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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Education programs should follow adult learning principles, be dynamic and interactive, and address the following topics:
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.
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Education programs should follow adult learning principles, be dynamic and interactive, and address the following topics:
This component contemplates broad self-help informational services being accessible to system-users. This can be through information provided in-person or online.
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This component contemplates implementing standardized, plain language forms that are also user-friendly.
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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.
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This component addresses providing information about ADR and ensuring ADR is appropriately integrated into the civil justice system.
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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.
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This component addresses strategies for increasing comprehension of and compliance with legal processes and court orders.
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This component contemplates a new set of roles that provides legal services by professionals who are not lawyers.
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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.
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This component contemplates ensuring sufficient levels of full-service legal representation across income levels.
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