This article presents an overview of civil legal aid and three reforms to improve delivery of services: 1) comprehensive triage system; 2) using business process improvements; and 3) creating legal information exchange organizations.
Geography
The Social, Geographic, and Organizational Determinants of Access to Civil Legal Aid Services: An Argument for an Integrated Access to Justice Model
This article proposes an accessibility model that matches supply and demand for civil legal services spatially.
Optimizing the Health Impacts of Civil Legal Aid Interventions: The Public Health Framework of Medical-Legal Partnerships
This article shows how medical-legal partnerships, a healthcare delivery model, can address the social determinants of health — how one’s social conditions (like neighborhood, job, and access to resources) affect health.
Medical-Legal Partnership and Healthy Start: Integrating Civil Legal Aid Services into Public Health Advocacy
This article looks at the medical-legal partnership model and how it can improve health outcomes by addressing the underlying social determinants of health.
State Legal Needs Studies Point to Justice Gap
The nine state legal needs studies released 2000-2005 indicate that the findings of the 1993 ABA study concerning the gap between the legal needs experienced by low-income people and the services they receive from private attorneys and legal aid programs remain valid today.
Documenting the Justice Gap In America: The Current Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans (2009)
This report updates and expands LSC’s 2005 report “Documenting the Justice Gap in America: The Current Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans”. This report, completed in September 2009, shows that a continuing, major justice gap exists in our nation: for every person helped by LSC-funded legal aid programs, another is turned away. This report adds data on self-represented litigants.
Accessing Justice in Contemporary America: The Community Needs and Services Survey
This is the first study to pair an investigation of the civil justice problems people experience with an investigation of the legal and non-legal resources available to assist them in handling those problems.
Representing Indigent Parties in Civil Cases: An Analysis of State Practices
This is a two-year study of state efforts to provide indigent representation services in civil cases finds that a lack of clear federal guidelines has resulted in variations in state provisions.
A Test of Unbundled Legal Services in the New York City Housing Court
The study finds that the Volunteer Lawyer for the Day Program is a feasible and useful approach to alleviate the overwhelming unmet legal needs of New York City Housing Court litigants.
Statewide Action Plan for Serving Self-Represented Litigants
The plan states that court-based staffed self-help centers, supervised by attorneys, are the optimum way for courts to facilitate the timely and cost-effective processing of cases involving self-represented litigants, to increase access to the courts and improve delivery of justice to the public. Well-designed strategies to serve self-represented litigants, and to effectively manage their cases at all stages, must be incorporated and budgeted as core court functions.
Legal Aid Research 