Achieving Civil Justice

Current Success in the Civil Justice Field

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Project
Justice : Legal Services for the 21st Century
 

The American justice system is a mosaic of hundreds of jurisdictions and policies. Necessarily, the movement to expand access to civil legal assistance and information involves numerous local experiments, research, and other efforts that result in some successes and some failures. When those efforts work, they allow others to observe and then use the knowledge gained to replicate proven solutions or adapt those approaches for the specific needs of their own jurisdictions and communities. Often, enthusiasm for a solution spreads because civic activists, philanthropists, professors, policymakers, or others can envision how to stop small, human-sized problems from snowballing into devastating and costly legal crises, such as eviction, destitution, hospitalization, and criminal conviction.
 

Bringing Justice Out of the Courthouse to the People Who Need It

A major barrier to civil justice is the widespread lack of understanding of a simple fact: many personal and social problems have a legal side and thus a potential legal solution. The optimal moment to tackle a civil justice crisis is early on, ideally when legal knowledge in hand can forestall major court cases down the road. To offer that help, frontline workers already involved in everyday life problems—healthcare workers, librarians, educators, advocacy organizations, social workers, teachers, even retirement home staff—can be trained to recognize and respond to legal issues before they become catastrophes.
 

Training community members to deliver help where it is needed
 

Alaska is vast in acreage. It has the nation’s lowest population density, only 1.26 inhabitants per square mile. Its 733,391 people—roughly the population of Vermont—are spread out across 665,384 square miles, a territory greater than that of Texas, California, and Montana combined. Many communities are connected to the rest of the population only by air, boat, or snowmobile.28

Nikole Nelson had just stepped into her role as executive director of Alaska Legal Services Corporation (ALSC), Alaska’s statewide legal services organization with twelve offices across more than one hundred and sixty communities, when she made a site visit, traveling to an isolated Alaskan Native village that was not connected to any road system. Asked by village residents how to process and enforce protective orders in domestic violence cases, she explained that the legal procedure was simple: register the order at the local courthouse, then have local police serve the order on the defendant and urge the petitioner to wait in the local shelter until then. Locals responded that the village had no state courthouse, local police force, or domestic-violence shelter. The insight into the community’s actual needs transformed Nelson’s understanding of the task ahead. She spent the next three days working with the community to establish plans for registering a protective order with the nearest courthouse, flying in sheriffs to deliver and enforce orders, and engaging with local community groups to secure alternatives for sheltering impacted families.

Nikole Nelson sits beside Matthew Burnett, facing an audience (off-camera), while Matthew turns to face her as she speaks. A paper, pen, and two boxes of water are on a small wooden table between them. Both Nikole and Matthew wear business attire. Nikole has pale skin and long blond hair. Matthew has pale skin and short dark hair.
Nikole Nelson (Frontline Justice) shared her experience on the “People-Centered Civil Justice” panel at the Making Justice Accessible Summit at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 2024. Matthew Burnett (American Bar Foundation) also participated in that panel discussion. Photo by Martha Stewart Photography.

The Alaska Supreme Court’s Access to Civil Justice Committee was aware that a vast proportion of urgent civil justice cases involved individuals unrepresented by anyone with legal knowledge. To better understand the issue, the committee applied for and received a Justice for All Initiative grant administered by the National Center for State Courts (NCSC) and supported by the Public Welfare Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, and the JPB Foundation.29 The 2016 grant provided funding to take an inventory of the state’s civil legal resources and legal needs as part of developing a strategic implementation plan, making Alaska one of ten states in the first cohort funded through this initiative. Through this project, they surveyed Alaska social service providers already on the front lines, many of whom worked closely with Native Alaskan nations.

The Access to Civil Justice Committee then worked with the Self-Represented Litigation Network (SRLN) to develop a geospatial visual map of social, medical, and information service providers across the state, along with the infrastructure anyone would need to access those services, such as roads, mobile phone service, and internet.30 The committee discovered that many villages were isolated, having no legal professionals within one hundred miles. Seeing a visual representation of these gaps across the state pushed the committee to explore more solutions.

This research also uncovered a similar gap in the provision of medical services, making clear that community health programs faced the same problem: too few medically trained nurses and doctors to serve such a vast territory.31 Instead of reinventing the wheel, ALSC adapted a solution already in use by community service providers. The solution was straightforward: train local community members to be health aides who can handle basic needs.32 By partnering with health aides, tribal social workers, and other trusted community members, ALSC’s legal team developed training for a statewide cadre of “community justice workers.”33

With continued support from LSC to improve training and participation in the program, this cross-disciplinary model proved effective in serving remote communities. Moreover, the community justice workers who partnered with ALSC were empowered to expand the services they were providing. Impressed by this success, the Alaska Supreme Court approved a waiver of regulations that banned anyone except licensed lawyers from offering legal information or advice—so long as they completed training provided by ALSC, accepted ALSC supervision, offered services exclusively through ALSC, and informed clients in writing about their community justice worker status.34

As of July 2024, the Alaska Community Justice Worker Program, or CJP, has recruited and trained more than five hundred community justice workers in forty-seven Alaskan communities.35 The program has been so successful that it received a $1 million 2022 CIVIC Innovation Grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to expand further. NSF awards those grants only to programs that successfully engage local communities, work across disciplines to achieve urgent goals, and show real-world proof that a community benefits.36 In other words, CJP is a proven and effective approach to closing the civil justice gap.
 

Arts and culture projects to empower residents and promote trauma-informed housing policies
 

The NuLawLab at Northeastern University School of Law also draws on community insight and local knowledge in its work.37 By placing culture at the center of organizing strategies and engaging with community-invested artists, the NuLawLab uses the arts to foster more trauma-informed policies consistent with community experiences. The NuLawLab’s Stable Ground program brings together law students, legal experts, artists, community-based housing justice organizations, and the City of Boston’s Office of Housing Stability with members of the community to understand the human impact of the housing crisis through participatory, community-based arts and culture programming.38 The NuLawLab’s arts projects, such as poetry workshops in which participants can express their experiences with chronic housing instability and insecurity, connect housing policy decision-makers with the very people those policies impact.39

Because of these relationships, the NuLawLab and its partners were able to launch the Stable Ground: Boston Housing Support Stations, a project to assist with pandemic-related rapid-relief efforts.40 The stations are designed to provide local residents with access to computers, internet, and printers, as well as law student volunteers who can help residents use that technology to access government and nonprofit resources for securing housing stability. The goal: to give Boston residents greater confidence in courts and legal aid organizations and reduce alienation and fear. Funded by the Kresge Foundation’s Arts & Culture program, the Stable Ground program helped build the foundation for this collaboration with an impressive group of organizations: the City of Boston’s Artist-in-Residence and Office of Housing Stability, Maverick Landing Community Services, City Life Vida Urbana, Tuft University/School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab, Ropes & Gray, and Runcible Studios. The NuLawLab works with its partners to help the Boston government design responsive programs that help orient services and policies to better serve residents.
 

Endnotes

Offering Legal Services Through Providers People Already Turn To 

Another approach involves offering legal assistance in places people regularly go for help: doctor’s offices, libraries, and city and community events where civic and local organizations meet residents. Much as annual check-ups can provide early warning signs for health issues, legal information and screening can be used to prevent legal problems from becoming legal cases—making it easier to resolve issues outside courts.
 

