Categories
Current Projects Integration into Community

Devolving Legal Services out of law offices: Medical-Legal Partnerships

from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership's Toolkit
from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership’s Toolkit

Among the many camps of ideas for how to increase access to justice, one of the strongest I keep returning to is Devolved Legal Services.  What I mean by this:

How can we devolve legal services out of offices — out of legal bureaucracies — and into community spaces?

How can we integrate legal help into other (often, more trusted & more accessible) organizations & institutions, so that a person can get easier access to legal professionals — as well as a more holistic solution to their problem?

Legal help may be devolved into schools, into libraries, into places of worships — and into hospitals.   Medical-legal partnerships are one of the most established forms of devolved legal services.

Open Law Lab - Medical Legal Partnerships

The Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University has established a National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership, that provides information on the health centers & legal organizations that have made such partnerships — as well as best practices & a starter toolkit for those interested in opening a partnership (you just have to complete a short form on their site to download the toolkit).

Functions of a Medical-legal Partnership, from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership's toolkit
Functions of a Medical-legal Partnership, from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership’s toolkit

Such a partnership can take many forms: with lawyers physically stationed inside emergency rooms, clinics, or hospital wards — or with the medical organization having established a channel to lawyers, to funnel certain clients to them for consultations & help.

Different levels of integrated partnerships, from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership's Toolkit
Different levels of integrated partnerships, from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership’s Toolkit
Open Law Lab - Medical Legal Partnerships 3
Types of Partnerships, from the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership’s Toolkit

This new universe of medical-legal partnerships is a great example of how other community touchpoints can be made into legal ones.  It also shows fruitful collaborations between other professionals and legal ones, to give a fuller & more satisfying service to the end-user.

As the National Center’s toolkit suggests — there is a huge crossover of medical problems & legal ones, but the two camps of professionals do not speak to each other — or if they do, they do not speak the same language.  A structured partnership can uncover these links & build new service models, that benefit the individual end-user in the short-run and the community in the long-run, by enforcing the laws in a more systematic way that will stop bad practices that lead to health & legal problems.

The toolkit addresses the medical professional’s mental model, trying to expand it to include legal services.

Legal needs are not currently part of the language of healthcare, nor is legal care a tool in the toolbox healthcare team members use to treat patients or address population health. The connection between legal needs and health is invisible in the provision of healthcare. Overcoming this invisibility will require considerable education, not just about the connection between legal needs and health, but also about how lawyers can help each member of the healthcare team provide the necessary care. Medical-legal partnership builds on an existing framework, asking healthcare team members to expand their understanding of social determinants of health to recognize that some of those problems require legal screening and intervention. It asks them to accept lawyers – as they have patient navigators, case managers and social workers – as unique but indispensable members of the healthcare team with a new expertise to help identify, treat and prevent these problems in patients, clinics and populations.

It also tries to stretch legal professionals’ service models, to start thinking outside of traditional ways of problem-solving and client-service.

Legal institutions already provide assistance to individuals around many issues that impact health, but do so in a justice-driven framework, not a health-driven one. Medical-legal partnership requires legal institutions and professionals to dramatically re-orient the delivery of legal aid to prioritize health and to practice law in a public health framework, valuing population outcomes alongside individual case outcomes. Lawyers learn from their healthcare partners how to evaluate their work and adopt health-related priorities. It also asks legal professionals to move from crisis driven care (justice is about righting a wrong) to practicing prevention and upstream care. Legal services provided still include traditional typical case representation, but significantly shift time and resources to training healthcare team members and collaborating with healthcare team members on clinic and population health changes.

For some case studies of partnerships in action, here is a recent article from Tina Rosenberg at The New York Times that profiles some such partnerships in action in Cincinnati, Boston & New York

Via The New York Times

When Poverty Makes You Sick, a Lawyer Can Be the Cure

By TINA ROSENBERG July 17, 2014 9:30 pm

By early summer 2010, the temperature had already reached 100 degrees in Cincinnati. At Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, doctors were urging the families of children with asthma to use air-conditioning. One mother handed a piece of paper to her doctor: The child’s room did have a window unit, and she was using it. But then the landlord responded — he apparently didn’t want to pay the electric bills. Use that air-conditioner, the letter said, and you will be evicted.

