Community
partners can be providers of content, consumers of content, and shapers
of content.But much more important,
they can become collaborators in the process of using content to help solve
the legal problems of poor and middle income people.Moreover,
in the process of that collaboration, we can move toward erasing the current
political and ideological barriers between poor and middle income legal
consumers.By so doing we can help
build the political support for the systems that meet all of these inter-related
needs.
Below
are detailed discussions of various of the potential community partners,
of what they would bring to the partnership, of what they would need for
the partnership to work, of models of how the partnerships might work,
and of the overall implications of each potential partnership.
Moreover,
we know that electronic access is often not enough.Those
in nee of legal information may not yet be sophisticated or technologically
experienced enough to manage the access process on their own.It
is thus particularly encouraging that many libraries are coming to experiment
with a much broader view of their access role.In
Brooklyn NY, for example the public library, in cooperation with a group
called Libraries for the Future, has set up a project in which the libraries
are used as on-line health information centers.A
network of 30 community organizations feeds people to the libraries and
at the libraries a trained staff person assists them to locate the on-line
health information that they need.This
is clearly an important model for potential similar legal information access
sites at libraries and other similar institutions.
In
a similar project, the Orange County California Public Library has announced
a partnership with the local legal services program in which the legal
services program, in cooperation with the court and local domestic violence
program, will program court access software, and the library will offer
the access and assistance that the client population needs to make use
of this software.The first planned
modules are domestic violence and eviction defense.[2]
If
libraries are to function well as legal public information sites, the following
tools and approaches will help build and facilitate the partnerships needed.
·Ease
of access software
·Tools
to manage paper and printing (a major library issue)[3]
·Training
systems to bring library staff up to speed
·Writing
software that is easy for volunteers to use as they help those in need
·Making
sure that “unauthorized practice of law” issues are resolved[4]
·Developing
model court-library-legal service-community organization partnerships so
that these are seen as politically low risk.[5]
As
they expand onto the Internet, unions will want to make sure that their
sites feature the kind of services and help that members need.If
not, members will ignore the Internet web front page that the union offers,
and go straight to Excite or some other portal.
There
are two important potential points of partnership entry into the union
network.The first is the new plan
of the AFL-CIO to create an internet provider service that will give members
low cost access to the Internet, and bring union users to a uniform entry
portal. The AFL plan to provide Internet access to millions of union members
provides a potentially huge access partnership for any legal services legal
information project.
The
second point of entry is the significant union investment in pre-paid legal
service plans.This commitment has
resulted, particularly on the part of the UAW, in significant software
development.Thus both access and
content partnerships are realistic and potentially very useful.
The
legal information content developed by these union prepaid plans offers
the basis for a long term natural partnership.Unions
have a similar target population, every interest in sharing their material,
and no real competitive reason to hold that information close.Rather,
they have every interest in making the information that they do have as
accessible as possible to their members.Since,
as a general matter, they have tended to develop materials for their attorneys
rather than for their members, a partnership structured around making that
information more directly accessible both to union members and a broader
in-need population would serve everyone.Indeed,
unions might regard public credit for such information as providing a useful
public image enhancement and recruitment tool.[7]
Pension
plans share many of the same interests, and would provide a more focused
but general partnership opportunity.
For
such partnerships with unions to come to pass, the following would be helpful:
·Structuring
on-line gateways to information to reflect union membership concerns.
·Identification
of, and focusing on, on-line self-help material relating to issues of special
union concern
·Figuring
out what unions as institutions can gain from this partnership
·Linking
to training programs for union members
In summary, unions provide a potential key ally for maximizing the power and use of any integrated solution.