Medical-legal partnerships deliver better life outcomes
 

A vast number of the health problems Americans endure result from social issues, called “social determinants of health,” such as unsafe or unstable housing, lack of high-quality food, family violence, encounters with bias, or unsafe working conditions. Furthermore, Americans regularly turn to healthcare teams for help with medical or health concerns, while few regularly check in with lawyers about problems that could be legal. Healthcare systems are increasingly screening patients for unmet social needs or risk factors, including potential legal issues that contribute to health problems. Through medical-legal partnerships (MLPs), healthcare teams collaborate with legal aid organizations to receive specialized training on health-harming legal needs and the various legal services and resources available to patients. These teams can refer patients to dedicated partners at legal aid organizations who possess the expertise to prevent crises such as avoidable hospitalizations or homelessness. These referrals facilitate access to free legal services or pro bono volunteers, provide guidance to help patients and their providers navigate issues independently, and ensure that patients are able to access the resources, programs, and public services for which they qualify.

Bethany Hamilton speaks at a wooden podium. An American flag is behind her. Bethany has brown skin and long black hair, and wears a black suit and red glasses.
Bethany Hamilton, Director of the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership (NCMLP) at the Milken Institute School of Public Health, at the Making Justice Accessible Summit at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 2024. Photo by Martha Stewart Photography.

Here are two real-world stories to illustrate how this works.

Recognizing that Ms. Donaldson could benefit from legal help, the doctor referred her to a partner organization providing free legal services. The legal team successfully advocated for the landlord to remediate the hazardous housing conditions, in partnership with the pediatrician who shared a letter about why those conditions were especially harmful to Ms. Donaldson’s asthmatic child and required urgent attention. In addition, the legal team reinstated her food stamps and secured rental assistance and additional benefits, improving her financial situation and ultimately preventing her eviction. Her child’s asthma attacks ceased, and the family avoided significant trauma and health harms by remaining housed.41

Dr. W is worried about her pregnant patient who is struggling with poor living conditions related to nonworking appliances, rats, and an unresponsive landlord. Fortunately, Dr. W’s practice includes a medical-legal partnership that allows her to refer her patient to an attorney. When it becomes clear that new housing will not be ready by the time of delivery, the attorney secures temporary housing paid for by the landlord. When Dr. W.’s patient and newborn leave the hospital, she knows they will have a clean, safe apartment with working appliances.42

Numerous organizations are working to make such interventions routine. For instance, at Georgetown University’s Health Justice Alliance, law students supervised by a law professor work alongside the healthcare teams at Medstar Washington Hospital Center.43 Here the learning goes in many directions. Students learn about the real-world health consequences of legal issues. Healthcare workers learn about legal resources for patients whose life situations are harming their health. Patients learn that legal help can alleviate their medical problem, and they walk away with referrals that are just as important as inhalers or blood pressure medicine in improving the quality of life.

Georgetown’s Health Justice Alliance is just one example. Medical-legal partnerships have spread quickly. The movement has trained thousands of healthcare professionals to spot legal issues that are hindering health and to refer patients to the appropriate resources. Currently, almost five hundred MLPs across the United States are helping patients find legal resources. Of course, with a population of 340 million people, five hundred is not enough.44 But it is a start. For those interested in learning about or instituting one of these efforts, the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership has led much of the research and offers guidance on MLP implementation and practice.45

In a breakthrough, federal funding can be used to support access to civil legal services. In 2014, the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) recognized civil legal services as an “enabling service,” meaning that health centers can use federal dollars to pay for on-site legal assistance for patients.46 Since then, the U.S. Departments of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and Health and Human Services (HHS) agencies have endorsed using Medicaid dollars to fund efforts to tackle and improve social determinants of health in coordination with housing programs, launching a new federal initiative in 2024 known as the Housing and Services Partnership Accelerator to strengthen partnerships across housing, disability, aging, and health sectors.47 In February 2024, eight states and the District of Columbia were selected to participate in the Accelerator. Participating state Medicaid agencies, in collaboration with their state and local housing partners and disability and aging networks, health, and behavioral health system partners, will join in peer-to-peer learning, state needs assessments, and meetings with agency and subject-matter experts to design housing-related activities that improve service delivery to individuals experiencing housing insecurity.48

Other federal agencies are also leveraging medical-legal partnerships. HRSA joins other federal programs investing in MLPs, including the Office of the Administration for Children and Families’ Medical-Legal Partnerships Plus grant program that strengthens and expands long-standing MLPs by introducing social service navigators, increasing collaboration with social services organizations, and contributing to a knowledge base around MLP best practices. MLPs are also part of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ strategy for coordinating better care for veterans. The VA’s National Center for Healthcare Advancement and Partnerships offers resources, funding opportunities, and operational support for more than thirty MLPs at veterans affairs facilities nationwide.49

Medical-legal partnerships are important in themselves, offering opportunities to significantly improve quality of life by approaching several life challenges at once. But they also help answer the problem mentioned at the beginning of this section: That all too often, Americans either do not realize they need legal help or they do not know how, when, or where to obtain it. If they learn at the clinic that more solutions are available, they become more likely to turn to such services in the future or refer family and friends to them. That builds community resilience, dispelling the helplessness, defeat, and despair that can prevent people from even trying to improve their lives—building instead a sense of individual and community efficacy and possibility.
 

Legal kiosks and information centers in public spaces
 

Medical systems are just one option for heading off larger crises. Some states make legal aid information available through kiosks in community spaces like libraries, so that people who seek information can get help directly from trusted sources such as legal aid organizations and courts. A2J Tech, a public benefit corporation designing technology services and solutions for increasing access to justice, has partnered with civil justice organizations to install over three hundred such kiosks across ten states.50 Kiosks such as these serve as information terminals that can deliver plain-language guides, legal referrals, information about interpreter services, and even access to public computers, internet, or other devices for attending virtual hearings. In some cases, legal aid teams can train librarians, staff, or volunteers to help patrons find resources, understand filing requirements and procedures, and identify documents they need to move forward on their own. Since installing its first such kiosk in 2022 in Marion County, the state of Indiana has installed more than one hundred fifty kiosks in local courts, public libraries, and public assistance offices.51 In twenty Texas locations, users can find a virtual court kiosk at a public library or other community space from which to attend virtual courts if they lack adequate access to devices, cellular data, or internet services of their own.52 And, for the last twenty years, Illinois Legal Aid Online, a nonprofit independent of the court, has developed a suite of websites available in every county delivering self-help to residents, specialized legal information on common issues, and training for volunteers and other providers on how to provide legal information.53

A person stands at kiosk station typing into a computer. The person has short dark hair and wears a black facemask and turtleneck. A welcome banner in multiple languages in large print with the Mid-Minnesota Legal Aid logo is posted on the wall and a phone sits on a desk with a chair.
Legal kiosks, like this one in Minnesota, allow users to access legal information in places they already visit. Photo by Reach Justice Minnesota.

The pandemic prompted some of these innovations. With courts and legal aid offices closed nationwide, LSC took note of the many Americans who were turning to public libraries for internet, information, language, and other services; thanks to those resources, they were nevertheless able to access virtual services despite pandemic closures. This prompted LSC to partner with an existing library technology nonprofit to produce a series of online webinars designed to train public librarians to point their users toward essential legal information, being careful to ensure that the information provided did not cross the line into being the kind of legal advice that only lawyers may provide.54 With funding from the Susan Crown Exchange Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and LSC itself, the group worked with a nonprofit cooperative known as OCLC, a global library support organization offering technology services, original research, and community programs in line with public libraries’ missions. The result: a series of free, self-paced courses that train library staff to ask patrons the right questions and help them find the resources and information needed to tackle their civil justice questions.

