Legal Aid Ontario is embarking on a significant expansion of legal services in family law that could chip away at the swelling masses of self-represented litigants and steer couples away from lengthy court battles.

A pair of programs, which will be announced Thursday, will offer financially eligible couples free access to a family lawyer to negotiate separation agreements and provide legal advice for mediation.

It is assistance that is desperately needed, says Jana Saracevic, who was forced to represent herself in divorce proceedings after she ran out of money for lawyers.

A rehabilitation therapist and mother of two, Saracevic, 50, did not qualify for legal aid. She said she was quickly overwhelmed by the intricacies of a system “designed by lawyers, for lawyers.”

“It consumes you,” she said. “You lose friends because no one wants to hear you anymore.”

Thomas Kelsey, director of family law services for Legal Aid Ontario in the GTA, said the two programs represent the organization’s most notable expansion of free legal services for family law cases in over a decade.

“It’s a big step,” Kelsey said. “It’s a whole different avenue that people can now access to resolve their family law problems.”

To qualify for the new programs, an individual with no dependants can now have a gross income of up to $18,000 a year (the threshold varies by household size). If one partner is financially eligible, the other also qualifies, as long as he or she earns no more than $50,000 a year.

The first program offers, among other services, up to 10 hours with a family lawyer to obtain and review disclosures, engage in settlement discussions and finalize a separation agreement.

The second program provides six hours of legal advice to those who choose mediation services; it has been piloted successfully in select locations since February. Financially eligible clients can get information about the mediation process and assistance in obtaining a court order or binding agreement to enforce a mediation agreement.

Julie Macfarlane, a law professor at the University of Windsor and leading researcher on the rise of self-represented litigants, called the changes “very important.”

“These are both well-used and generally effective ways of trying to ensure that people’s conflicts don’t really escalate,” she told the Star. “If you let people get really mired in this, it gets much harder to help them.”

After the province slashed funding for legal aid in family law in the mid-’90s, the percentage of self-represented litigants, once a relative rarity, exploded in Ontario’s unified family courts. Between 1995 and 1999, the numbers rose 500 per cent, Macfarlane said.

By 2011-2012, nearly three-quarters of those filing their cases at the Jarvis St. and Sheppard Ave. family courts in Toronto were without legal counsel, she said.

According to Ontario Superior Court Justice David Price, self-representation by family law litigants “diminishes the likelihood of settlement” and slows the process because the court must take time to explain the basics.

“Litigants who lack the ability or resources to secure the evidence they need, or an understanding of what outcome they can reasonably expect at trial, are apt to lack the confidence to settle their cases,” he said in an email. “They are then more likely to relinquish their decision-making power to a judge.”

Price said expanded legal aid funding for advice on separation agreements and free mediation services “can be expected to bring a significant improvement in the lot of self-represented litigants, and ease pressure on our courts.”

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(The judge said his views are based on personal experience and do not reflect the official position of the court.)

Macfarlane’s research shows that many of those representing themselves in family law court don’t earn enough to afford a lawyer but earn too much to qualify for legal aid.

In Ontario, legal aid is offered in family law cases where these is spousal abuse or issues of child custody or protection. For a single person to qualify, his gross income can’t be more than $10,800 per year. That’s roughly half of Statistics Canada’s after-tax, low-income cut-off for a single person living in Toronto.

The province has not raised the financial thresholds, which vary by family size, since 1996. However, that could soon change. According to Michael Ferguson, a spokesman for Ontario’s attorney general, when the 2014 budget is reintroduced, it will include a proposal to increase the legal aid eligibility threshold by 6 per cent a year over the next seven years.

“We will continue to work with (Legal Aid) to provide legal aid services that are effective, sustainable and support our most vulnerable,” Ferguson said.

The initiatives unveiled Thursday will be funded with some of the additional money ($30 million over four years) announced in the 2013 provincial budget for Legal Aid Ontario.

Saracevic said she is hopeful that by getting help “at the beginning stages of the separation,” more couples will be able to reach a settlement “before people get angry … and lose their trust.”

Over the course of her legal battle, which began in 2008, she has borrowed money on several occasions to hire new lawyers, only to see those funds exhausted and having to return once again to representing herself.

She sardonically jokes that going it alone in family court is like a lyric from the Eagles’ song, “Hotel California.”

“You can sign in any time you want,” she said, “but you can never leave.”