Last year, the biennial ILAG conference, Access to Justice and the Challenge of COVID-19 was held from June 22 to 24. The ILAG conferences have become the premier legal aid conference series in the world, held every two years in a different international location since its beginnings in 1994 as a meeting in which a small number of academics and researchers provided advice to the Dutch Legal Aid Board. Last year for the first time the conference was held on-line, sponsored by ILAG and Legal Aid New South Wales, with New South Wales providing the all-important technical support required to host a global on-line conference.
The theme of the conference was how legal aid service providers have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, although there were presentations on a variety of other topics, prominent among them holistic legal services and health-justice partnerships. Regarding COVID responses, most legal aid providers have turned to digital methods of service delivery in response to the pandemic. Roger Smith, a leading authority on the application of digital technology in legal services, cautioned that technology is not the total answer. Rather, complex and mixed services will be required to address complex and mixed problems. Importantly, as digital approaches come into wider use we must avoid the nirvana of increased access at a reduced price. There were a number of contributions to the COVID sessions from Australian colleagues. Among them a paper by Jane Cipants from New South Wales discussed how services could be both client-centered and COVID safe drawing on the experience of NSW legal aid through the pandemic. It will be an interesting exercise to reflect further on these discussions as we emerge from the pandemic and have a better understanding of the processes and digital approaches that are here to stay and the pre-pandemic procedures that have returned.
There were several papers about holistic and integrated services. Megan Longley, CEO of Nova Scotia Legal Aid and David McKillop, Vice President of Policy, Research and External Relations at Legal Aid Ontario made a joint presentation on holistic initiatives in Canadian legal aid focused on racialized minorities. One point of emphasis was that the commitment to holistic justice in legal aid is not only at the project level but a total commitment to an overall service delivery ethic.
There were several presentations about health-justice partnerships. Suzie Forell, Research Director at Health Justice Australia spoke about how health-justice partnerships support collaboration between lawyers and health workers to better identify and respond to legal needs that can undermine people’s health. Professor Dame Hazel Genn talked about her experience with health–justice partnerships in the UK, emphasizing the importance of rolling out local health-justice partnerships within a broader health-justice partnership initiative.
ILAG 2021 was a well-organized and successful on-line conference. However, admittedly without the benefit of the post-conference participant questionnaires, the consensus among those who offered an opinion at the end of the conference was that an in-person event would have been preferable. The 2023 International Legal Aid Group conference will be held somewhere in the Americas. Discussions with possible hosts are currently on-going.
Papers, abstracts, recorded presentations, national reports and information about presenters for ILAG 2021 are available at: https://www.legalaid.nsw.gov.au/about-us/international-legal-aid-conference-2021.