Called “Creating Pathways to Civil Legal Justice,” these courses are hosted on WebJunction and are available for free to anyone, not just librarians.55 OCLC and LSC, in consultation with law libraries, continue to create new training modules that help with issues surrounding evictions or natural disasters. Since they are free and available to anyone, these courses might be useful for people working in other public settings. Could early education about the civil justice system and the organizations serving legal needs become a component of civics in high schools? Could providing information about legal services, programs, and resources in other public spaces—say, a train station kiosk with basic legal information or a public gathering in a park—help too?
 

Services do not need to be delivered in buildings
 

There is no reason why civil justice cannot go to those who need it, rather than waiting for people in need to come to the court or legal aid office. Although this can be an effective delivery tool, it is too infrequently used. In Salt Lake City on the third Friday of each month from April to October, the Salt Lake City Justice Court is open (weather permitting) for sessions that take place on canoes or kayaks along the Jordan River or on bikes or walking trails.56 Recognizing the difficulty of serving the legal needs of those experiencing chronic housing instability, the Justice Court identified a novel way to reach the growing encampment along the city’s Jordan River. Courts and lawyers may not be the best first contact for those with negative experiences with legal systems. Recognizing this, the Justice Court contacted the Salt Lake City Housing Stability Division and organized a volunteer group of public defenders, defense attorneys, judges, social workers, and community members to work as a team for what are called Kayak Courts.57 Social workers paddle, bike, or walk ahead of legal teams to identify people open to talking about their legal needs. Caseworkers lead with trauma-informed practices to match individuals who want to work with volunteers, who provide assistance and make a connection if an individual feels safe receiving the service.

Similarly, in Tennessee, you might come across a light-blue cargo van with large print text calling itself the Tennessee JUSTICE BUS.58 This mobile law office is outfitted with computers, tablets, a printer, internet access, video displays, and office supplies to help lawyers and other volunteers provide light-touch, on-the-spot access to legal help. Tennessee is not alone—justice buses, or mobile legal information hubs, have been launched in Minnesota, Louisiana, and Ohio.59

A blue cargo van is parked outside of a municipal building. The van's sides are covered in text that reads, "The Tennessee Justice Bus: An Access to Justice Commission Initiative. Free Legal Services for Tennesseans, JusticeForAllTN.com, Help4TN.org.
The Tennessee Justice Bus. Photo by Tennessee Supreme Court Access to Justice Commission.

Partnerships and collaborations across sectors can weave together services responsive to community needs. And they need not be based in a courthouse or legal aid office. These efforts are underway across the country, with many looking for stabilizing support to help replicate or scale these programs and raise awareness about these services.
 

Endnotes

Using Technology to Streamline Access to Assistance

Not everyone qualifies for free or reduced-cost access to lawyers’ time—or can find such assistance even if they do qualify. As a result, part of the answer to the civil justice crisis must be streamlining access to legal information, simplifying interactions with courts, and making guidance and information available in plain and multiple languages rather than legal jargon. To ensure that every American can find basic legal information, file simple court documents, or “appear” in court without having to enter a courthouse, civil justice organizations in a variety of jurisdictions are investing in improving online access. The pandemic jumpstarted much of this innovation.
 

Websites with trusted information for the public
 

The nonprofit Pro Bono Net (PBN) had been designing products that enable legal aid organizations to launch websites and other tech-enabled services of their own. Established in 1999, PBN is a national nonprofit organization committed to increasing access to justice through innovative technology solutions and collaboration within the legal community. States use PBN’s LawHelp.org website platform to customize information and resources for patrons from their state, and PBN has introduced additional tools such as automated document assembly interviews through its product LawHelp Interactive.60 Launching and improving these websites is supported through LSC’s Technology Initiative Grant program and other funders, or directly in a legal aid organization’s operating budget.61 These legal aid websites provide vetted legal information and referral options to patrons that are sensitive to local rules, and they help legal aid organizations deliver resources they develop for all to use.
 

Technology to assist self-represented people
 

Often, new technological tools and services for legal aid come from university innovation hubs specifically dedicated to making it easier for Americans to seek justice. For instance, in Boston, the Suffolk University Law School Legal Innovation and Technology Lab (LIT Lab) works to develop law-related technologies based on current data science, artificial intelligence, and document automation.62 As the pandemic began, many in Massachusetts—as in much of the country—were laid off and unable to pay rent. They received eviction notices even after the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) declared an eviction moratorium. Courts were closed. To simplify efforts to get emergency assistance, the LIT Lab partnered with Greater Boston Legal Services and the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute to create its Document Assembly Line project, which gathered a network of a hundred volunteers on five continents to automate the relevant court forms and self-help materials in numerous languages.

University students cluster in teams around desks with laptop computers. A dry erase board with a hand-drawn idea map stands in the background.
The Legal Design Lab at Stanford University Law School. Photo by Margaret Darin Hagan.

Within twenty-four hours of the moratorium, Massachusetts residents could go to the resulting website—on mobile phones if necessary—and fill in a simple form that asked key questions in plain language. The program then produced a completed court filing PDF that could be downloaded or printed, no legal knowledge required. The result: printable and enforceable demand letters to hand or email to landlords, employers, and others. Roughly six thousand people used the form within the next month—when just the month before they would have had to create these forms on their own to claim their right to stay in their home.

Quentin Steenhuis wears a headset microphone and speaks to someone off-camera. Quentin has brown skin and brown hair, and wears glasses and business attire.
Quentin Steenhuis (Suffolk University Law School) presents about the Suffolk LIT Lab at the Making Justice Accessible Summit at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, March 2024. Photo by Martha Stewart Photography.

In 2020, the Massachusetts Appeals Court approved an order authorizing the LIT Lab to prepare and submit court filings through its program.63 Known today as Court Forms Online, the project is hosted by the LIT Lab and now works with partners in other tribal, state, and federal courts across the country.64 Currently, the LIT Lab is staffed through a clinic with twelve students and several volunteers who work on projects all year long. The project was intentionally built on an open-source platform known as docassemble and shared on GitHub under an MIT license so that others can improve the system or adapt it in their own jurisdictions.65
 

Finding information without needing to know legal jargon
 

Another LIT Lab project, an AI-powered legal issue spotter called Spot, aims to improve how people discover legal information. A website or chatbot built on top of the Spot-API can help users identify legal issues and the help needed to resolve them. Someone who is not a lawyer types or speaks their description of a problem, in ordinary language. Spot responds with a list of legal issues the problem could involve, making it easier to look up possible courses of action. The list of legal issues itself comes from a national taxonomy, the Legal Issue Taxonomy (LIST), developed in collaboration with Stanford University School of Law’s Legal Design Lab.66 As with Court Forms Online, the project is designed to enable others, like nonprofit and legal aid organizations or courts, to build interfaces such as chatbots and websites that connect users to appropriate legal information without needing the legal expertise of a lawyer.
 

Modernizing and improving how cases move through the system
 

On a larger scale, Stanford Law School’s Legal Design Lab and Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession have launched the Filing Fairness Project.67 Supported by the Ford Foundation and the Mousetrap Foundation, the project is working with key stakeholders from numerous jurisdictions to agree on basic requirements for court filings and to eliminate unnecessary or outdated requirements like notarized signatures. By helping these different states coordinate the information they will need and reach consensus on reasonable fees, the project plans to standardize court filings and develop easy-to-use forms. These forms will reduce the burden for getting emergency help for such issues as partner violence, missed child support payments, debt collection, and eviction notices.

