Building a bridge to justice from the other side

Our professional-centric approach to resolving unmet legal needs hasn't worked. Maybe it's time we empowered the people who are already there.

Sometimes, your success in building a bridge depends on which side you start from.

For the most part, we’ve been trying to solve the problem of unmet legal needs in two ways. We’ve urged lawyers to make their services more accessible, and we’ve licensed new quasi-lawyer providers to meet the needs that lawyers don’t. Neither strategy has delivered knockout results so far.

1. Lawyers. It feels like time we moved to the final stage of grief and accepted that lawyers just aren’t the answer here. Only about a fifth of people with civil legal problems turn to lawyers for help, and the profession has shown little interest in getting in touch with the other 80%. Lawyers have positioned themselves as the choice for the elite segment of the legal market (as well they might), and nothing short of the AI-driven evisceration of the profession seems likely to change that.

2. Quasi-lawyers. Some legal regulators, admirably, have looked beyond lawyers and carved out particular exceptions to the lawyer monopoly over legal services (including paraprofessionals in Utah, Minnesota, Arizona, and Oregon). But resistance from the legal profession has been fierce (derailing similar efforts in Florida and California), such that these new providers are relatively few and their scope and authority are narrower than the very wide range of unmet legal needs.

What these strategies share in common is a supply-side approach. We can solve this problem, the reasoning goes, if we can just get a licensed and authorized legal professional in front of the people who need legal help. It’s a provider-centric vision that, unfortunately, tends to draw the unwelcome attention of the legal market’s exclusive service providers.

Given all that, I think it’s time we tried a demand-side approach instead — one that doesn’t require us to licence and deploy more legal services professionals, but instead focuses on and empowers those who are already dealing with people’s unmet and unrecognized legal needs.

What do we know about these people and these needs? At least three things:

1. Who experiences these needs. Lower-income households are more likely to experience legal problems and suffer adverse effects from them. These problems frequently correlate with a person’s disadvantaged or marginalized personal and social conditions, including health, housing status, race, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

2. What the needs consist of. Among the most common unmet legal issues are wage theft, eviction, debt collection, bankruptcy, domestic violence, foreclosure, access to medical treatment, and the care and custody of children and dependent adults. Broadly, the problems emerge most often in housing, debt, immigration, health, and family law.

3. How often the needs go unrecognized. Only 29% of people surveyed by the World Justice Project in 2019 understood their problem to be legal in nature — they assumed they were simply experiencing a “life problem” with no connection to legal rights or remedies. Other studies have reached similar conclusions.

We know one other interesting thing about unmet and unrecognized legal needs: The people who experience them don’t seem all that interested in lawyers anyway. A recent US study found that consumers trusted someone with legal training, but not a law degree, more than they trusted a lawyer. They want to receive legal services, the study found, from “someone who looks like them, understands their situation, and are trusted members of their community.”

This makes sense once you recognize that most unmet legal needs aren’t particularly complex legally — you normally don’t need the deep legal expertise of a lawyer to solve them. The challenge of these needs more often lies in the complex tangle of difficult socio-economic circumstances of the poor, vulnerable, or marginalized people who most often and most severely experience them.

The optimal skillset for helping people in these situations includes emotional intelligence, cultural competence, inter-disciplinarity, and trauma-informed care. I think it’s fair to say that doesn’t describe most legal professionals that you and I know. That’s not who they were educated, trained, and licensed to be.

So if we’re not looking for legal professionals, who are we looking for? If we take a user-centred, needs-focused approach, we’ll find ourselves looking for someone who’s familiar to and trusted by the vulnerable people with unmet legal needs, who’s walked with them, earned their confidence over time — “someone who looks like them, understands their situation, and are trusted members of their community.”

These individuals are already present in the lives of people with unmet legal needs. They’re community activists, librarians, hospital employees, teachers, social workers, homeless advocates, therapists, food bank employees, members of a religious order, financial counsellors, mental health clinic staffers, juvenile case workers, and many others.

They’ve already gained the trust of the people they want to help through hard work and empathy. They don’t need a licensed legal professional to parachute in and save the day. All they need is access to the basic legal knowledge and skills to help address these people’s legal problems, and to be left alone to do it.

We can give them that. What I suggest is training and certification for anyone in this position who wants to help identify and resolve the unmet legal needs of the poor, marginalized, and vulnerable people they already work with.

I’d call this role a Legal Intermediary — someone who acts as an empathetic and trustworthy bridge between the justice system and the people who need what the system offers but can’t access it. These people already help the vulnerable; we would just give them the means and authority to add legal help to their toolkit.

There are examples of this kind of role. Court Navigators in New York State are volunteers who support and assist unrepresented litigants during court appearances in landlord-tenant and consumer debt cases. Their training consists of a three-hour seminar on the basics of civil courts, consumer debt cases, and essential skills, along with a training manual and access to online legal tools.

Then there are Accredited Representatives designated by the US Department of Justice to help unrepresented people in federal immigration law matters. The Villanova Interdisciplinary Immigration Studies Training for Advocates (VIISTA) is the leading online interdisciplinary program in this area, equipping students with the legal and cultural knowledge to effectively represent migrants.

The training and certification for a Legal Intermediary should be similarly accessible and convenient. A lawyer-developed online program in legal assistance, plus access to a Large Language Model trained on data about everyday legal problems, and you’re basically good to go. Keep the barriers to entry here as low as we can manage.

What would a Legal Intermediary do? I think it’s important that the Intermediary’s scope be multi-disciplinary, given that people’s legal needs frequently overlap with other legal and non-legal challenges. So here’s a suggested starter pack of activities; feel free to add others.

General

• Diagnose which problems people are facing have a legal dimension and remedy

• Inform people of their legal rights and show them pathways to legal solutions

• Help people when appearing before boards, tribunals, and some courts

Residential

• Review leases and help respond to unlawful changes or rent increases

• Help renters advocate for entitled benefits under their lease (e.g., heat, A/C)

• Help renters fight eviction notices or similar proceedings from landlords 

Financial

• Review loan agreements to identify and reduce potential legal risks

• Help people negotiate with creditors to ensure their legal rights

• Help people obtain government benefits (e.g., social assistance, disability claims)

Personal

• Draft and review simple wills and powers of attorney

• Provide basic legal document drafting assistance in family law cases

• Provide emergency legal assistance for people in situations of actual or potential harm (e.g., domestic violence victims, unhoused individuals, sex workers)

(Yes, some of these activities fall under the definition of “the practice of law.” Leave that aside for the moment — I’ll deal with it more fully in the next issue of the newsletter.)

There’s lots more that could be said about a Legal Intermediary, but I’ll leave it at that for now and invite your comments. I think we need a more user-focused approach to resolving people’s unmet legal needs — one that empowers ordinary people from the ground up, rather than adding legal professionals from the top down. Obviously, every lawyer and legal paraprofessional who wants to help resolve unmet legal needs should be welcomed; but it seems to me the lead role in the process should belong to on-the-ground experts who’ve been there and who would like to do that.

So, do you think the Legal Intermediary is a viable bridge between people with unmet legal needs and finding solutions to those needs? Should this be pursued, or modified, or abandoned? Let me know what you think.