Month: December 2016

Much of the work that is being done to improve access to justice for Canadians comes down to access to justice advocates. As a part of our efforts to highlight the diverse range of individuals working across the access to justice arena, the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice was thrilled to recently speak with Sarah McCoubrey for our Access to Justice Advocates series.

Sarah McCoubrey, a lawyer and a founding partner at Calibrate Solutions, is well-known in the access to justice community. She has been integral to several provincial and national campaigns that have sought to disseminate information, research and resources pertaining to a number of access to justice issues. We recently sat down with Sarah for our Access to Justice Advocate series to talk about her work, shifts in the access to justice landscape and what needs to be done to improve the accessibility of our civil justice system. The interview with Sarah was conducted by CFCJ Research Assistant, Lucas Gindin and can be viewed in full here.

The Legal Health Check-Up (LHC) is a uniquely valuable tool for documenting unmet legal need at a very fine-grained, local level. The LHC questionnaire is administered by community groups and service agencies to people seeking their services. Individuals who require service from the legal clinic are referred to the clinic. The LHC form becomes the basis for a dialogue between the clinic staff and the individual, laying the groundwork for a more holistic and integrated service that would otherwise not have occurred with an intake process focussing on addressing only one problem that is presented. The larger number of LHC forms, which may or may not include requests for help from other services, can provide useful insight and, can  be included in a database that comprises all the individuals who complete the forms and report the problems they are currently experiencing.

The LHC used for data collection does not constitute a random and representative survey. The scope of the data depends on factors such as the number of groups in the community that have LHC partnership arrangements with the legal clinic. The reliability of the data is subject to the manner in which each agency has people complete the forms.

However, the form does record the everyday legal problems that occur in the lives of the people who complete them. The problems can be aggregated for all the community agencies that have partnerships with the legal clinic and the data can be cumulated over time. The LHC is highly flexible. Changes can be made to the problem types presented in the survey in response to social changes in the community. Problems that apply uniquely to certain groups such as Aboriginal peoples or refugee claimants can be included. Acknowledging the limitations of LHC data for describing the landscape of legal problems, these data have a level of specificity for small areas that cannot be achieved by sample surveys even with extremely large samples. The LHC data documents legal problems directly and, to that end, is superior to inferences about legal need using proxy measures derived from census or other official data that are collected for other purposes.

As an outreach strategy, it is important to understand that the LHC approach is more than just the check-up questionnaire that is used to identify inconspicuous legal need.  The LHC also necessitates a relationship between the legal clinic and community organizations that provides a pathway to legal help.

The form itself is a valuable source of information to better understand unmet legal need. As a resource that is used in the course of providing service, the form also provides useful data that is not easily accessible by other means.  Legal service providers using the LHC approach should bear this in mind in the way they use the LHC form.  Decision-makers in government and legal aid commission bureaucracies who are responsible for encouraging and funding promising approaches for expanding access to justice should also pay close attention to this important feature of the legal health check-up approach.

A couple months ago, I had the privilege of attending a conference centered on the theme of Civil Justice and Economics. This conference, presented by the Canadian Institute for the Administration of Justice (CIAJ) in partnership with the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ), featured presentations by a number of prominent researchers, academics, judges, legal practitioners, and government and non-profit stakeholders, all devoted to the common goal of improving the economic efficiency and accessibility of our civil justice system. While the Canadian justice system has been touted internationally as fundamentally fair, rule abiding, and open, it has received mediocre rankings on scales of efficiency and accessibility, particularly in the realm of civil justice.[1] This is no secret when considering the extent to which some of the highest members of our judiciary have bemoaned the current state of access to justice in Canada.[2] As a leader among nations, Canada is a country that has the capacity to do better and must do better.

While there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done, the CIAJ/CFCJ conference offered a reassuring glimpse into some new developments that are helping pave the way for increased accessibility and efficiency. Chair of the Civil Resolution Tribunal (CRT), Shannon Salter, for example, spoke about the work that the CRT has been doing in leveraging technology to create Canada’s first fully integrated online tribunal. The CRT has jurisdiction over strata property disputes in British Columbia, and uses a solution explorer that enables users to resolve their disputes from the convenience of their own homes. Speaking to a different development, 2016 Gonthier Fellowship recipients Heather Heavin and Michaela Keet presented the results of their research project, which proposes using legal analytics to enhance the capacity of counsel to provide litigants with competent advice at an early stage in the litigation process. By using hard data to inform a particular action’s prospects of success, Heavin and Keet’s methodological approach allows lawyers to be more accountable to clients, and allows clients to make better informed decisions about settling versus litigating.

The work of the CRT and of professors Heavin and Keet are just two examples of some of the up-and-coming developments that are helping to improve the provision of legal services within our borders. Other presenters also spoke to ongoing or potential initiatives in the realms of data sharing, class actions and alternative legal services (ex: “unbundling” of legal services, “limited scope retainers”). Moving forward, it will also be important to observe the extent to which provincial regulators implement the recommendations set out in the CBA’s Futures Report. If Canada is to make substantial gains on the accessibility front, provincial regulators need to be open to the possibility of allowing for Alternative Business Structures (ABS’s), non-lawyer fee sharing, and Multi-Disciplinary Practices (MDP’s). These three things in particular, can have a profound effect in both improving the quality of legal services and in driving down costs for consumers.

The Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil and Family Matters is pleased to announce the launch of its new Justice Development Goals website (www.justicedevelopmentgoals.ca).

The Action Committee was convened in 2008 by the Rt. Honourable Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada, in order to develop consensus and priorities around improving access to civil and family justice in Canada, while also encouraging cooperation and collaboration between all stakeholders in the justice system. In 2013, the Action Committee published Access to Civil & Family Justice: A Roadmap for Change, which contains 9 Justice Development Goals that, if accomplished, will help to address the large and growing access to justice gap in Canada.

The new Justice Development Goals website presents the 9 Justice Development Goals in plain language so that the most important justice stakeholders – the public – can join us in our journey towards meeting these goals.

The website is only the first step in a broader public engagement process to be conducted over the winter and the early spring of 2017.

___________________________________________________________________________________

Le Comité d’action sur l’accès à la justice en matière civile et familiale est heureux d’annoncer le lancement de son nouveau site Web sur les objectifs de développement en matière de justice (www.justicedevelopmentgoals.ca).

Le Comité d’action a été formé en 2008 par la très honorable Beverley McLachlin, juge en chef du Canada, pour établir un consensus et des priorités concernant l’amélioration de l’accès à la justice en matière civile et familiale au Canada, tout en encourageant également la coopération et la collaboration entre tous les intervenants du système de justice. En 2013, le Comité d’action a publié le document intitulé L’accès à la justice en matière civile et familiale : Une feuille de route pour le changement, lequel contient 9 objectifs de développement en matière de justice qui, s’ils sont atteints, aideront à combler l’écart important et grandissant en ce qui concerne l’accès à la justice au Canada.

Le nouveau site Web présente les neuf objectifs de développement en matière de justice en langage clair afin que les plus importants intervenants du système de justice – les membres du public – puissent nous accompagner dans notre parcours vers l’atteinte de ces objectifs.

Le site Web n’est que la première étape d’un grand processus d’engagement du public qui se déroulera à l’hiver et au début du printemps 2017.