In early 2024, the Superior Court of Los Angeles County, the nation’s largest trial court system, announced a partnership with the Rhode Center and the Legal Design Lab to research, design, and implement innovative, evidence-based approaches to reduce barriers to participation in the judicial process—improving access to justice for all court users.68 The primary focus of the project is on case types with high percentages of self-represented litigants, including eviction, child support, and debt collection actions. Efforts to build partnerships across governments, states, and private sectors—like the collaborative work underway in Los Angeles—are helping to reveal a fuller picture of opportunities to address civil justice gaps.

More accurate data would help these projects expand. How many cases are coming through the U.S. legal system? What proportion involve individuals who represent themselves? Whom do evictions hurt the most? How many cases concern one party defaulting—thus leading to eviction or wage garnishment—for lack of information about how to respond to a court notice? Simply collecting that data is an enormous challenge, since every jurisdiction maintains slightly different information in incompatible formats. Worse, many local court systems still conduct their operations on paper, with physical case files sorted by hand, making that data nearly impossible to collect from a distance.

Image of the cover of Measuring Civil Justice for All with various people standing outside of a courthouse.
Led by Academy Member John M. Hansen and Rebecca Sandefur, the Academy’s Making Justice Accessible Project published the whitepaper, Measuring Civil Justice for All, that provides a national blueprint for the collection of data about civil justice activity in the United States. Available at www.amacad.org/publication/measuring-civil-justice-all.

 

Supporting tech-enabled courts for better policy
 

For that reason, The Pew Charitable Trusts (Pew) launched a project to explore civil court modernization.69 This multiyear effort worked to enable state and local courts to update their technologies and simplify court processes for more streamlined services court users could navigate effectively. Pew invested in several proof-of-concept projects, sharing its technical capacity to support new technology and sending in skilled staff to help. Partnering with states, Pew helped aggregate, synthesize, and report court data to further understand strengths and areas for improvements.

Identifying a lack of national consensus about how to move courts toward modernization, Pew brought together a working group of its partners to conduct a literature review, share insights about court technical capacity, and uncover common roadblocks across court systems. The result: a civil court modernization toolkit that gives courts resources to become tech-enabled by prioritizing court openness, effectiveness, and equity in court operations. The toolkit includes a series of fact sheets that make the case for this investment and offers guidance on standardizing data and simplifying court processes, making legal information clear and useful for everyone regardless of whether they have legal representation, and using the resulting data. 

Pew also helps raise awareness of the challenges and opportunities for reform in the way courts handle debt cases. Through this project, for example, Pew partnered with the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga (CFGC), Tennessee, and the Hamilton County, Tennessee, General Sessions Court to look at the civil court debt collection process and how it affects county residents.70 The research revealed key insights. First, the vast majority of debt collection cases in the county ended up in default judgment simply because the person who was sued did not show up to defend themself—suggesting serious deficiencies in the notification process, which left those sued uninformed about their responsibilities, options, and the consequences of not responding.71 The study revealed that more than half of debt collection cases resulted in default judgment, enabling debt collectors to garnish as much as a quarter of a worker’s paycheck and all the money in their bank account. Those levels of garnishment and account seizure can be devastating for the people who are already struggling financially, and unable to afford necessities such as food, housing, and healthcare.

Once a debt collector files to garnish an individual’s wages, that person’s employer receives a notice to begin withdrawing the money. The employer then has twenty-four hours to notify the employee and ten days to calculate the amount they are permitted to garnish, fill out the paperwork, and send the garnished pay to the court. During this time, if the employer makes a mistake or misses the deadline, the debt collector, who may not even live in the state or be able to prove they are owed the debt, can haul the employer into court—in essence, holding the employer liable for its employee’s debt. As a practical matter, the General Sessions Court was being used by debt collectors, many of them located out of state, to extract wealth from employees and their local employers. For small employers, this proved to be a tremendous burden. Court data analyzed for the study showed that, from 2016 to 2022, debt collectors took four hundred fifty-eight Hamilton County businesses to court for alleged mistakes in garnishment processing. In 60 percent of those cases, the employer ended up having a judgment entered against it.72 The main lesson: neither those who were sued nor their employers had the necessary information, instructions, or access to assistance to understand how to respond, navigate, and defend against these lawsuits.

The Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga’s report gained attention not just from those small businesses, the mayor’s office, the General Sessions courts, and the legislature. Pew’s partnerships with the CFGC redoubled the county’s efforts by bringing in the necessary technical capacity to scale the investigation needed to examine and improve the process to better serve its residents, enabling targeted local policy solutions to help consumers to know their options and helping small businesses realize and fulfill their responsibilities earlier in the process.73 And this was not the first project the Hamilton County General Sessions judges had worked on. Through long-term engagement with local partners like the CFGC and on projects with national organizations like Pew, the county courts have worked to update local rules to improve the debt notification process, advocating for meaningful changes that would require debt collectors to provide stronger evidence in their filings, improving notices by updating them to be written in plain language, and explaining the details of the debt in question. 

In 2024, the Tennessee legislature passed a law requiring third-party collectors, such as debt buyers and debt collection agencies, to disclose certain details about a debt and their authority to sue on it when filing a lawsuit.74
 

Expanding technology capacity and skills in courthouses
 

The Georgetown Law Justice Lab has launched an initiative with support from Schmidt Futures, the New Venture Fund, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the State Justice Institute, and the Utah Bar Foundation to recruit developers who can help courts create needed tools and data infrastructures. Through the Judicial Innovation Fellowship program, technologists, designers, and data scientists are placed within state, local, tribal, and territorial courts.75 Fellows working with courts in Utah and Kansas are bringing technology sector standards and skills to make these civic institutions effective and accessible. Utah’s statewide Self-Help Center website is making it easier to find the most important actions to take and streamlining access to court-approved forms and self-help guidance. In Hamilton County, Tennessee, building on the relationships and lessons from its work with Pew, the General Sessions Court and County Mayor’s Office asked its fellow to conduct an audit of the court’s data system. In addition to revealing interoperability issues between the court and county governments’ case management systems, the audit also uncovered the fact that case numbers printed through the court’s system were too small to read. A simple request to the IT department resulted in an immediate win, and the court now works to achieve bigger wins by bringing together court and county staff to design ways for their technology systems to work together.

Just like healthcare and legal teams learn from each other through medical-legal partnerships, cross-training through the Judicial Innovation Fellowship projects enables critical process improvement. For example, court professionals working with fellows now use notion and kanban boards (already well-known to technology professionals) to manage project tasks and timelines across their program. Through the fellows’ projects, county government, courts, legal aid organizations, community members, and technologists are meeting in working groups that never existed before the program was launched.

These projects reveal that, when courts can invest in basic digital infrastructure, technology solutions can be leveraged to help people with legal problems.
 

Endnotes

Expanding the Supply of Affordable Legal Assistance

Helping Americans handle basic legal tasks on their own, even with technology, solves only so much, however. Sometimes people will need assistance from a human being. Some small businesses and working- or middle-class Americans might be able to find solo practitioners or smaller law practices they can afford, but more low-cost services are needed. Although law practices are common in cities and larger towns, many cannot afford to serve low- or middle-income clients even when they are motivated to engage in some level of pro bono work. Outside cities, not enough lawyers are available, period, for those who need help with their civil legal problems.
 

