Upsolve’s New Student Debt Relief Tools

Episode Notes

Transcript

Jonathan Pyle:

Business people will think about, oh, there’s this market out there that’s untapped. Well, we should think like that in terms of legal needs. Let’s find a way to provide a service at the right value point so that people will actually get that legal problem solved.

Speaker 2:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice and An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ron Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Today we’re talking about new online resources available to people who are financially burdened by student loan debt, the online debt relief and bankruptcy nonprofit UPS Solve as partnered with Philadelphia Legal Assistance on this project, which received funding from an LSC technology initiative grant in 2023 ups. Upsell’s goal is to raise awareness of available debt relief programs and provide guided assistance for qualified borrowers to pursue student debt elimination. Let me introduce our two experts so they can tell us more about their work. Jonathan Pyle is a contract performance officer at Philadelphia Legal Assistance and LSC funded legal aid program serving low income people in Philadelphia County. Ben Jackson is chief product officer@upssolve.org, a nonprofit which seeks to help people get out of debt by providing free debt relief tools and financial education. Ben, let’s jump in with you. Can you tell us about Upsell’s mission and what has it been like for you working at UPS Solve since its founding?

Ben Jackson:

Yeah, thanks so much Ron. It’s great to be here and upsell’s vision. I want to start there and then dive into the mission a little bit. Our vision is a world where luck has a lot less impact on your access to the US economy. So being able to find things and access things that, generally speaking, only wealthier people can access regardless of what your income is. And our specific mission is to help people take control of their debt. So people who are overwhelmed with student loan debt, overwhelmed with credit card debt, who feel like they don’t have a way out of that, we give them tools that help them dig themselves out so that they can build wealth. And the reason that I do this work is in my early twenties, I started a company that collapsed. And in the process I racked up a ton of debt, really like a crushing amount of debt that I just could not get out from under.

And no matter what I did, no matter the number of side hustles that I ran, I just could not pull myself forward, couldn’t get student loans, couldn’t really do anything other than be a slave to this debt that I have. And it was stumbling across chapter seven bankruptcy that allowed me to dig myself out, put me on a path where I was able to go and get a law degree, and introduced me to Jonathan Pats my co-founder at UPS Solve. And I decided that this freedom and this sense of just a weight lifted off of my shoulders that I had been given that had set my life back on track was something that I wanted to try to help other people experience as well. So I joined UPS Solve very early on and with Jonathan Pets and our other co-founder at the time, Rohan Pav built a tool that took what at the time was kind of a 90 minutes to two and a half hour really form heavy process and automated it down to as little as a three minute review workflow using some pretty simple technology. And it’s just been an absolutely astonishing and exciting journey. Ever since then, we’ve helped over 350,000 people relieve about $730 million in debt, and that’s just with our core bankruptcy tool. We also have a suite of additional products in education that we have developed in the past as well as new tools that we’re developing now that we hope will be able to help millions more Americans dig themselves out of debt and participate in the economy.

Ron Flagg:

Well, it sounds like you’re in the empowerment business, and I’m going to look forward to hearing more about how you empower people with technology and the particular tools you’ve built. Now, Jonathan, you’re like me on the legal end of things. Could you tell us a bit about the focus of your work at Philadelphia Legal Assistance?

Jonathan Pyle:

Yeah, so I’ve been working at PLA since 2008. I’m an attorney and I have many different responsibilities including LSC compliance for our organization and helping out with random things that need to be done in management and administration. But I have a background as a self-taught computer programmer, and I just can’t get away from computer programming because there’s so much need to automate things. So I’ve been very helpful over the years at PLA automating the generation of reports and invoices. We applied for TIG grants going back over a decade in order to develop tools for low-income people, including document automation projects. And I was very much inspired about 10 years ago by the message of Jim Sandman, your predecessor to LSC, who made this bold claim kind of like the JFK announcement about going to the Moon in 10 years. He wanted the community to be able to set up a situation where we provide some form of effective assistance to 100% of people with a civil legal problem instead of providing assistance to 10% and then complaining about lack of funding.