A concerned doctor might have tried to call the landlord to fight the notice. Or, she might have handed the letter over to a social worker. But Cincinnati Children’s had something better — it had lawyers. In 2008, the hospital and the Legal Aid Society of Greater Cincinnati set up a medical-legal partnership, the Cincinnati Child Health-Law Partnership or Child HeLP.

A week later, another family came in with the same letter. And the week after that.

“Our lawyers were getting the same problem referred over and over in a short period of time,” said Elaine Fink, who is the co-leader of Child HeLP. “They looked at the map ­— they were all in the same neighborhood. They looked to see who owned the buildings. In this case we hit bingo ­— the same owner.”

That was the Brooklyn-based NY Group, which held 18 buildings in Cincinnati and one in Dayton. Many tenants in those buildings had ended up at Child HeLP — to get help with mold, water damage, structural perils, rodents or bug infestations.

Child HeLP wrote to NY Group, including in its letters statements by physicians about the health impacts of its legal violations. It sued on behalf of one severely disabled boy with a tracheotomy whose health depended on air-conditioning. The repairs were done in a few weeks.

But the point was not just to help individual patients — it was to improve conditions in the buildings for all tenants. At the same time, NY Group was walking away from the buildings — Fannie Mae foreclosed on all 19 by the end of July. Legal Aid helped tenants to organize and have a voice in the foreclosure process — among other things, they wanted to make sure that the buildings remain subsidized housing.

Ultimately that pressure resulted in widespread repairs, and helped persuade Fannie Mae to sell the buildings to Community Builders, a Boston-based nonprofit that develops and operates good low-income housing (which is maintaining the subsidies). Reconstruction is about to start.

Being poor can make you sick. Where you work, the air you breathe, the state of your housing, what you eat, your levels of stress and your vulnerability to crime, injury and discrimination all affect your health. These social determinants of health lie outside the reach of doctors and nurses.

In the early 1990s, Barry Zuckerman, the chief of pediatrics at Boston City Hospital (now Boston Medical Center), decided he was tired of seeing kids cycling back into the hospital again and again — asthmatic kids who never got better because of the mold in their houses, infants with breathing problems because their apartments were unheated. He’d write letters to the landlord, who ignored them, said Megan Sandel, who was an intern there at the time. Then at a cocktail party, someone listening to his complaints asked Zuckerman: What does the law say?

Zuckerman thought it was an important question. In 1993, he established the Family Advocacy Program with three lawyers to prod landlords, secure government benefits families were entitled to and fight with Medicaid, insurance companies, schools and other bureaucracies.

(Zuckerman deserves his own wing in medicine’s hall of innovation — he also co-founded Reach Out and Read, which supplies books and encourages doctors to prescribe them and family reading for kids. And he is co-founder of Health Leads, a program that trains college students to connect patients to food, heat and other basics of health.)

There were few medical-legal partnerships until about five or 10 years ago, but now 231 health care institutions have them, according to the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership. The largest is New York’s LegalHealth, which works in about 20 New York hospitals and is expanding — it will soon have clinics in all 11 of the city’s public hospitals.

Medical-legal partnerships are growing in part because of increasing attention to social determinants of health. Talking about inequality means talking about the vicious cycles that keep people poor; one of the most important is the intersection of poverty and health. “And sometimes a new asthma inhaler isn’t going to solve the problem,” said Martha Bergmark, executive director of Voices for Civil Justice, and until recently director of the Mississippi Center for Justice.

The vast majority of low-income Americans have unresolved legal problems: debt, immigration status, custody issues, child care, benefits, back pay, housing, a special education plan for a child — you name it. All of these affect stress levels, which is in itself a health issue, but many have a more direct connection to health.

Medicaid in New York State is now, in some cases, paying for supportive housing. (Medicaid has long bought housing in the form of nursing homes, of course.) This WNYC radio story describes one formerly homeless woman now in a Medicaid-paid apartment. “You could treat her epilepsy until the cows come home, but without an appropriate place to live she was going to be sick,” said Bergmark.