AARP,
like the unions, offers internet access to its members.[8]Like
the unions, AARP has a massive membership, with a generally, but not exclusively
progressive bent. Its members share a general set of policy interests,
although they do not necessarily vote in accordance with their leaders
interpretations of those interests.Interestingly,
there is research that suggests that lower income seniors are less frustrated
by the process of mastering the technology that higher income seniors.[9]
Perhaps
more significantly, AARP, through its legal service plans, already controls
a huge mine of state-specific legal content.The
AARP legal services hotlines, now operating in many states, are backed
up by substantial pro-se and attorney oriented materials.This
material is in the process of being made specific to state law.[10]When
fully state-specific, it will provide an excellent basis for a national
on-line library of on-line content.(Of
course the material is focused on the concerns of the elderly, and would
need to be supplemented with additional topics.)
Finally,
although not directly associated with AARP, seniors enjoy a massive network
of service organizations, reaching into every community, and usually with
a physical manifestation (a senior “drop-in” or community center), a paid
staff, often supplemented with volunteers, and enormous public sympathy.These
programs, with their professional but legally untrained staff, would be
ideal gateways into legal Internet content.
Partnerships
with elder-serving organizations will be facilitated by:
·Design
that is sensitive to the special visual and access needs of the elderly.[11]
·Content
that reflects the legal problems of the aging population[12]
·Access
methodologies that are sensitive to the professional and volunteer staffs
that serve the elderly.
·Cooperation
in content development and integration that reflects the substantial base
of already developed content aimed at this population.
Both
groups, and others like them, could become critical partners in the deployment
of accessible legal content.As experts
in getting urban dwellers on the net, and providing the support that is
needed to make that access meaningful they would play a critical role.For
such organizations, partnership with legal content providers would give
them the tools to show the critical relevance of their work to the day
to day lives of the people they serve.
Collaboration
with such groups will be facilitated by the following:
·Attention
of software designers to needs of such consumers
·Analysis
of how to link the content sites with the community organizations’ sites.
·Focus
on content that meets the needs of partner organizations
If
it were possible to create a collective connection to this group, or to
a significant portion of its members, that would provide dramatic leveraging
of access to the content.Specifically,
many of these organizations have hundreds of member or affiliates organizations,
and many of them are slowly realizing the potential of the Internet to
transform the lives of the people with which they work.The
Girl Scouts, for example, as well as using the web to promote itself and
recruit members, has programmed its site with specialized information and
connection opportunities for its GirlScout
members.
Many
of these organizations target the poor and middle income group as among
those they serve.Others serve people
who work with or seek themselves to be of help to the target population.In
either event, the potential of partnering exists.While
the nature of such partnering will depend on the mission of the individual
organization or network, the following will be helpful in bringing such
partnering to fruition.[14]
·Developing
legal content so that it appeals to, and helps, different constituencies
·Developing
the content system so that it can be integrated into the display systems
of other web sources.In this way
a new legal site could provide the legal content for the client serving
web sites of many different kinds of organizations.
·Developing
outreach materials so that other groups will want to develop such relationships
with a new legal information system.
Indeed,
there are many reasons for this natural partnership:Legal
service and Community Programs bring a wide range of resources including
skill and experience in the substantive areas and the techniques of communicating
to the pro se population.It is only
legal services and community programs which really know the poor.Courts
must be careful not to build pro se programs that work only for people
who have the resources to hire lawyers anyway, just choose not to.Like
courts, Legal Service programs are obliged to plan for and take responsibility
for everyone, not just for individual clients.
However,
there are powerful cultural barriers to effective collaboration.Courts
must preserve the judges’ role as a neutral arbiters – but that that does
prevent courts as institutions from helping making sure that everyone has
the best chance to tell their story to that arbiter.Limitations
on the Judge’s role do not necessarily extend to all in the court house.
Similarly,
Legal Services Programs are advocates for poor clients – but that does
not stop them from working with Courts to make sure that pro se programs
are seen as fully consistent with the neutral role of judges.They
can contribute to pro se programs without becoming arms of the court, or
captives of the court, or captors of the court.Their
contribution will always have a flexibility that the court can never have.
Moving forward on collaboration will require:
·Identification
of national network partners
·Figuring
out how the collaboration can preserve the neutral roles of courts while
taking advantage of their critical role in the legal decision-making process
·Learning
how to create sites that do advocacy, yet are acceptable to courts
·Figuring
out the roles and relationships that will support this partnership.