So I thought that this was a really motivating goal and I thought this really is possible with technology. I know what automation can do. I’ve been doing all sorts of automation in the legal space, but we just need to sort of expand it. And at the time there were these document automation tools, but they were kind of designed to be easy to use by lawyers and they only really did form filling. So I set about on my nights and weekends to build a open source free document automation platform called Doc Assemble. And then I released that to the world and it’s used by some legal aids, but it’s actually mostly used outside of Legal Aid. I understand I’m having an impact on access to Justice in India and Brazil by the people who use this tool. So that’s the main thing that I like to do is automate things. And my work at PLA, it’s useful because if one of our attorneys has an idea for some type of client facing web app, I can say, oh, well I can get that done for you by tomorrow morning instead of saying, oh, we have to hire somebody. And so it’s a lot of fun when I have a chance to automate things for clients.

Ron Flagg:

Well, it sounds like you’re in the empowerment business as well, so maybe that’s the business we all are in and should be in. And let’s talk about that more Jonathan. How did Philadelphia Legal Assistance become connected with UPS solve for this project, and how did that collaboration evolve?

Jonathan Pyle:

Yeah, so in May, 2016, I was in Chicago for the Equal Justice Conference and Jane Rubin, who works with you at LSC came up to me and said, there’s this college student here named Rohan Pav Lu. You should really talk to him. And I thought, what is a college student doing at the Equal Justice Conference? That doesn’t make any sense. So eventually I found him in the hallway and we got to talking, and I never made it to the session that I was planning on attending because we talked for an hour and a half and I was like, oh my gosh, who is this college kid who knows everything about the problems in civil legal aid and the potential for technology to solve them? I was just blown away. And so I kept in touch with Rohan, who was at the time a student at Harvard and working with the HJ lab there.

And so a year later he had this startup, he hadn’t graduated yet, he had this startup called UPS Solve. He had a little bit of money from Harvard. And so I applied for a TIG grant on Upsell’s behalf, sort of where we were getting the money and upsell was our vendor to automate Chapter seven bankruptcy. And we worked on that project. And that summer, a younger Ben Jackson was an intern through the A to J fellow program, and I helped out during the early years coding the client interview in Doc Assemble. Now they’ve since hired all sorts of developers and moved on to bigger and better software. And so mostly I’m serving as the LSC grantee receiving the grant and working with UPS Solve and then UPS Solve, I build the software. So the relationship has continued. We’ve applied for other grants to expand the software to build the attorney portal and to build assistance for debtors after the filing of the petition. So it is just been so great watching UPS Solves tool Evolve. It’s not just document assembly, it’s the whole thing. It’s up to the last mile of assistance, which is precisely what low income people need. They don’t just need a document, they need ongoing help, they need customer service, they need somebody to review things. And so upsell provides all that. I just love it.

Ron Flagg:

So we all went to law school and obviously as part of our law school, we read cases from the 19 hundreds, the 18 hundreds, maybe even the 17 hundreds in the law. All too often yesterday’s answer is tomorrow’s solution, but that’s not the nature of the world we live in. And recently we did a podcast episode with four recently retired legal aid directors who had worked in the field for 40 years or more. And one of the things that they emphasized was the importance of identifying new client needs and adopting to those needs and innovating to provide services to meet those emerging needs. Does that ring true in your organization’s approaches to entering the student debt space?

Ben Jackson:

Absolutely. Yeah. So Absolve has about three and a half million annual site visitors who find us on Google asking various debt questions. And we have, depending upon the year, between about twenty five hundred and thirty five hundred people who use our core bankruptcy application. So there’s a big disconnect there. I am not a math wizard, that’s why I went to law school. But what are we talking about there? One 10th of a percent of the people that come to our site find that bankruptcy tool as their core solution, which tells us that there are an enormous number of people who need debt relief help, who either need something other than bankruptcy or for whom it’s going to take really an uphill battle to persuade them that bankruptcy might be the right option for them. So we are constantly trying to figure out what are the other services we need to provide to these users so we can help them address their debt relief problems before they hit the emergency point of bankruptcy.