Clinics that have medical-legal partnerships approach health differently than others. When doctors have no options for helping patients with the social determinants of health, they tend not to ask about them. With a medical-legal partnership, they do. At Cincinnati Children’s, each patient’s family is asked: Do you have housing problems? Problems getting your benefits? Are you depressed? Are you unsafe in your relationship? Would you like to speak to a lawyer or social worker about any of these things?

That process can start right away. “We have attorneys and paralegals on site in the primary care center five days a week,” said Fink. “Many times we get a legal aid attorney to walk down the hall to talk to family while the child is waiting to get immunizations.”

A legal letter can often get a response where a doctor’s or social worker’s letter does not. The lawyers also save doctors time. “Everyone works at the top of their profession instead of the physician figuring out why mom is going to be evicted tomorrow and what they can do about it,” said Ellen Lawton, co-principal investigator at the National Center for Medical-Legal Partnership.

The reverse is also true: adding doctors makes legal work easier. Lawton said that lawyers’ arguments carry more weight when they include a medical opinion. “The health of the kids changes the advocacy conversation,” she said. “It goes from ‘this is the law and you have to comply’ to a conversation that’s about community well-being and health. And when you’re able to use the clinical viewpoint rather than a legal framework, you’re able to resolve the issue much more rapidly.”

Most important, a medical-legal partnership goes beyond curing an individual. Child HeLP’s actions in Cincinnati’s sick buildings made life better for all the families there. “Don’t wait for the kids to be sick,” said Sandel, who is now the medical director of the national medical-legal partnership center. “Look for the pattern and find what’s making kids sick in the first place. The power of the model is moving upstream, going from person to person to population level” — legal action as preventive medicine.

Like other forms of preventive care, medical-legal clinics are a bargain. One striking example: New York City’s LegalHealth wrote formal legal demand letters to help adult asthma patients get their apartments cleared of rodents, bugs, mold, water and structural damage. The apartments were fixed. Patients improved, drastically, and there was a 90 percent drop in emergency room visits and hospital admissions. This was achieved by a one-shot intervention that cost an average of $225 per case.

But while society may save money, that’s not necessarily true for hospitals — and it’s hospitals that make the decisions. Fee-for-service medicine rewards hospitals for more admissions and emergency room usage, not less, and doesn’t reimburse hospitals for preventive services such as legal aid. Nor can legal aid lawyers rely on funding from the federal Legal Services Corporation, which never recovered from the Reagan administration’s cuts.

Increasingly, though, hospitals are establishing and paying for medical-legal partnerships, despite the lack of reimbursement. (New York City’s Health and Hospitals Corporation is paying for part of the expansion of LegalHealth, with other major funding from the Robin Hood Foundation, an anti-poverty group.) One reason is the growing move toward value-based reimbursement instead of fee-for-service — for example, Medicare now rewards hospitals for having low rates of readmission and good scores on safety measures. Nonmedical staff members such as social workers — and lawyers — are becoming a better investment.

Kerry J. Rodabaugh, a gynecologic oncologist at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, started a medical-legal partnership at an earlier job at the Roswell Cancer Center in Buffalo. She studied how often lawyers were able to get patients into insurance or benefit programs, which allows hospitals to be reimbursed for their care. She wrote a paper on the partnership’s work and the savings.

At Nebraska, Rodabaugh established a medical-legal partnership in her department.

“In order to get funding for my program I’ve had to prove a financial benefit,” she said. “I’ve been able to document at my current program a 700 percent return on investment since 2009. When I’m talking to administrators they get very excited.” Now U.N.M.C. is expanding these clinics to every department and to its primary care clinics in places with significant poverty.

“So much of child health is the result of poor social and physical living conditions for kids — food on the table, shelter, quality education,” said Robert S. Kahn, a pediatrician at Cincinnati Children’s who is the medical co-leader of Child HeLP. “So much of what we do in pediatrics is driven by these broader well-being issues for the family. We do much better when we partner with groups that have that as a mission.”

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Tina Rosenberg

Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and the author, most recently, of “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World” and the World War II spy story e-book “D for Deception.”

