Kate Fischer Doherty, Melbourne Law School
A major part of the role and mandate of law school is to equip the next generation of lawyers with the skills, knowledge and understanding both to thrive as legal professionals and to contribute to the promotion of justice in a changing world. Yet – with the notable exception of clinical legal education – there is often little focus on the reality of legal need in the community and the disadvantage caused or exacerbated by low levels of legal literacy. There is also often little recognition of the broader justice ecosystem of which lawyers form part.
At a time when access to justice is recognized as a ‘wicked problem’ that requires multiple strategies in response – including the increasing use of digital communications and law tech – community legal education and information (CLEI) is a critical part of the ‘toolkit’ for justice-oriented graduates. However providing opportunities for students to develop skills for CLEI often falls well behind a focus on ‘learning the law’ and traditional skills for litigation and transactional practice.
This presentation critically examines the development of a new clinical subject at Melbourne Law School – ‘Street Law: Community Legal Empowerment’. Using a partnership-based model students worked in small groups with a community legal centre to design, develop and deliver a targeted education project to address an identified critical issue. In 2023 projects included resources on change of identity and relationship registration in partnership with a new LGBTIQA+ peer-led legal service, consent education for high school students, climate justice and disaster response resources for an at-risk local area, end of life planning for older people and resources on discrimination in health care. Students were encouraged to be creative as well as critical in their design choices, with an overarching focus on understanding and meeting the needs of the target audience.
Key learning aims of the subject were to develop students’ understanding of the theory and practice of CLEI, the skills to design and implement it and its part in the matrix of strategies to address individual and community access to justice needs. Students were encouraged to reflect on their own professional identity and the role of legal professionals and other actors in addressing the challenge of access to justice.
Finally, I will present feedback on the new model and suggest strategies to maximise the impact and potential of project-based community legal education and information partnerships for both students and communities.
Belinda Lo, Eastern Community Legal Centre
Chalita Ugrinovski, Eastern Community Legal Centre
Donna Askew, Melbourne Law School, Australia
Research demonstrates that many individuals don’t recognise their problems as legal, leading to a reluctance to seek legal advice in the first place. The ease of Intake at the front-end of legal service provision process plays a pivotal role. The person’s perception and comfort level of this process can be a determining factor in their willingness to engage. Outcome-focused and proactive front-end services, early intervention and seamless pathways are essential in improving access to justice for help-seekers and communities experiencing complex life challenges. An evidence-based approach is key to addressing these challenges.
There are many systemic and intersectional factors that may affect someone’s ability to successfully access legal support. People experiencing disadvantage and marginalisation face many barriers to having their rights and interests considered. These include lack of access to free or affordable legal assistance, lower levels of functional literacy, lack of knowledge of legal rights and responsibilities which can together lead to lower confidence to navigate legal systems.
Building on its sector-leading Enhanced Entry Intake & Triage capability approach, Eastern Community Legal Centre (ECLC) has built on the data insights gained from the ‘Strengthening Intake Quality in Legal Assistance’ Project, supported by the Victoria Law Foundation, to better understand help-seeking needs and barriers that underpin a person-centred, trauma-informed and multidisciplinary legal assistance service that seeks to work with help-seekers’ strengths and identify legal capability challenges that may benefit from additional legal and related support.
ECLC has leveraged sophisticated data collection tools and innovative approaches to gather unique insights into legal needs. These insights have informed the development of a Quality and Capability Framework, which has strengthened intake and referral assessments end, helping to better elicit diverse help-seeking needs and support referral pathways matching individual circumstances. Mapping the value of triage and early response provision for individuals provides important considerations in assessing key contextual variables such as individual legal capability, types of legal problems, and required quality and responsiveness of the service(s).
ECLC’s in collaboration with the Victoria Law Foundation will lead a presentation on developing triage service design and delivery principles to meet intersecting legal help-seeking needs. It will explore research, assumptions and the evidence-base of intake and triage approaches. The presentation will share key research findings as well as insights of legal need at the front-end of legal service delivery and the importance of undertaking an enhanced intake approach to support individual legal help seekers effectively.
Through the innovative use of digital capabilities, such as sentiment analysis within ECLC’s multi-channelled Contact Centre platform, the help-seeker journey can be better understood. By capturing the attitudes expressed during intake calls —whether positive, negative, or neutral—valuable insights into the help-seeker experience are gained. This analysis reveals vital trends and patterns, helping evaluate the quality of intake calls across varied demographic groups. As a result, key outcomes can be highlighted in what is working well and what needs improvement in service delivery and satisfaction, tailored to specific communities.
The presentation will showcase how PowerBI capability enhances data utilisation and provides deeper insights into legal needs throughout the help-seeker journey. This has led to service improvements and integrations, particularly at the point of entry. This comprehensive approach ensures alignment with the needs and capabilities of target clients and communities. Informed by sentiment analysis, this approach continues to drive continuous improvement in service design and delivery, enhancing impact and better serving those in need.
Understanding the impact of entry into legal assistance is vital for providing equitable access to justice. By continuously refining an intake approach tailored to help-seekers capabilities and leveraging innovative technologies in line with current and emerging help-seeking needs, services can better serve individuals facing complex legal and social challenges.