And I think back to my own experience with debt bankruptcy was the point where I was like, oh my God, I cannot understand these options anymore. I cannot keep trying to just make more money and pay for this. I have no idea what people are talking about when they talk about debt settlement or validation or credit builder loans. I just have to get rid of this. But that was a long journey to that point, right? There were a lot of things that I encountered on the way that could have helped get me out of debt, but I just did not understand. And so part of UPS’s vision as we move forward from being the world’s largest chapter seven bankruptcy, providing nonprofit to being hopefully the world’s largest general debt relief source, is that we can start to address some of those upstream needs and help our users locate themselves in that decision framework where they come in and they say, I have no idea what’s going on.

I just feel pain. And we can help them figure out what the most appropriate ways of addressing that pain are, whether it’s using mechanisms in the legal system like bankruptcy or using standard negotiation practices direct with creditors like debt settlement, validating debt, if they have debt collectors calling them, building credit, et cetera, et cetera. And we are actually actively working on a suite of about 11 tools to deliver those additional services so that we can address the needs of those. Again, I can’t do the math. 99.99% of the rest of our users for whom bankruptcy is either not a viable solution or just not a solution that they’re comfortable with, but it is tremendously difficult to figure out exactly what the needs are.

Ron Flagg:

Jonathan Philadelphia Legal Assistance, pretty much every legal aid program in America has more applicants for its services than it possibly can serve given your resources. So in an environment like that, how do you take on something new as you’ve done in this space? How does that evolve?

Jonathan Pyle:

Yeah, it’s really crazy. It’s like drinking from a fire hose when you think about the intakes that we get and then what we’re actually able to provide. And it’s really even worse than that because the people who contact us are just the subset of the population that knows that there’s such thing as legal aid, and we don’t do all that much to attract people to our website the way that UPS solve does. So people don’t necessarily find out about Legal Aid when they’re searching for things as your justice gap surveys have found out, some people don’t realize that their problems have a legal component. And also the services that we provide, there’s sort of an inertia to it coming both from funders and also from the professional nature of being an attorney. Once you’re really an expert on something, you don’t want to learn a whole new area of law.

And so there’s this inertia to what Legal Aid provides, and we certainly try to be nimble. And during the pandemic, we were able to turn on a D and do things differently. But I really love UPS Solves approach because they’re a nonprofit, but they’re so entrepreneurial and they speak in these terms that are sort of alien to me in the nonprofit world talking about how they capture all their website visitors and things like that. And so I think it’s precisely that mindset that we really need. Business people will think about, oh, there’s this market out there that’s untapped. Well, we should think like that in terms of legal needs. It’s like, oh, there’s this. People have these legal needs that they might not even identify as legal needs. Let’s find a way to provide a service at the right value point so that people will actually get that legal problem solved instead of letting it just stay there unsolved.

And so I think there’s a room for all types of delivery models. We provide attorney bankruptcy assistance, and that is necessary for a certain subset of people, but there’s all sorts of people who benefit from UPS Solve. So when somebody comes to us with debt, we will offer UPS Solve we’re appropriate, but we’ll also try to find a pro bono lawyer. And I think the more we have tools like Absolve that are the assisted pro se variety, we can sort of deal with that fire hose of need by taking some off that can benefit from the written materials or the assisted pro se. And then what we’re left with is legal aid, the more complex cases that really do require an attorney. So I feel like we’re not far enough in pursuing that type of approach, but I just think UPS solve is a big step forward and I’m really glad they’re branching out to student debt relief as well as bankruptcy.

Ron Flagg:

Well, that’s a good segue, Ben. Can you tell us more about the suite of resources that are currently available to people struggling with student debt through upsell?

Ben Jackson:

Absolutely. I’ll send everyone an NDA after this conversation. Yeah, so we have our core bankruptcy product that I mentioned earlier. If you are filing bankruptcy, there’s actually a process that’s been around for quite a while, but it’s been very difficult to understand whereby you can file an adversarial proceeding essentially saying that it is too difficult for me to repay my student loans based on any number of circumstances. So things like I am very old and it would be impossible for me to find employment or I’m injured and that in some way makes it difficult for me to get gainful employment. The school shut down before I could get a degree, et cetera, et cetera. And up until about late 2022, those hardship criteria were very squishy. Every assistant US attorney would adjudicate it differently like hardship in some context meant one thing and another thing it meant you’ve lost all of your limbs and are blind.