More affordable services are sorely needed
 

One way to increase the supply of affordable services is to empower more small and solo practitioners to offer reduced-cost assistance. While technology can reduce operating costs, running a practice alone or with a small team can still pose a challenge. That is where incubators can help. The ABA’s Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services published a comprehensive survey in 2021 that highlighted seventy lawyer incubator programs in law schools across the country.76 These programs, designed to support solo and small practice lawyers to develop and launch law practices, offer meeting space, mentoring, and training to licensed lawyers and support them in designing services and fee structures. While each program is structured differently, the survey found an overarching interest in access to justice, exposing lawyers to unbundled and limited-scope services and alternative fee structures that help reduce costs for clients. Of these programs, 80 percent encouraged lawyers to establish practices that address the needs of low- and moderate-income individuals.77

Every state permits some form of unbundled services or limited-scope offerings by which legal costs can be reduced by having an attorney assist in discrete tasks rather than provide full representation.78 A lawyer might prepare only court documents, or the client might fill out the documents and work with a pro bono attorney or low-cost attorney to represent them in court appearances only. These limited services, like preparing a will or filing an uncontested divorce, can be offered for a flat fee. For other cases, lawyers might base fees on a client’s ability to pay, determined by, for example, income and family size.

The traditional lawyer-client relationship—in which an attorney agrees to represent a client—can still be prohibitively expensive. Even with these alternative fee structures and limited-scope services, costs can balloon quickly. So how can we help more Americans get the aid they need? Simply increasing the numbers of qualified, licensed attorneys willing to offer their services pro bono or at low cost will not solve the entire civil justice gap. Every effort, however, can contribute to the solution.
 

More lawyers who focus on unmet needs are essential
 

Encouraging law schools to graduate students to be ready for such work is another way to close the civil justice gap. Law schools have already adapted their curricula so that graduates are ready to practice, adding clinical and experiential training programs to their offerings, but too few such programs dedicate concentrations and curriculum to the civil justice gap. And while most well-resourced law schools have the resources to support collections of clinical programs on a range of issues, such as housing, criminal justice, immigrants’ rights, civil rights, and other discrete areas, many law schools cannot afford these programs or must focus on specific types of issues. The necessary student-to-faculty ratio, engagement with practitioners, resources to investigate problems and appear in court, and student interest often limit the longevity and sustainability of such clinical programs. Moreover, the focus remains on preparing clinical students to provide direct services to clients through a law practice model, rather than opportunities where law students learn and apply the skills they will need for civil justice careers. These include experiences proposing and managing public and private grants, producing self-help resources and standardizing court forms, conducting focus groups with communities and other system actors, collecting data and evidence as part of research and evaluation, or managing technology projects and contracts with vendors.
 

Legal education and licensure should be accessible
 

Reducing the cost of law school would also help. The average law school graduate owes upward of $130,000 for the cost of attending law school, including school fees, cost of living, and undergraduate debt.79 Even for a law school graduate, getting authorized to practice law is difficult and expensive, costing thousands of dollars just to study, register, and sit for a state bar exam. And since the bar is graded on a curve—guaranteeing that many will fail—the exam must be taken more than once by some law graduates. To lower this barrier, several states—including Washington, Oregon, and New Hampshire—now have some form of alternative licensing options.80

Leaders from the Oregon Board of Bar Examiners, the Oregon State Bar Exam, and the Oregon Supreme Court convened a task force to expand the number of attorneys authorized to practice in the state by offering an alternative path to a traditional bar exam. Given the state’s legitimate interest in testing the competency of new lawyers, the task force engaged lawyers, judges, bar examiners, practitioners, students, and stakeholders in other states pursuing similar efforts to design a program that addressed these concerns. The resulting alternative approach to licensure, the Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination, offers a rigorous apprenticeship supervised by experienced lawyers; examiners then look at the applicant’s portfolio of work to assess their practice skills. Instead of sitting for the traditional bar exam, candidates that apply for this new pathway must complete a 675-hour paid apprenticeship under a qualified supervising Oregon-licensed lawyer, leading at least two initial client interviews or client counseling sessions and at least two negotiations, and producing at least eight pieces of written work product.81

A group of six people stands on a stage facing an audience, with one person speaking at a podium.
Leaders from Oregon that worked on the Oregon State Supervised Practice Portfolio Examination project stand on a stage to accept the IAALS 2024 Rebuilding Justice Award, given in recognition of their leadership, innovation, and role in catalyzing national dialogue on licensure reform. Photo by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS).

In California, the California State Bar Board of Trustees approved a program to develop its own portfolio-based licensure pathway. The California State Bar proposed the project after securing a commitment from the Bay Area Legal Services Funders Network (LSFN) that offered to fully fund the start-up costs, which could run to $425,000.82 LSFN also works to increase the number of public interest lawyers by funding fellowships throughout the state.83 Law firms and nonprofits similarly sponsor dedicated fellowships for early career public interest lawyers. All of these efforts are improving the supply of lawyers, and more can be done to increase the supply of legal help.
 

Endnotes

Expanding the Workforce of Civil Justice Professionals

In the civil justice system, individuals can have a lawyer assist them, first with advice, judgment, and experience to evaluate the claim at issue and then, if the matter remains in dispute, as an advocate in court. But the economics of legal practice put such advice and representation out of financial reach for millions. And since we know that, in two-thirds of civil cases, at least one party is proceeding alone, judges in trial, state, and administrative cases are put in positions where deficiencies in procedure—not the merits of a case—drive outcomes.84

The key predicament here is that existing rules prohibit the “unauthorized practice of law” (UPL)—meaning that lawyers and only lawyers can furnish advice and representation. Furthermore, those who sit on the state bar associations and regulatory bodies that interpret these rules are also lawyers and judges. Lawyers get to decide what services fall under these rules. In a word, lawyers have a monopoly on providing legal services. They can and do charge prices that they believe are warranted, and, as individuals of free volition and professional prerogative, need not charge any less. Those prices, however, put their services essentially out of reach for most Americans—for tenants, middle- and low-income families, retirees, and those who do not earn enough to pay. Thus, in the absence of a national constitutional right or federal statute, only states can combat this monopoly by permitting, say, paraprofessionals or technology to offer specific services to clients in need and reduce cost barriers to meaningful assistance.
 

Legal information is helpful even if it cannot be “advice”
 

Understandably, lawyers—having worked long and hard to master their profession—appreciate the value their skills provide compared to untrained competition. Also understandably, courts and legal profession regulators do not want rogues to advise individuals whose lives hang in the balance. But over the past decade, the movement for access to civil justice has started to persuade state court systems to view these prohibitions in a different light, driven by arguments that lawyers are interpreting UPL rules too broadly—and overregulating in ways that harm the most vulnerable. Most states have developed policy guidance to distinguish between legal advice, which only lawyers are qualified to deliver, and legal information, which others can offer. Such policies, however, are not standard across states and depend on local court policy decision-makers.85 Rethinking the line between advice and information can allow people without a law license, yet equipped with training and resources, to help close the civil justice gap.

