JFA Component 1: Consumer Needs and Experience
CONSUMER NEEDS & EXPERIENCE
JFA Component 2: Jurisdictional Infrastructure
JURISDICTIONAL INFRASTRUCTURE
JFA Component 3: Stakeholder Capacity
STAKEHOLDER CAPACITY
JFA Component 4: Emerging Practices and Innovations
EMERGING PRACTICES & INNOVATIONS
JFA Component 5: Judicial and Court Staff Education
JUDICIAL & COURT STAFF EDUCATION
JFA Component 6: Community Integration
COMMUNITY INTEGRATION
JFA Component 7: Self Help Centers
SELF-HELP CENTERS
JFA Component 8: Plain Language Forms
PLAIN LANGUAGE FORMS
JFA Component 9: Triage and Referral
TRIAGE & REFERRAL
JFA Component 10: Alternative Dispute Resolution
ALTERNATIVE DISPUTE RESOLUTION
JFA Component 11: Courtroom Assistance Services
COURTROOM ASSISTANCE SERVICES
JFA Component 12: Compliance Assistance
COMPLIANCE ASSISTANCE
JFA Component 13: Navigators
NAVIGATORS
JFA Component 14: Limited Scope Representation
LIMITED SCOPE REPRESENTATION
JFA Component 15: Full Representation
FULL REPRESENTATION

Customer Needs and Experience

This component helps you inventory how your state learns about the public's experiences in and outcomes from the civil justice system. Gathering the public voice in a systemic way in the legal system is very difficult. However, this component supports the development of a systemic plan for gathering this information using strategies from other sectors, such as health care.

Key Elements:

  • Strong feedback loops with the public, service providers, and other community partners
  • User-focused quantitative and qualitative data measures identified and captured
  • Mechanisms for integrating user voice in strategic and operational access to justice decisions

Jurisdiction Infrastructure

This component helps gather insights about how the infrastructure in your jurisdiction may impact access to justice innovation and reform. A state or local profile can help traditional and non-traditional stakeholders better understand how the courts, legal aid, the bar, and other institutions are structured and interact to support your states’ civil access to justice ecosystem.

Key Elements:

  • Infrastructure reflects representation from all civil access to justice stakeholders (traditional and non-traditional)
  • Profile includes state and local level information, where possible
  • Documents current infrastructure as well as potential areas for growth
  • Informs civil access to justice governance structure

Stakeholder Capacity & Governance of Traditional Stakeholders

This component provides insights into the capacity and structure of stakeholders engaging in the JFA process. Understanding more about the stakeholder capacities can inform what practical roles they can take in JFA planning and implementation. For instance, courts cannot undertake substantive law reform, while community groups can advocate for substantive law reform. Likewise, Legal Service Corporation grantees cannot handle class actions, but private attorneys can. As a robust continuum of legal help and information develops under JFA, an understanding of the role and capacity of each stakeholder within the continuum is critical.

Key Elements:

  • Established forum and process for collaboration between stakeholder groups
  • Clear understanding of access to justice roles and responsibilities within and between stakeholder groups
  • Dedicated attention to funding, resources, and partnerships to support growing stakeholder and ecosystem capacity

Emerging Practices & Innovations

This component is the frontier of innovation today. A JFA good practice is to stay on the leading edge of change, especially with the massive transformation technology is having on our society. While emerging practices and innovations take varied forms, they all capture a way of doing business that has the power to transform the justice system, for bad and good. Leaders and planners must become conversant in these topics and have some sense of their implications.

Key Elements:

  • Simplification
  • Upstream Interventions
  • ODR
  • Portals
  • Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
  • Regulatory Reform
  • Data Privacy
  • Cyber Security
  • Standards

Judicial & Court Staff Education

This component contemplates the existence of a judicial education program that engages judges and promotes leadership on access to justice issues within and without the courts. A court staff education program will adopt many of the same principles tailored to staff interaction with users.

Key Elements:
Education programs should follow adult learning principles, be dynamic and interactive, and address the following topics:

  • Engagement with self-represented litigants
  • Availability of community resources and other referral opportunities
  • Systems change leadership for judges
  • Language access requirements and procedures
  • Procedural fairness
  • Cultural sensitivity

Community Integration & Prevention

This component contemplates civil access to justice responses that facilitate system access through community stakeholders and more effective responses to user’s legal issues on the front end. Community leaders and service providers can often serve as a trusted intermediary that can demystify the justice system as well as connect individuals with services to decrease justice system involvement in the first instance.

