Jenkins' New Self-Help Research Guides

Jenkins recently announced a refresh of our online Research Guides, which are meant to help users find information and resources on particular legal topics, whether online or at Jenkins. Today, we’re highlighting a specific subset of our guides.

Jenkins’ Self-Help Research Guides are geared towards Self-Represented Litigants and other members of the public throughout Pennsylvania, with a focus on Philadelphia. We’ve updated and reorganized our two previous Self-Help guides to create several different guides on various topics.

For those who are looking for legal help, we’ve created two separate guides: 

• The Self-Help: Free Legal Aid guide lists many free legal organizations in Philadelphia and PA, both by topic and in alphabetical order. It also includes information about free Help Centers in Philadelphia (some Help Centers may offer limited legal advice. Other Help Centers can only provide legal information, not advice. Please read the information about each Help Center carefully).
• The Self-Help: Find a Lawyer guide offers legal directories and lawyer referral services for those who want to hire an attorney to represent them. 

Members of the general public who are looking to conduct their own research at the library ($5.00/day) may want to start with our one-page guide, Self-Help: Visiting Jenkins Law Library. Next, users may want to take a look at a few guides that can help with some basics of legal research, such as:

• Self-Help: Finding Laws, Court Rules & More
• Self-Help: Finding Forms
• Self-Help: Legal Dictionaries
• Self-Help: Writing a Brief or Memorandum

Many of our Self-Help guides are on specific subjects. Currently, topics include:

• Self-Help: Child Custody & Support
• Self-Help: Divorce
• Self-Help: Ejectment
• Self-Help: Elder Law
• Self-Help: Landlord-Tenant
• Self-Help: Protection From Abuse (PFA) & Domestic Violence

These topical guides typically start by listing free legal aid organizations that offer assistance in related areas of law, followed by a curated collection of online brochures and websites for learning more about the topic. The subject-specific guides also point to sources for finding forms, whether online or through resources at Jenkins. These guides offer suggested starting places for researching laws (statutes) and court rules for each topic as well. Over time, we’ll be adding more information on which books, databases, or other resources may be helpful when researching a subject onsite at Jenkins.

Check back for new Self-Help topics in the future!