There was no real standard for it. And in late 2022, if I’m not mistaken, it might’ve been early 2023, the DOJ said, look, student loan debt is a massive problem. There’s something on the order of 43.2 million people who own 1.6 million or excuse me, trillion in debt. We need to do something to standardize this just given the volume of cases of people coming through trying to ask for these hardship discharges. So they guidance that set forth some pretty cut and dry standards that essentially say, if you hit these things, you are just presumed to have a hardship and therefore we should rubber stamp these adversary proceedings in bankruptcy cases. And so absolve saw this. We have a couple of attorney advisors who had been doing this out in the field for a while, and we said, let’s build a tool as sort of an add-on component to our bankruptcy products that assesses for these hardship criteria.

If you pass them, then we’ll facilitate you actually doing a adversary proceeding. We’ll facilitate telling you whom you need to serve the documents on assistant US Attorney, department of Education, et cetera. We’ll give you filing instructions so you can do that, and then we’ll track your case outcome secondary to your bankruptcy case through to the finish so that we can give you guidance along the way and make sure that those loans are actually discharged. Now to date, we’ve done about 75 student loan discharge applications along with bankruptcies through that tool. And we’ve done another 75 manually sort of as a process of learning the automation procedure, figuring out what does and doesn’t work. Of those cases, we’ve had five that have been forgiven so far, fully discharged student loans and bankruptcy. We have about 11 others that have been forgiven in different ways. So through standard federal forgiveness programs that people found out they were eligible for as they were using this adversarial proceeding process.

And we’ve had three in total that were either rejected for deficiency or just withdrawn because oftentimes the aas that users are working with, they are not necessarily directly or quickly following the guidance users get confused and they will sometimes withdraw their cases on their own. Now, that sort of highlights a problem with this, which I don’t want to get into because it’s distracting, but the adjudication process on this is still immensely slow. We’re talking like three, six plus months after sending in your proceeding before you get any response at all. So it’s difficult at this early phase to gauge what the total impact of that will be, but that’s thing one that we’re working on. I’ll stop there if you have any questions about that. Well,

Ron Flagg:

A practical question, what’s the website on which these tools are housed?

Ben Jackson:

Yeah, great question. So UPS solve.org is where we host all of our tools. Up until about last week, that was exclusively a bankruptcy tool. So you click that and you enter a screener immediately that screens you for bankruptcy and then also for student loan hardship in pivoting towards just general debt relief work. We actually updated the site last week, which Jonathan Pyle, I don’t know if you’ve even seen this yet, but we now do intake where we’re assessing what sort of pain does the user feel related to their debt, and then what type of debt are they struggling with. And then based on those answers, we move them into different product services or education models that we have live. So from UPS solve.org you can access this tool. We also have UPS solve.org/bankruptcy, which is a description of the core bankruptcy tool and the student loan functionality that goes into that.

And we are working on UPS solve.org/student loans, which is going to be a repository both of information about how to discharge your student loans through bankruptcy, as well as how to take advantage of other federal programs, whether that is occupation-based relief income-based relief. Right now, the resources we have on those things that are already on absolve.org are essentially guides. So we have instructional guides on how to apply for all those programs. And in the relatively near term, I would guess next 12 months, we expect to be integrating actual application flows where you can apply for those other hardship assistance programs alongside of the bankruptcy hardship exemption, if that’s something you’re eligible for. And to plug the URL absolve.org.

Ron Flagg:

Thank you. So there are obviously millions of people who have student debt, probably millions of people who find that debt to be difficult and having a material adverse effect on their lives, and still others of substantial subset of those millions really finding themselves in an unmanageable situation much the same as you described, Ben, in your own life. So presumably we have people in all of those categories listening to this, I hope. So, listening to this podcast, what sorts of situations would someone find themselves in where they might benefit from these online resources?

Ben Jackson:

I think it’s all over the map. That’s the interesting thing with student loan debt is it affects people who are far below the federal poverty level often as much as it affects people who are significantly above. It’s a massive debt problem in the United States where student loan borrowers tend to find themselves as opposed to people that are really crushed by credit card debt or other forms of consumer debt. Is it sort of like a background simmering problem? It’s a thing that they say like, oh, this doesn’t almost even count as a debt. It’s just like a general tax on my income that can’t possibly go away. So one of the things that we find is they often don’t even think of it as the same problem as their credit card debt because for years and years they’ve been told you can’t get rid of this.

