Serving the Needs of the Many
The primary objective of the Mobile Rural Law Van has been to expand service in underserved rural areas, first to rural Wellington County in the summer 2019 pilot project and then, in the second three-year phase of the project from 2021 to 2024, to Wellington County and to the adjacent North Halton area as well. The mobile summer Law Van operates between May and the end of October. During the fall and winter when Canadian weather becomes too inclement for an outdoor service the winter “law van” moves to various indoor venues in the same towns where the mobile Law Van visits in the summer. The summer van identifies unmet legal need by going out to where people live or spend much of their time, maximizing accessibility mainly by being highly visible in small towns throughout the area. The summer Law Van allows people to come to a high visibility location where it is parked for the day, where they can request free legal help in in a convenient location in their community, at a time that suits their schedule, and on their own terms. In this rural area of Ontario, the project is solving a problem that was occurring in rural Wellington County and North Halton. On a larger canvass, the Law Van project is developing an approach that is addressing a problem that has for a long time been a problem for legal aid. It represents a way to serve the needs of the many rather than the needs of the few.
The rationing of service has long been a concern in legal aid.[1] Legal aid can broadly be characterized as being a highly budget-driven service that has been rationed by two main mechanisms, financial eligibility guidelines and coverage provisions. The rationing mechanisms serve to keep the level of service in line with the funding available. This has resulted in an institution inevitably geared toward serving the few, relative to the number of people in need. In criminal aid this is evident in the number of unrepresented accused appearing in court with only duty counsel advice. The problem is also evident in the number of unrepresented litigants appearing in family courts. The justice gap is even greater in non-family civil matters.[2] The main difference compared with criminal and family law is that a very small proportion of people experiencing civil law problems make use of the formal justice system to deal with them.
Meeting the Needs of the Many
The success of the Law Van in meeting the needs of the many is illustrated by three interim results.
Assisting more people
The number of people assisted has increased each year from 454 in the first summer of 2019, to 503 in summer 2021 and to 523 in the summer of 2022. The winter venues attract only about one third of the numbers of people coming to the summer Law Van.[3] The winter venues are located in libraries and on the premises of other community organizations. Signage, notices in community newspapers and social media posts announce the locations and schedules. However, in one important respect the summer van and the winter locations have essentially opposite ways of connecting with people. The summer Law Van goes out to where people are at, offering service in their place, on their time and on their terms. This maximizes accessibility. On the other hand, the winter venues invite people to go to particular organizations that may not be familiar to them. The winter venues are located where the physical environment may require some contact with the regular reception or with other aspects of the physical space that may be intimating.[4] Nonetheless the Law Van and the winter venues, viewed as forms of outreach, are meeting the needs of the many by attracting more people.
Assisting people who might not otherwise be helped
The second way in which the summer van and the winter venues are meeting the needs of the many is by encouraging people who have had no previous contact with either the Halton or Guelph community legal clinics. These people may not otherwise have received help with their legal problem. From the summer of 2019 to the summer 2022 between about 85% and 90% of people assisted at the Law Van or a winter location said they had no previous connection with the community legal clinic. It is not known if the individuals had sought or received help from another sources. They are nearly all first-time users of the either of the legal clinics involved.
Assisting people with a wider range of problems than might otherwise be the case
A third way in which the summer Law Van and its winter counterpart are serving the needs of the many is by providing help “on-demand” for a wide range of problems. Because the mobile Law Van and the winter venues represent a highly accessible, proactive offer of service they are open to requests for assistance by people experiencing a wide range of problems. People are not deterred by an application process or by information that the clinic provides help only with certain issues. They come in asking, this is my problem. Can you help? The summer van and the winter venues are no wrong door, no wrong number kinds of services. The response is never sorry, we don’t do that. The response is always we are here to help. This represents a third way in which the Law Van project meets the needs of the many.
Taking the summer of 2022 as an example, a small number of problem types made up the majority of problems for which people asked for assistance. Housing problems made up the largest proportion of issues at 30.1%, followed by family law making up 14.4% and a variety of non-family civil law problems at 11.1%. At 55.6%, these three categories made up over half of all requests for assistance. The fourth largest number of requests involved wills and powers of attorney with 10.6% of people requesting assistance, followed by people requesting help with social assistance problems equaling 6.3% of people and then criminal law at 2.8%. Just over three quarters of all people requesting assistance made up the six largest problem categories. However, there were 23 other problem types each with numbers of requests ranging from employment law, 9 requests for assistance, provincial offences at 7 requests, consumer and bankruptcy with 2 requests each, human rights, fraud, debt, police actions and victims issues each with one person requesting assistance.
Conclusion
The primary objective of the Mobile Rural Law Van project is locally meeting the legal and justice needs of people in rural Wellington County and North Halton. At the same time the project resonates with a legal aid issue that is global. The Law Van project stands out as a successful attempt to push back against the perennial challenge of legal aid, of limited resources that are not adequate to meet the needs of the public, resulting in too few people being helped. Beyond the numbers, there is a subtle alchemy that makes this project work. First, it is a highly effective form of outreach that takes the service out to where people are at, where they live or spend much of their time. Second, the effective use of social media is important. This goes beyond posts on community Facebook pages about the schedule of the van and the winter venues and extends to being the subject of the normal patterns of social media communication among people in the communities. People learn about the law van from each other. Third, the Law Van has become part of the rural communities being served. The Law Van fits within the rural culture of the area. Showing up week in and week out, year after year has earned the Law Van an accepted place in the community as being from around here. Finally, the network of access to justice services that support referrals is another essential element that allows the Law Van and the winter venues to expand the range of problems with which people can be helped.
The Rural Mobile Law Van project is being generously funded by the Law Foundation of Ontario.
—
Ab Currie, Ph.D.
Senior Research Fellow
Canadian Forum on Civil Justice
____________________
[1] Richard Moorhead and Pascoe Pleasence, Access to Justice After Universalism, Journal of Law and Society, 30:1, 2003; Regan, Francis, “The Swedish Legal Services Policy Remix: The Shift From Public Legal Aid to Private Legal Expense Insurance,” Journal of Law and Society 30 (1): 49-65; Organ, James, and Jennifer Sigafoos. The impact of LASPO on routes to justice. Manchester: Equality and Human Rights Commission, research report, 2018: 118; Hammerslev, Ole, and Olaf Halvorsen Rønning., Outsourcing Legal Aid in the Nordic Welfare States. Palgrave Macmillan 2018.
[2] Non-family civil law problems refers to a potentially wide range of issues, including poverty law issues such as transactional legal actions relating to real estate or notary services, tax or rental issues from the landlord side and other miscellaneous problems such as identity theft or name changes.
[3] The 162 individuals includes people who received assistance virtually (9) and by telephone (38).
[4] This observation was provided by Maddy Smith, the Rural Community Worker on the project.
Comments are closed.