented pressure from people who keep showing up, and that pressure works best when it is shared.

What Fixing It Would Actually Require

First, fund the navigators the state has already authorized. The accompaniment pilot will only test anything meaningful if pilot agencies can actually pay providers through grants, state appropriations, or bar foundation funding. The Court’s public comment period on Administrative Order 2025-1 runs from September 10, 2026, to January 1, 2027. Anyone who has done this work for free should tell the Court what it costs.

Second, staff self-help centers in every circuit, not just the counties that can afford them, and require that every order affecting a self-represented party arrive with a plain-language notice explaining what it means, what deadline it triggers, and where to get help. Courts produce the confusion. Courts should produce the explanation.

Third, if courts are going to keep operating the way they do, with most civil cases involving at least one person who has no lawyer, they should stop treating those people as the exception and move to a case management model built around them. That means case navigators: trained, supervised non-lawyers, employed or funded by the court or its partner agencies, who follow a self-represented person’s case from filing to resolution, explain each step, track deadlines, and connect people to legal aid and social services when a legal problem is tangled up with housing, health, or safety. New York City has tested this. Its Court Navigators Program began in February 2014, and a December 2016 evaluation by Rebecca Sandefur of the American Bar Foundation and Thomas Clarke of the National Center for State Courts found that tenants assisted by navigators in Brooklyn Housing Court raised more than twice as many defenses as unassisted tenants and were 87 percent more likely to have those defenses recognized and addressed by the court. Michigan’s accompaniment pilot points in the same direction. A navigator model would make that kind of help a permanent, funded part of how courts operate instead of a limited pilot run through outside agencies.

That model should be trauma-informed from the ground up. People who end up alone in court are often there because of an eviction, a custody dispute, a protective order, a death, or an arrest, and many arrive carrying trauma that shapes how they hear instructions and respond to pressure. The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s 2014 guidance on a trauma-informed approach asks institutions to realize how widespread trauma is, recognize its signs, respond by building that understanding into policy and practice, and actively resist retraumatizing the people they serve, guided by principles that include safety, trustworthiness and transparency, and empowerment, voice, and choice. In a courthouse, that looks like plain-language notices, predictable scheduling, staff trained to explain rather than rush, and procedures that do not penalize people for confusion the system itself created. A court that worked this way would need far fewer outsiders to translate it.

Fourth, close the legal aid gap the Supreme Court itself quantified. A ratio of one attorney per 5,401 eligible people is a policy choice reflected in appropriations, and it can be changed by appropriations.

Fifth, normalize sustainable models for independent journalism and justice organizations: memberships, grants, paid research, institutional partnerships, and free public resources that scale. Charging for individualized work is what keeps the free public work alive.

Sixth, give affected people a way to find each other. Courts and oversight bodies that track complaints by subject could publish anonymized summaries of recurring issues, and community groups, libraries, and legal aid organizations could host spaces where people facing the same kind of proceeding meet, compare notes, and organize. A system that keeps every complainant isolated will keep treating every complaint as an isolated event.

Seventh, build a culture of asking well. Ask once. Say clearly what you are asking for and how much time it would take. Accept a referral as help, because it is. Offer something in return, whether payment, a tip, a share, or simply thanks. Treat no as an answer that needs no explanation. The tool below is a starting point for anyone who needs help and wants to ask in the right place.

Why This Matters

I started writing about Michigan courts because I learned the hard way how the system works when no one explains it. I keep writing because the record matters, and because I love this work. But loving it does not turn anyone’s time into a public utility, mine included.

The American justice system has created an unpaid workforce out of the people it has failed. That alone should embarrass every institution that benefits from it. And it becomes harder still when, usually without meaning to, the people helping each other begin to treat an advocate’s time, expertise, and life as though they are owed to the public. The people fighting institutional exploitation should not be expected to submit to exploitation themselves.

Sustainable justice advocacy requires boundaries, funding, institutional responsibility, and a culture that respects the people doing the work. It requires courts that explain themselves, legislatures that fund navigation, case management and trauma-informed navigation for the people courts already serve alone, people with shared problems standing together and lifting each other up, and a public that understands generosity is a gift, not a debt. It took decades to get here, and it will take patience and persistence to get out. Nobody becomes public property simply because they choose to do public good.