When legal advice is needed, other kinds of models have emerged that increase the supply of professionals able to provide more than legal information. According to the IAALS’s June 2023 survey report of the U.S. legal landscape, twelve states now allow alternative legal services, from “allied legal professionals” to “community-based justice workers.”86 The former is the phrase IAALS uses to describe a tier of providers who are trained and certified to be a regulatory body that can offer legal advice and services for certain case types, without needing a bar license.87 Community-based justice worker models train and certify individuals at community-based organizations to offer legal advice and services in certain case types in which the courts effectively suspend application of UPL restrictions. These models unlock services to low-income individuals and supply more legal help providers through removal, modification of, exemption from, or waivers of UPL restrictions. Texas has since joined the twelve states in IAALS’s report that have begun to explore how people other than lawyers can 1) offer specific kinds of legal information on limited subjects; 2) prepare and file certain kinds of legal documents; 3) communicate with and review documents from the opposing party and the court; and 4) represent litigants at mediation and settlement conferences.88
 

Opportunities to safely test pilot projects
 

Utah has launched a pilot project to enhance legal efficiency and access to justice. In 2020, after economists and legal scholars presented evidence of the state’s access to justice gap, the Utah Supreme Court approved the creation of what it calls a regulatory “sandbox”: a live, time-limited project enabling the use and testing of various innovations, supervised by regulators.89

The innovations involved two principal changes to the existing rules governing legal services. First, in the sandbox, entities could apply for approval for a business structure that would permit profit sharing among lawyers and nonlawyer entities, although such collaborations would otherwise violate legal ethics Rule 5.4, which is designed to limit nonlawyer investment in law firms. Second, certain legal services could be provided by nonlawyers in special circumstances. These experiments would gather data and enable the court, bar authorities, and other stakeholders to evaluate successes and failures.

In 2022, the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession at Stanford Law School issued a comprehensive report on the sandbox projects.90 The report found that most of these experiments offered legal services to individual consumers and small businesses, not big corporations. Waivers of UPL rules enabled technology and those who did not hold a law license to offer support. Nonprofit groups offered meaningful legal services to indigent clients and others who might otherwise have been shut out of the civil justice system. The report found no evidence that consumers suffered: No more consumer complaints were filed against sandbox entities than against traditional lawyers and law firms.
 

Design hubs convene stakeholders to make reform possible
 

In Arizona, the state supreme court, working closely with the state bar and other stakeholders, moved even further, eschewing a regulatory sandbox and formally repealing the rule that prohibited nonlawyer investment in and ownership of private law firms.91 Such investment can now go to technology startups and other types of organizations that would normally be prohibited from sharing profits with lawyers under these rules. The same 2022 Rhode report described above found that because of the repeal, more Arizonans could access justice, with no reported complaints.

Straddling the border between the two states, the Innovation for Justice (i4J) process design hub, cohosted by the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah Eccles School of Business, focuses on looking at how human beings use systems and processes, and then works to analyze and streamline how things get done by co­designing solutions with, not for, communities.92

To show how restrictions on the unauthorized practice of law made it harder to help those with legal problems, i4J interviewed and then repeatedly convened a range of system actors—domestic violence survivors and advocates, social services providers, healthcare providers, mental health professionals, regulators, attorneys, judges, community members, and more—to consider what new service models could better connect those in need of legal help with resources. This working group emerged with agreement on minimum standards to allow i4J to engage advocates to assist and advise self-represented survivors through the court system. The result: Arizona’s Licensed Legal Advocate (LLA) Program, which launched in 2020 as a two-year pilot project allowing i4J to train and license domestic violence advocates.93 In 2023, following the completion of the pilot period, the Arizona Supreme Court authorized the program for statewide expansion.94 That success helped create pathways for similar projects i4J has since launched in Arizona and Utah to help communities experiencing medical debt, housing instability, and other frontline issues.

A group of young people of various races pose together in front of a large, colorful painting. They face the viewer and smile.
Advocates-in-training and the i4J team meet in Arizona with U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Access to Justice Director Rachel Rossi. Photo by Innovation for Justice (i4J).

Stanford’s Legal Design Lab (LDL) works similarly to coordinate stakeholders in designing a legal process that satisfies all stakeholders’ concerns.95 To help respond to the pressing problems that can cascade from evictions, LDL worked with the National League of Cities on the Eviction Prevention Learning Lab (EPLL), which brought together a cohort of thirty cities in a peer-to-peer network for learning about best practices, policies, and tools to prevent evictions.96 The LDL maintains a website with resources collected through the EPLL and also profiles current initiatives targeted at the eviction crisis to help government and nonprofits develop more effective responses.97

These legal design hubs—NuLawLab, LIT Lab, i4J, Legal Design Lab, Georgetown Law Justice Lab, and others—can work with city and state governments and their courts in ways that most professional or advocacy groups cannot, convening participants around a shared problem in neutral territory to move solutions forward.
 

Navigators within communities are able and willing to assist
 

Oakland’s Legal Link, created in 2015, offers brief but intensive “legal first aid” training programs for housing advocates, librarians, civic-minded neighbors, or anyone moved to volunteer, training them to be what it calls “community justice navigators.”98 As Legal Link puts it, the organization empowers “housing counselors, domestic violence counselors, immigration advocates, tenants’ union volunteers, and credit counselors, among others . . . [to] interface with legal issues and navigate clients through and around them to reach a resolution.”99 Once trained, these navigators can help people spot relevant legal issues and identify appropriate and basic legal actions to take, if necessary referring them to legal services lawyers. These basic services provide information and guidance, rather than legal advice.

The Georgetown Law Justice Lab has been helping other communities adapt the Legal Link model for themselves. A collaboration among Georgetown, Legal Link, Charleston Legal Access, and Charleston Pro Bono Legal Services started in the summer of 2022.100 In the first six months of the program, the South Carolina Justice Navigators Network, supported by a Ford Foundation seed grant, trained more than one hundred twenty social services staffers in the tri-county area around Charleston to help clients spot and address legal issues before they become crises and court cases.101 The South Carolina pilot project inspired the similar Oklahoma Community Justice Network, which has been funded by the Oklahoma Access to Justice Foundation and uses federal Housing Stability funds.102 Caseworkers are also trained to use resources already available in Oklahoma, such as a curated legal referral search tool, and can access more than two hundred trainings on advanced legal issues. Within the first year of the program, Oklahoma trained five hundred civic volunteers as community justice navigators in their network; these volunteers are active in every county in the state.103
 

Programs launched by nonprofits and membership organizations can train navigators
 

In addition to the “legal first aid” training in the tri-county area around Charleston, South Carolina now has a broader and more formal program. In 2023, the South Carolina Access to Justice Commission released a report revealing a statewide eviction crisis, with 99 percent of those in housing court representing themselves, and one in every ten tenants evicted every year.104 South Carolina Legal Services had turned away more than two thousand people each year from 2017 to 2019 because it lacked resources.105 The state affiliate of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) recognized that not enough free and low-cost lawyers were available to represent all of its constituents who needed help—and that the best solution was to train individuals who were not licensed to practice law. But what to do about the state’s UPL regulations? In 2023, the South Carolina Conference of the NAACP sued the state, claiming that banning UPL was too restrictive and violated the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, drawing the line between expert advice and legal information.106

The lawsuit has since been settled, with the state court agreeing to try out the NAACP’s Housing Advocate Program as a three-year pilot, training and certifying volunteers in this very limited area of law.107 The NAACP must submit reports and data about the project’s successes and failures, measuring effectiveness in providing access to meaningful help with housing issues. The court will submit annual reports to the South Carolina Court Administration and the South Carolina Access to Justice Commission and evaluate after three years whether to allow a broader rollout.

Two people stand together, holding signs that read "Housing is a fundamental right," “Housing is community,” and “Housing should be accessible and affordable.” Both have brown skin and long dark hair. They face the viewer and smile.
Participants in the NAACP’s Housing Navigator Program in Columbia, South Carolina, sharing their reasons for joining the program after being interviewed by SC Appleseed. Photo by South Carolina Appleseed.