Categories
Current Projects Dispute Resolution

Roompact: Contracting & Conflict Resolution software for roommates

Open Law Lab - Roompact 1

The New York Times profiled the start-up Roompact yesterday, framing it as a roommate dispute tool.  It also is a legal product — it’s a platform for two parties to come together and create a contract about the terms on which they’ll be roommates, and then flag potential violations & failures after the agreement is signed.  In this case, the university administration can intervene and try to lead a dispute resolution process through the platform.

Roompact has an interesting mix of the dispute resolution functions that have been popping up online over the past decade — and also conflict prevention tech.  It advertises an algorithm that will help a person find a person whom they’re less likely to come into conflict with, and then tries to allow for collaborative contracting and early responses to problems with the agreement that bubble up.

Open Law Lab - Roompact 2

It would be interesting to see other Dispute Resolution platforms aimed not at roommates, but in families, the workplace, or commercial transactions.  This model incorporates a full user flow rather than a simple dispute resolution function:

  1. finding an appropriate party to make a deal with,
  2. collaborating with her to create a custom, mutually satisfying agreement,
  3. solidifying & preserving that legal agreement,
  4. allowing for low-level complaints about deviations from that agreement, or other problems in the relationship,
  5. early-stage intervention to resolve these low-level problems,
  6. later-stage dispute resolutions if the problems spin into larger ones that threaten to sabotage the agreement

A platform with such a wider flow of services — focusing on earlier stages in a pair’s relationship as well as the later ones, when the problems have devolved into ‘disputes’ to be resolved — could be a new direction for the dispute resolution legal products to evolve towards.  Or it could be a service design for traditional courts to consider as they bring their mediation efforts online.

Here’s the New York Times article about Roompact:

via Today’s Students Don’t Have to Suffer if They Hate Their Roommates – NYTimes.com.

Over the last few years, many colleges and universities have adopted online roommate matching programs that help incoming students look for and select their own first-year roommates. Like dating sites, the roommate analytics systems can match people based on preferences like music volume, sociability and even tolerance for snoring.

But schools are not offering first-year students roommate personalization engines merely to ease their transition to college life, as I noted in my article for Sunday Business this week. These educational institutions are trying to reduce an expensive problem: roommate conflicts so severe that they can prompt students to transfer or drop out before their sophomore year.

Rona Skinner, the director of business strategies for student auxiliary services at Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, N.Y., for instance, said she had seen roommates develop conflicts over issues like overnight guests and even whether their dorm room windows should be kept open or closed.

To try to preclude those types of problems, the university uses StarRez, a comprehensive online housing management program that includes a roommate self-selection option for students.

“In today’s market, we have to be competitive inside and outside the academic arena,” Ms. Skinner said. “If we can give students a happy experience with a roommate, they are likely to be retained, not just at the school, but in on-campus housing.”

A start-up, Roompact, is trying to tackle college roommate conflicts directly.

The company has developed online roommate agreements that incoming college students can use to agree on parameters for dorm room cleanliness, security, property sharing and other issues. Then Roompact sends each student a text message on a weekly or twice-monthly basis asking for a rating of how the roommate relationship is going.

The Roompact system also allows university staff members to track the roommate relationship in each dorm room and notifies them when a problem seems to be developing.

“Today, a residence hall director who is in charge of a whole building might find out there’s a problem after a student has already been fighting with a roommate for two months,” said Matt Unger, the chief executive of Roompact. “We want to detect conflict earlier, notify folks in residential life and help with conflict resolution.”

This fall, the University of Hartford in West Hartford, Conn., plans to introduce Roompact for its incoming class, which includes about 1,200 residential students.

The university already had its own strategy in place to try to mitigate roommate conflict. It used paper-based roommate agreements for students and assigned university staff members, like residence counselors, to regularly check in with each student.

While that oversight will continue, Shawn McQuillan, the university’s associate director for residential life, said he hoped features like the regular text messages from Roompact seeking updates will encourage students to better communicate their roommate situations to the university.

“With students becoming more high-tech, it was like pulling teeth to try to get them to fill out the paper forms,” Mr. McQuillan said. “For students who don’t communicate much with us directly, we’re hoping they are going to be more honest with the text messages.”