·Model
partnerships that are carefully structured, and designed for replication
·Involving
local bar and communities in these partnerships
Many
of the local nonprofit support groups are now becoming actively involved
in technology support.Moreover,
many new technology support groups are being formed.Examples
are N-Power in Seattle, and DC Works in Washington DC.
These
groups, now coalescing into a network will provide the parallel access
support that a system as ambitious as the one needed to distribute legal
content will require.
The
system under consideration needs to be able to make use of the legal content
generated by these many organizations, and also to distribute to as broad
an audience as possible the combined legal service and issue driven network
content.Probono.net is a good example
of the use of technology by a central group that enables smaller issue
groups to get their word out in an integrated way.
Effective
collaboration with these groups will require the kind of electronic linkage
that allows groups to make what use they want of information, without surrendering
control to an outside entity.
There
are in place numerous networks of progressive educators, concerned with
the huge potential of the Internet to expand education. Moreover, there
are many school systems that have grasped this potential, and are working
to make the resource as broadly available as possible.Government
and the private sector has collaborated with particular intensity to make
this access point available.[17]The
StreetLaw program has shown the power of legal content in this educational
environment.[18]
This
there will be no problem finding model partners.The
greater difficulty will be finding those partners in jurisdictions in which
the other partners are ready for experimentation.For
such partnerships to work, the following will be helpful:
·Software
that works with young people and reflects their media expectations
·Content
that reflects the legal interests of young people[19]
·Content
and design that is built around the idea of a young computer savvy person
working on line with an older person who has the legal problem.
·Design
that deals with the problem of teacher supervision
At
both the national and local level, many bar associations have developed
pro se or legal information materials.Such
material could well be integrated into a more comprehensive system.In
addition, the bar associations offer various forms of lawyer referral system.These
systems could be integrated into an attorney advertising system that might
finance the whole project.One advantage
would be that a different non-legal services entity would then take responsibility
for all the politically complicated issues deriving from the possible need
to screen attorneys.
Most
importantly, however, at both the state and local levels, bar associations
can provide the leadership that would make a project such as this of use
to, rather than a threat to, the organized bar.
Thus
the example of the state of Washington, with its Access to Justice Board,
a partnership of the judiciary, legal services, and the bar, provides an
important basis on which to build.That
Board regards access to justice as a high priority of the State Bar (as
well as the other players) and is already engaged in a wide variety of
technology and non-technology projects to engage as many groups as possible
in providing access to justice.
For
such collaboration to work, the following would need to be addressed:
·A
structure of information that integrates existing bar information
·A
structure that provides access to information for private lawyers
·Systems
that help those who need and can afford private lawyers get to those lawyers
·Building
it so that it increases rather than threatens the role and legitimacy of
the private bar.
Law
schools could also expand their clinics to be provide legal information
access points, and the clinic students could help clients use the system.Indeed,
one way of looking at the software would be as a tool to make sure that
student advice was high quality and reliable.Generally
the main interest of law schools is likely to be providing their students
an opportunity for real world practice engagement.
This
may lead to the conclusion that not one, but several different gateways
to the same information are required.Indeed,
that the information should be structured so that it can be accessed and
structured in a myriad of ways.That,
of course, is what the Internet and particularly XML are all about.The
challenge is to create the data structures and the front ends that are
flexible to meet these myriad needs, while being easy enough to manage
and distribute widely.
Compared,
however, to the other organizations in the neighborhoods which they serve,
the legal services program is often “high tech.”It
is the legal services program that has the office network and the Internet
connection.It is the legal services
program that has someone trained as a network administrator, and it is
the legal services program that is connected to a larger statewide network
of technology resources.
In
the partnerships that may develop, the legal services community brings
its technology leadership as an asset.
The
task of building a system that engages the enthusiasm, data and potential
of even a small portion will be difficult, but the payoff is potentially
transformative in terms of expanding the reach of legal services to poor
and middle income people, and the political and social power of the ideas
that lie behind those service.
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