South Carolina’s experiment not only provides an imaginative way to use people other than lawyers to deliver needed legal services, but also shows an alternative outcome in constitutional litigation related to UPL laws. In litigation brought by a financial education and civil rights nonprofit called Upsolve, the New York rule against the UPL was challenged as applied to their training program for volunteers.108 The Southern District of New York agreed with Upsolve and granted a preliminary injunction preventing enforcement of the rules, finding that a content-based restriction of Upsolve’s training program and guidelines to volunteers was not justified. As of this writing, that decision has been appealed by the New York attorney general, who is asking the Second Circuit Court of Appeals to end Upsolve’s program to train volunteers and dissolve the injunction. Upsolve’s American Justice Movement trains volunteers to give basic legal advice to New Yorkers facing debt-collection lawsuits. These volunteers are trained to help people fill out a form that allows them to respond to a debt lawsuit by checking a handful of boxes. Because of the complexity of constitutional litigation, this suit has gone on for nearly two years, effectively halting training of new volunteers as the case moves through the litigation process.

Negotiated experiments, such as in South Carolina, show one way that collaboration among interest groups can avoid an adversarial approach, yet each state must grapple with the conditions under which these efforts are launched. This collaboration between state legal authorities and other stakeholder groups could be a productive start.

In summary, the rise of alternative legal services providers is promising. Helpers who are not lawyers are not new in cases in which legal rights and protections are at issue. The Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable’s (LAIR) 2023 report, Access to Justice in Federal Administrative Proceedings, highlights that federal agencies have long recognized the value of nonlawyer assistance and some will allow or have established formal accreditation programs to facilitate access in their proceedings.109 These agencies include the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Department of Justice Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Department of Treasury Internal Revenue Service, the Department of the Interior Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Agencies that have accreditation programs offer training and provide protection to consumers when bad actors abuse their credentials to cause harm. Other agencies, like the Social Security Administration and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, do not have accreditation programs, but still allow nonlawyer help, providing applicable guidelines and education, such as for SSA qualified representative programs.110 Courts have also recognized the role of navigators within the courthouse building, each with varying degrees of supervision.111 Navigators come from a variety of backgrounds—court staff, AmeriCorps members, students—and cannot give legal advice, but they help people in courts navigate the courthouse, complete court documents, and some are even permitted to accompany litigants to hearings for emotional support and to answer factual questions asked by the judge.
 

Endnotes

Funding and Scaling Solutions

The progress these experiments have achieved has been with the backdrop of significant underfunding of civil justice and legal aid operations. In its most recent FY 2025 budget request, the Legal Services Corporation calculated that to fully resolve the legal problems of low-income Americans served by its grantees, Congress would need to appropriate $1.749 billion of funding for Basic Field programs, which comprise 97 percent of LSC’s proposed budget. Although LSC’s budget was increased by $6 million, the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee approved a proposal of $566 million.112 This number does not keep up with inflation, the aftermath of public emergencies like the pandemic and climate disasters, and the increasing need for legal services. Within states, legal services are funded through a state appropriations process and through funds distributed through a state’s interest on lawyer trust account (IOLTA) program.113 For many communities, however, funding is scarce, competitive, and often not targeted to support expanding program services or scaling a project. Even as other funders step up, civil legal services will always require collaboration and significant engagement from federal and state partners as well as regional and local funders. That is where public and private sector philanthropy and businesses can help. 

To bring these promising approaches into more jurisdictions requires funding and capacity. In the past, many have seen the only option as state or federal government funds. Given stagnant and chronically underfunded budgets, however, these sources of funding cannot alone address the civil justice gap. When approached thoughtfully, businesses, individuals, and philanthropies are willing and able to invest in these urgent initiatives—whether with funds, technical resources, policy advocacy, adopting internal changes, or other support. Supporters of expanding access to civil justice can help philanthropists understand that investing in access to civil justice enables them to deliver on their other goals, whether protecting worker safety, securing veterans’ well-being, ensuring stable housing, expanding food security, making families and communities safer, or building a stronger local workforce.
 

Philanthropy and civil justice can learn from each other
 

This approach was jump-started in 2014, when the Kresge Foundation and the Public Welfare Foundation (PWF) teamed up to release the groundbreaking report Natural Allies: Philanthropy and Civil Legal Aid. The report shows how funding legal aid can transform the lives of homeowners in danger of being foreclosed upon after fraudulent investment schemes, consumers hounded by predatory lenders, people escaping intimate partner violence, and more.114

After releasing Natural Allies, the Public Welfare Foundation and the Kresge Foundation funded a convening of National Association of IOLTA Programs (NAIP) members, whose programs use the interest from money that a state’s courts hold in escrow to fund legal services in that state.115 Interest on Lawyer Trust Accounts programs are usually a state’s biggest legal aid funder. The 2014 NAIP Leadership Summit brought together civil legal aid leaders from across the United States to learn from one another, discuss strategies, and develop understanding about engaging with local grant makers. Public Welfare then committed $150,000 to NAIP, which

  • helped NAIP members meet with private philanthropists to discuss funding legal aid;
  • offered small grants that enabled IOLTA leaders to convene regional meetings with philanthropies;
  • funded a March 2016 NAIP Foundation Leadership Summit, which enabled members to report on their activities and evaluate and refine strategies; and
  • launched the NAIP Foundation Leadership Alliance Project, in a third round of support to expand this work to other states.

Boosted by all this, NAIP has improved the landscape for civil legal aid funding by commenting on proposed rules for state court practices; convening IOLTA leaders online and in person; and collaborating on advancing best practices for funding legal help. In 2022, NAIP launched the NAIP Funders Collaborative to continue expanding the work started through PWF’s investment through technical support, which focuses on cultivating relationships and engagement with organizations that assist and support its members. Even a modest investment can be leveraged for big gains.

While a list of every project, policy, and research that philanthropists and national nonprofit organizations have supported with the goal of expanding access to justice is beyond the scope of this report, two major efforts—from the Kresge and Public Welfare collaboration and from Pew’s work with courts—show that strategic, trust-based partnerships in civil justice can leave the field transformed and far better equipped for the future. Kresge and Public Welfare’s publication of Natural Allies and the multiyear investment in helping NAIP learn to raise charitable dollars will keep paying dividends for years, as will Pew’s careful engagement in technical capacity and promising practices for state and local courts to modernize and better serve Americans seeking justice. And while support from large, national grant makers and research institutions is important, regional and community grant makers and local leaders are equally critical to ensuring that projects have the support needed to stabilize and scale. Each leaves the field better off and better able to move ahead. Their efforts will improve lives for countless Americans struggling for healthy housing, safe families, manageable debt, decent jobs, and other basics needed for a good life.
 

Businesses invest in justice
 

Some corporations invest in access to justice projects. They choose to do so for a variety of reasons: to build employee satisfaction, to invest in more stable communities, and because business leaders are themselves citizens who care about society. That matters a great deal—in part because individual philanthropy can do its part but can never be sufficient. Corporate, public, and private philanthropy are needed across the landscape of opportunities addressing the civil justice gap. Sometimes corporations do so by setting up philanthropic efforts, offering technical resources, or donating to access-to-justice projects through their foundation arms. At other times, they take up the innovations launched by the access-to-justice movement and amplify those across their own systems.116

A recent example of this comes from one of the nation’s largest nonprofit healthcare systems, Kaiser Permanente. The company’s mission is to focus on high-quality, compassionate care through a whole-person approach for the 12.5 million members it serves across its integrated healthcare system. It was interested in learning from pilot medical-legal partnerships, from HUD/HHS commitments to working on the social determinants of health, and from data collected by organizations mentioned earlier in this report that conduct research through medical-legal partnership programs.