Key Elements:
Education programs should follow adult learning principles, be dynamic and interactive, and address the following topics:

  • Robust information exchange, including cross-training
  • Community resources integrated into provider services
  • Collecting and sharing information on user experience across providers
  • Collaborative partnerships, including social services providers
  • Community outreach, enabled by a robust communication strategy
  • Cross-training between organizations
  • Early issue identification and proactive, robust referrals in a range of areas (e.g., achieving access through partners)
  • Education about dispute resolution without legal action

Self-Help Centers

This component contemplates broad self-help informational services being accessible to system-users. This can be through information provided in-person or online.

Key Elements:

  • All information provided in plain language
  • Instructions on legal processes, applicable law, and how to prepare for and present a case
  • Links to information and forms on other specific subject matters, including out-of-court resolution
  • Materials optimized for mobile viewing
  • Information on which courts hear what cases and how to access court (e.g., transportation)
  • Staffed self-help centers in/near courthouse, or accessible in community
  • Multiple channels of providing information (e.g., workshops, online)

Plain Language Forms

This component contemplates implementing standardized, plain language forms that are also user-friendly.

Key Elements:

  • Implementation of standardized plain language forms
  • Testing for comprehensibility and usability
  • Form data integration with the court information system
  • Protocols for assessing and updating forms

Triage & Referral

This component is about ensuring there is “no wrong door” to enter the legal system, whether through referrals or other channels. This requires a robust and continued triage system that assesses what services each individual and situation needs, followed by appropriate and verified referrals.

Key Elements:

  • Triage/assessment and referral by any existing resource
  • Identified, consistent triage and referral protocols & practices
  • Triage supported by technology (i.e., portal)
  • All stakeholders, including non-traditional ones, aware of referral information
  • Effective referrals (i.e. entity can take matter without time, income, or subject matter restrictions precluding service)
  • Central legal aid hotlines and market-based equivalents for moderate-income people to diagnose legal issues/potential solutions and resolve less-complex issues at an early stage

Alternative Dispute Resolution

This component addresses providing information about ADR and ensuring ADR is appropriately integrated into the civil justice system.

Key Elements:

  • Provision of information about ADR modes and processes, substantive ADR law, and consequences
  • ADR information available online and integrated into portal
  • Clear codes of ethics for the non-judicial neutrals
  • Access to ADR modes provided within procedural context, possibly through self-help
  • Ethically appropriate collaborations between ATJ stakeholders and ADR providers

Courtroom Assistance Services

This component involves a more dynamic provision of information to system users through technology and in-person assistance. Judges and court staff are also central to providing courtroom assistance.

Key Elements:

  • Instructional videos on logistics and procedures
  • In-person assistants
  • Technology tools to support work of assistants, such as automated forms
  • Technology tools for the judges to prepare and explain final orders in the court room.
  • Training tools for personal assistants and court staff

Compliance Assistance

This component addresses strategies for increasing comprehension of and compliance with legal processes and court orders.

Key Elements:

  • Written orders and compliance information available immediately after hearing
  • Use of plain language orders and judgments
  • Explanations provided by judges and other court staff
  • Reminders prior to deadlines
  • Online tools to assist with compliance and enforcement
  • Collaboration with stakeholders and users to identify common problems and ways to address them.

Navigator (non-lawyer) Services

This component contemplates a new set of roles that provides legal services by professionals who are not lawyers.

Key Elements:

  • Assist litigants in navigating court processes on-site.
  • Assist litigants in selecting and filling out forms.
  • Assist litigants in complying with legal processes for case actions with large numbers of self-represented litigants.

Limited Scope Representation (LSR)

This component contemplates achieving sufficient levels of limited scope representation (also called unbundled or discrete task legal assistance) deployed at strategic points for the highest possible impact for users.

Key Elements:

  • Lawyers willing to provide legal services on a discrete task basis
  • Processes for conclusion of limited scope representation, (i.e. client is aware of any remaining legal needs and how to do that through self-help or other resources)
  • Training and resources to support participating lawyers
  • Adoption of rules that facilitate limited scope representation and ease in entering/exiting a matter
  • Good lines of communication between the limited scope attorney and the client
  • Screening, triage and referral components to connect these lawyers with persons seeking their services
  • Full acceptance by the judiciary of the practice
  • Take steps to create and aggregate a market for discrete task representation through public education and advertising as well as through the creation of lawyer referral mechanisms focused on this form of law practice.

Full Representation Expansion

This component contemplates ensuring sufficient levels of full-service legal representation across income levels.

Key Elements:

  • Assessment of existing service capacity in the state, factoring in geographic differences.
  • Identification of effective service pro bono, legal aid and market- based delivery strategies with potential for replication/scaling
  • Training & assistance with implementation of best practices for utilizing technology and process improvement; identification of potential support to make this possible.
  • Incorporation of litigation strategies that have the potential to impact many people and decrease the need for full representation in the future.
  • Training and mentoring for pro bono volunteers, both on substantive issues and on how to work with low-income clients.
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