So it’s almost like not even a category in your brain of maybe I could get relief from this, but many, many people have it something on the order, like we said, of 43.2 million Americans have an average of $37,000 in student loan debt per person. That’s an enormous amount of money. And if you are the average American below the federal poverty level, which is something like 13% or more of Americans, we’re talking people that have a household income of between 45 and $70,000 a year. So your debt to income ratio just from your student loans, which again is a thing you don’t even think of as debt, this is to say nothing of credit card debt is 50%, which is wild. So this is a major problem for many people. And to the point of differentiated solutions, the people who are able to get discharges for the hardship question, those tend to be much lower income people because most of the hardship criteria are about you not being able to make enough money to pay your student loans. The people in the other buckets are very diverse. There are hardship programs based on your occupation if you work for a nonprofit, if you are a specific teacher, certain members of the military. And then there are things that are based on income that are sort of gradations from very low income to very high income, but it’s really all over the map. It’s a problem that affects everybody and really a problem that holds Americans back in significant ways.

Ron Flagg:

So Jonathan, first of all, thanks to you and Philadelphia legal assistance for helping to support the development of this tool and its rollout. Do you have plans for sharing your experience in working with this tool with either other legal aid providers in your region or elsewhere in Pennsylvania around the country or perhaps other service providers? I know Legal Aid in a vacuum trying to work in its own little silo is not nearly as effective as when you’re part of a constellation of service providers that are trying to help people through a variety of problems. Some of those problems could use legal help, some of them social work, some healthcare. So how do you let people know about this resource?

Jonathan Pyle:

Yeah, when I first started with building tech tools and applying for TIG grants, I had this impression that if you build it, they will come because it’s such a great tool. Certainly it will promote itself and the word of mouth will be really effective, but that’s not at all the case. Now, we do plan to present this tool at Legal Aid Conferences because we really want the community to know about the existence of the tool so that they can refer clients there. But one of the things I’ve learned is that outreach is a far bigger job than it might first appear, and publicity is a huge job. At one point, absolve had a whole staff member who just spent all day contacting other organizations with websites and inviting them to make a link to UPS Solve on their website and teaching them about UPS Solve.

So they know about it. And you might think, oh, that would get hundreds of links a day. But no, it kind of takes a lot of work to get the word out and to build trust. And so a lot of that work is kind of on UPS solve and the way that they approach it. That’s one of the great things that I’ve learned from working with UPS Solve is that one of the best ways that they can sort of do get the word out about their services by writing informational articles on their website, because then that gets picked up by Google and other search engines. And then anybody in the world who wants to know more about that topic, whether they Flagg it as legal or not, will find Absolves website at the top of the search results and then learn more about it. And those written materials don’t necessarily solve their problem on their own, but they lead people to understand what services they need and then they can click the button to go through upsells process. So getting other organizations to find out about it, I think might be sort of the same way. It’s just making sure that upsell’s name is well known. And so I appreciate the topic of today’s podcast is one of the ways that we can spread the word.

Ben Jackson:

Ben, your thoughts on reaching new audiences? Well, one of the things that I think you would find evident in just the fact that you’re doing this podcast is that people tend not to read as much as they used to read. So to Jonathan Pyle’s point, right? We’ve been very successful publishing content that Google picks up that then users will find and end up in our system getting the help that they need. But most people that engage, especially younger audiences that engage with educational content online are doing it through podcasts or through videos. And so one of the ways that we’re starting to move is to producing video educational content, and even potentially producing social media content, which Lord save us. That’s going to be a journey for me to get into social media, but really to meet users where they are, to meet people who, to Jonathan’s earlier point, would not be able to encounter or find legal help in any other context.

And so most of our move is to say, where are these other audiences that we can go directly to? We are also obviously interested in more service partnerships, so partnering with other legal aid agencies like we’ve done with Jonathan’s organization so that they can refer users to us as well, because there’s, especially in legal service delivery, there’s something about trust. There’s something about the relationship that happens face to face where if they say, Hey, you trust me, go check out these resources that Absolves produced. It’s a very, very different relationship than if it’s just, this is on Google. Is this a scam? What is this? And so we’re definitely interested in developing those relationships a little bit more as well.