Julie Mathews, Public Legal Education Association of Canada (PLEAC)
A growing body of research has discussed the vital role played by not-for-profit community-based organizations in helping people who turn to them with problems that may involve the law. The assistance provided by these non-legal organizations falls outside the formal justice system, and its role is often not understood and supported by institutions in the formal justice sector, even though there are often connections and collaborations between individuals and organizations across these sectors.
In early 2024, the DOJ retained CLEO (Community Legal Education Ontario/Éducation juridique communautaire Ontario) to research community justice help programs across Canada and summarize a selection of them in a table. The purpose of the project was to increase the knowledge and understanding of this type of assistance – what we call “community justice help” – available to people in communities across Canada.
The project focussed on community organizations that serve people living on low incomes. For the purposes of this project, “community justice help” is defined as the support and assistance provided by non-profit community-based organizations, and the non-lawyer staff at those organizations, to whom people with law-related problems often turn for help.
The researchers compiled a table of 30 community-based, not-for-profit organizations serving communities across all provinces and territories in Canada. These organizations support community members seeking housing, income assistance, safety planning for the future, permits or status to live and work or study in Canada, or have other needs. The help they provide typically is not confined to a single issue or area but, rather, responds to a client’s particular situation and multi-dimensional needs; they provide “wrap-around” or holistic services.
The organizations provide services through several different community sectors. And the nature of the services they provide varies widely, ranging from giving information about rights and resources, to helping clients understand and complete forms and documents, to helping people prepare for court, to accompanying people to court, to playing a liaison role with government or legal services.
This essential work is part of the ecosystem of “informal justice” work that is carried out across the world. The global movement to support “customary and informal justice” is gaining momentum.
Despite the essential role played by these on-the-ground community organizations, their work goes largely unrecognized and unsupported by the formal legal sector.
Through this session, PLEAC proposes to begin initial discussions that explore how a cross-country working group might be formed to look more closely at this type of work and how it can be supported and enabled. How can this work be better recognized and supported as part of Canada’s justice ecosystem? What would recognition look like, and what difference would it make to people with problems that involve the law? What are the obstacles to increased recognition and support?
Rebecca Robichaud, Wayne State University of Law School
In the State of Michigan, the law allows that certain convictions may be set aside. Recently changes in the law allowed for some convictions to be automatically expunged. But for many others, there is a process that must be followed to seek to have a judge grant an expungement request. The Michigan Attorney General has an entire website devoted to expungement and asserts that the site will “help applicants navigate their way through the new laws” for expungement that went into effect in 2021. However, even with the extensive self-help resources, community members find the laws and process challenging.
For many community members, having convictions expunged can be life changing. But many cannot afford the assistance of an attorney and are overwhelmed by the processes. The Attorney General’s office works with organizations to host expungement fairs to assist community members in starting the process. In November 2024, Wayne State Law hosted an expungement fair at the law school, which is located in Detroit. We grossly underestimated the need in the community for this assistance, as more than two hundred community members attended the fair.
Expungement fairs in Michigan generally help community members to identify if they are eligible for expungement. After the fair, the community members must obtain certified court records, complete the application, mail the application to at least four different government entities, obtain any supporting documentation to evidence why a judge should grant expungement, and advocate for themselves at a hearing. Each step is a potential obstacle for community members with very little legal aid to successfully complete the process.
To address this gap in legal services, we established a legal navigators expungement program in November 2024. We invited the first thirty participants at our November Expungement Fair to join us. We then recruited students in our undergraduate law program to be the navigators. Again, we underestimated the response. We originally planned to have ten students with each student assigned three community members. Due to the response from students, and the desire to provide learning opportunities and encourage community work, we allowed twenty students into the program. We paired the students, with each pair receiving three community members to work with.
We developed a training for the students on (a) expungement; and (b) how to work with community members. Students then reached out to their assigned community members. If the community member wanted assistance, students met with the community members and helped them navigate the process. To date that has included obtaining certified court records, finalizing the application, submitting it, helping to obtain supporting documentation, and then providing all of this to a pro bono attorney and law student to attend the hearing.
This session will discuss the outcomes from this experience. We will explore the following:
- challenges to setting up Navigators housed in a law school rather than in a court or legal aid office
- how the training for students was effective and ways in which it needs to be improved.
- timing issues between semesters/breaks and community member needs
- what this program evidenced in terms of how “user friendly” the expungement process is
- next steps for Navigator work at Wayne State Law School in collaboration with our undergraduate programs
Rebecca L. Sandefur, Arizona State University
Matthew Burnett, American Bar Foundation
In democracy, justice is meant to be everyone’s: everyday people are meant to participate meaningfully in shaping law’s content, using its protections, and fulfilling the obligations it creates. Research shows very clearly, however, that justice is not available to everyone. Global estimates suggest that over 5 billion people, nearly two thirds of the world’s population, live outside the protection of the law. Critical to justice being everyone’s is everyone having access to it. Yet all too often access to justice is constrained by regulatory capture, administrative burden, and institutional silos that estrange people from their own law. The estrangement of people from their own law is not just a problem of social welfare policy or justice service delivery, it is a failure of democracy.
In this paper, we explore the role of access to justice in building and enlivening democracy through a critical mechanism to democratize the law: justice workers. Justice workers are community members who enable their neighbors to access justice by helping them to understand, use, and shape the laws that order their lives. They may do this as part of their formal roles such as religious leaders, teachers, social workers, librarians, or healthcare providers, or simply as fellow members of a community. We argue that justice work makes democracy work.