The state is making it easier for people who want to forego an attorney and handle their own legal matters.

The judicial branch has officially opened the legal self-help portal, offering free legal resources and an interactive program that walks people through the process of filling out legal forms.

Those behind the portal say it's part of an ongoing effort to promote justice for everyone.

In order for the Kentucky courts to be successful in a vital part of our democracy, the citizens have to have confidence in us.

And they can't have confidence in something they can't access or understand.

So we're making every effort we can to get them into the court system to try to solve these legal problems they have.

The idea behind the legal self-help portal was to provide for self-represented litigants a one stop shop, a consolidated website where we pull together various different resources, some which were already available, some which we have created through the course of this effort to provide further access to justice.

They've taken kind of what appears to be complex legal proceedings, even in these smaller proceedings, and broken it down into step by step.

It's like a TurboTax for accessing the courts in a certain areas.

These are civil proceedings that tend to be some of the simpler proceedings and honestly are the kinds of things that most lawyers don't really take on unless they're already doing it pro-bono.

We're talking about things like domestic violence, petitions, some simple divorces, name changes, Expungements, for instance, many expungements can be handled without an attorney.

It's just another tool that, you know, we can offer people.

To give them a little bit more knowledge.

And, you know, knowledge is power, you know, to help them, you know, navigate their way through the legal system.

There's been lots of studies to show that when people go into court by even by themselves, but they're given the opportunity to to tell their story and they're heard that regardless of the outcome, they feel like justice has been achieved and they feel like the system has worked for them so that, you know, that's the big reason we're doing this.

The portal can be found on the state court system's website, and there are plans to have workstations at courthouses around the state.