Ron Flagg:

So a warm handoff could be to another human service provider or it could be to an online service. Well, this has been a great conversation, hopefully informative to our audience, I’d like to give each of you an opportunity to share a final thought on what you’ve learned from your collaboration or what you’d like people to know about Debt Relief Services. Jonathan, let’s start with you. I

Jonathan Pyle:

Want more UPS solves in the world, me too. And I am kind of disappointed that there aren’t more imitators because there’s just so much that can be done by providing scalable assistance to people who are helping themselves by handling their legal matter per se, with very targeted, very advanced assistance. So one of the things I’m doing is this weekend I’m attending the Social Justice Hackathon at Drexel Law School, and our project is to build a chatbot to help with people in Philadelphia who are experiencing eviction. And this is very experimental, but I really want the generation of young people, particularly law students, to envision themselves not necessarily working as an attorney at a firm, but being a nonprofit startup entrepreneur and building another UPS solve to tackle some type of issue with a combination of human and automated support. And I think the power of chat GPT is a real opportunity. Is chat GPT going to give good advice to people about bankruptcy? Well, it kind of all depends on whether Jet GBT is reading upsell’s website. I hope they’re, because there’s a lot of information there, and that might be the future of reaching people, is they’ll just go directly to chat GPT and say, how do I get rid of my student loans? So yeah, that’s one of the things that I’ve learned from working with UPS Solve is that we just need to use this model more.

Ron Flagg:

Well, from your mouth to innovator’s ears, I hope. Ben, final thoughts?

Ben Jackson:

Obviously, we’re working with a lot of different systems when we submit student loan applications, right? In some instances, we’re working with the Department of Education on services and processes. In some instances we’re working with assistant US Attorneys. And what I would say to these keepers of the keys is that you can trust us. You can trust that we’re doing the work, we’re doing the validation, we’re doing the vetting to make sure that people are able to submit applications for only services that they’re eligible for and that are in line with your guidance. And I think there’s a lot of room in the future for us to build even deeper trusting relationships with these experts in a similar way to what we’ve done with courthouses, where users will go in with applications prepared by UPS Solve, and the clerks will say, oh, I know UPS solve.

I’m going to think about this differently than I would think about a standard application that comes in. And then to borrow from Jonathan Pyle’s point as a recent law student, sadly becoming less recent all the time, as I am not the young Ben Jackson anymore that he referenced or to new attorneys, I want to say that there is hope for you to bring the change, the scalable change that you envision when you’re a wide-eyed law student going to your one L year before you get crushed by legal writing and torts and the need to pay back loans and things you don’t understand. You don’t have to rely on expensive one-to-one service delivery to bring real meaningful change to people’s lives. You can use tools like this that allow you to take your expertise and put it’s in the hands of masses, and that’s not a threat to you.

There are a lot of lawyers who see the work that Absolve does as a threat because we’re working in the legal space, we’re working with people who could potentially be their clients and to that demographic, I would say to Jonathan’s earlier point, we’re here to solve problems for people who would never find you. There are millions and millions of people who would never even imagine that they have a legal issue. Some of those people come to our site and we actually help them connect with lawyers once they realize that they have a legal issue. Some of them come to our site and say, I can’t afford a lawyer, and we can help them solve that problem. And then finally, if you are someone who is in debt and you’re feeling the weight and the pain and just the agony of not being able to pull yourself forward towards the American dream, I would say there’s hope. There are ways that you can dig out of debt. There are different lives that you can lead than the one that you’re currently in. And I am personally an example of that. And I would love to help you find that freedom as well through absolve services,

Ron Flagg:

Jonathan Pyle, Ben Jackson Young Ben Jackson. Thank you both so much for coming on to tell us about your work. I am sure that your work and your words today will help many, many people who are struggling with their debt. And to our listeners, thanks you for tuning in to this episode of Talk Justice. We hope you’ll join us in the future. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. In the meantime, stay well.

Speaker 2:

Podcast guest speakers views, thoughts and opinions are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the legal services corporation’s views, thoughts, or opinions. The information and guidance discussed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice. You should not make decision based on this podcast content without seeking legal or other professional advice.