In 2021, Kaiser Permanente launched a proof of concept for a medical-legal partnership across six of its service regions, aiming to understand how to prevent homelessness and increase housing stability among its patients and communities while simultaneously building the capacity of the local legal aid ecosystem. Working with the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, HealthBegins, and six legal aid organizations, Kaiser Permanente incorporated access to legal aid services as part of the standard workflow for patients at risk of eviction. Kaiser Permanente also invested in significant implementation and outcome evaluations from 2021 to 2024, finding that upstream access to legal aid services improved patients’ physical and mental health, as well as their housing quality and stability.117 Moreover, access to legal aid expertise was demonstrated to improve job satisfaction for participating frontline healthcare staff.

In 2023, Kaiser Permanente announced it was expanding its Health, Housing, and Justice: Medical-Legal Partnership initiative by investing in building legal aid capacity across seven of its eight regions, with a goal of preventing evictions for up to ten thousand more community residents and expanding access to housing-related legal support to up to forty-five hundred Kaiser Permanente members, patients, and families by 2025. From 2020 to 2024, Kaiser Permanente made one of the most significant national financial commitments to building legal aid sector capacity and access and should be considered a benchmark for business investment in civil legal aid services.

These examples offer some ways for private sector engagement, but other area partnerships and collaborations should be explored. As reported in the ABA Profile of the Legal Profession, chronic underfunding of civil legal aid and court salaries and operations diminishes the ability of these organizations to retain, recruit, and develop the necessary workforce to serve legal needs in their community.118 Could investments from local businesses or membership organizations help these programs develop the workforce and capacity needed to scale solutions? Whether the investment in civil justice supports a pilot project, or research about legal needs, or helps secure much needed professional development and salaries—funding, resources, and capacity will be needed to get these solutions in the hands of every American. Without these investments and creative partnerships, the promising ideas described in this report will remain aspirational. 
 

Endnotes

Achieving Civil Justice for All Takes an Ecosystem

Any state or organization ready to tackle the challenge of closing the civil justice gap does not need to go it alone. Rich cross-professional networks of resources, knowledge, and leadership have helped cultivate and advance the projects discussed so far. These networks and institutions stand ready to help any emerging project learn from what has already been done, find funds, and borrow technical expertise to put ideas into practice and to partner with organizations in communities to expand access to much needed legal assistance.

The premier source of support for legal services is LSC, whose funding programs include a Technology Initiative Grant, Pro Bono Innovation Grant, Basic Field Grants, and grants focused on staffing efforts to work on loan repayment, disaster relief, and veterans’ assistance. In 2016 and 2022, LSC produced a civil justice gap report, giving a baseline measurement of the magnitude of the gap and revealing the scale of the crisis.119

Equally important is the National Center for State Courts (NCSC), which houses the Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) and Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA). Through these groups, NCSC fosters thought leadership and develops guidance and strategic vision for state courts across the United States.120 In 2015, the CCJ and COSCA issued joint resolutions that reaffirmed the goal of “100% Access to Justice for All.” The fact that the national advising bodies of state chief justices and administrators issued such ambitious statements made a difference. Backed by that national vision, chief justices in more states were able to make the case for investing court resources in understanding their state’s civil justice gap.

From 2014 to 2016, the ABA Commission on the Future of the Legal Services completed a study to examine why meaningful access to legal services remained out of reach for too many Americans.121 Among the findings: despite sustained efforts, significant unmet legal needs persisted; funding for LSC remained insufficient; and pro bono work was an inadequate solution on its own. The report acknowledges that the complexity of the justice system and the public’s lack of understanding about how it functions undermine the public’s trust and confidence. The commission issued a call for the legal profession to support the provision of some form of assistance for civil legal needs to all persons otherwise unable to afford a lawyer and for courts to consider regulatory innovations in legal services delivery and simplification efforts. Upon the commission’s recommendation, the ABA launched a Center for Innovation with the goal of educating lawyers, judges, academics, and the public about innovations and new approaches to delivering legal services.122

Created in 2012, the Department of Justice’s Office for Access to Justice has led the federal government’s efforts to address barriers to legal systems and has spearheaded the work of the White House Legal Aid Interagency Round­table (LAIR), a collaboration of over twenty federal agencies to improve the coordination of federal programs to advance access to justice. The LAIR 2016 report, Expanding Access to Justice, Strengthening Federal Programs, provided a roadmap and priorities for achieving Goal 16 of the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which calls on countries to ensure “equal access to justice for all.”123 Today, the Office and LAIR issue reports and publish resources for state agencies to implement access to justice strategies.124

The combination of these efforts alerted more individuals and states to the urgency of the civil justice gap and the opportunities to address the crisis. All these major bodies then worked to help states take action to close the gap. Through the PWF’s 2015 Civil Legal Aid Special Initiative, several investments went to fund access to justice commissions and helped scale networks like the SRLN and National Legal Aid and Defenders Association (NLADA).125 PWF also brought together Kresge, the JPB Foundation, and the Open Society Foundation in 2016 to create a nearly $4 million fund to launch the Justice for All (JFA) Initiative, an initiative hosted at the NCSC to help fourteen states conduct strategic planning for achieving 100 percent access to justice.126 Participating states received funding for initial strategic planning to assess resources and deploy diagnostic tools to develop statewide strategic action plans and identify the most urgent priorities. The NCSC and SRLN would then be available to offer consultation and capacity to help with network building and planning. These projects developed civil legal needs studies and fostered access to justice ecosystems that enabled jurisdictions to think critically and holistically about the power and potential within their communities. These networks and plans led to many pilots and reforms, including legislative changes to garnishment laws, community justice worker pilot projects, legal education efforts for human services networks, and coordinated intake and referral for legal aid providers. The District of Columbia has even taken the initiative to adopt the JFA approach and used these same resources to conduct strategic planning of their own, without JFA funding.127

In 2024, the NCSC released updates to the JFA guidance materials with learning from experiences across the fourteen participants and launched the Justice for All Diagnostic Tool. The tool provides a series of questions about a jurisdiction’s current activities and then produces a customized report that suggests activities from the JFA framework worth considering.128 As demonstrated by the D.C. Access to Justice Commission, this resource helps states develop strategic access to justice plans that reflect each state’s unique ecosystems.

State courts and bar organizations went on to establish access to justice advising bodies to advance efforts, implement best practices, and seek funding within their states. The ABA’s Standing Committee on Legal Aid and Indigent Defense now formally convenes state civil justice coordinators at an annual gathering of Access to Justice Chairs where the ABA has combined its annual IOLTA and National Lawyer Referral Workshops so that these commissions can share what they have learned about how best to expand access to civil justice and adapt solutions across state lines.129

Another deeply important network for the lawyers delivering much needed legal services is the NLADA, which has a century-long history of connecting legal services professionals to one another through annual conferences, policy expertise, and partnerships across issues.130 Having long worked on criminal justice issues, NLADA is equally concerned with civil justice. It offers advocacy, training, and technical assistance to public defenders and civil legal aid programs across the United States and has a mutual insurance program to enable legal aid programs to gain affordable coverage. Moreover, as a national network, professionals join affinity groups focused on identity within the profession or particular areas of law.

Today, all these groups connect, orient, and support state coordinators and frontline professionals to better assist the people they serve.

Every new access to justice project that needs help or knowledge to move forward or could learn from others’ insights now has access to a network through which to connect with the right professionals. These professionals participate in conferences and convenings to share what they learn. Beginning to engage is the first step in connecting to these networks. Although the civil justice field may seem loosely organized, these networks form a national community of practice that makes the ambitious vision of justice for all achievable.

Endnotes

Project
Justice : Legal Services for the 21st Century
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