 

Categories
Current Projects Integration into Community

Project Nanny Van: a legal service design

Open Law Lab - Project Nanny Van

Project Nanny Van is an excellent new example of creative legal service design.  Dan Jackson from Northeastern Law’s NuLawLab clued me in about it. The NuLawLab & its law students have been working with Rev Tank & Marisa Jahn in creating this mobile van that comes to locations where nannies might be congregating, and provides them with resources about their legal rights — as well as other resources to empower them.

The van is staffed with people with knowledge of workers’ rights & the local laws, as well as resources and tips to help the nannies act on their rights.

Open Law Lab - Project Nanny Van3

It’s aimed also at other stakeholders, including employers — giving resources to help them ensure they’re legally compliant & also following best practices.

Open Law Lab - Project Nanny Van 5

The van has traveled across the country since it started operations in Spring 2014, with trips to different states that have laws that protect domestic workers’ rights.

Open Law Lab - Project Nanny Van 8

Here is a write-up from the New York Times’ City Room. via New York Today: The Nanny Van – NYTimes.com.

An artist named Marisa Jahn bought a 1976 Chevy van on Craigslist last year for a couple of thousand dollars.

Today, it will begin touring the East Coast.

It’s the Nanny Van.

Project Nanny Van aims to teach domestic workers about their rights.

There are an estimated 200,000 domestic workers — nannies and house cleaners — working in the New York City metropolitan region.

Under a New York State law passed in 2010, these workers have rights and protections that few of them know about, said Ms. Jahn, who uses art to advocate for low-wage workers.

“Most of them work in isolation,” she said.

The van will be stationed outside parks, libraries and elsewhere in the city starting next week: Flushing, Queens, is their first stop.

It will distribute literature “with superhero Pop Art graphics with local flavor — one character wears a head wrap from Trinidad and Tobago,” Ms. Jahn said.

And a phone number.

Calling (347) WORK-500, domestic workers can listen to more than a dozen episodes about issues in domestic work, recorded by domestic workers, in English and Spanish.

Already, 300 to 1,200 people call the line each month.

In one of Ms. Jahn’s favorite episodes, “there are two lungs, talking to the domestic worker,” she said.

One lung says, in a deep voice, “You’ve got to stop using that harsh oven cleaner.”

The workers’ reaction?

“They think it’s hilarious,” she said.

Here is some more of their awesome graphic designs about their project.

Open Law Lab - Project Nanny Van 2Open Law Lab - Project Nanny Van 4Open Law Lab - Project Nanny Van 7Open Law Lab - Project Nanny Van 10

Categories
Background

How will legal services evolve?

20140718-111305.jpg

Categories
Background

Law for Normal People

Originally posted on the d.school’s Whiteboard:
Over this past fellowship year, I’ve run so many workshops and pop-up classes on how to make law more engaging and usable for “normal people”.

People with legal problems or who aren’t highly educated are not alone in this “normal” bucket. People with PhDs, highly paid professionals, even law school graduates fall into this category as well — they want and need legal tools and processes that are built for “normal people”. That’s not to say these people want everything dumbed down. But they don’t want to use an exhausting amount of brain power to just figure out how to get from A to B in the world of law.

No one — except some supernormal lawyers — really enjoys the status quo of densely textual legalese and byzantine process that you must go through to get a legal problem solved.

So now, in the post-workshop phase of my fellowship, I’m sifting through all the findings and putting together patterns that can guide new families of legal product and service design.
Normal People Law Normal People Law- 2 by Margaret Hagan Normal People Law - image 4 - by Margaret Hagan Normal People Law - image 5 - by Margaret Hagan

Categories
Ideabook Work Product Tool

Legal Design Ideas: Crowdsourcd Parking Ticket Map

Legal Design Idea - Parking Ticket Map

One branch of Legal Design Ideas I’m working on is using crowdsourced information to improve transparency of how legal regulations are implemented & processes are carried out.

An idea in this branch is a Parking Ticket Map — that could use a crowdsourced map like Ushahidi, or other reporting platforms. Individual users can report when & exactly where they’ve received parking tickets or traffic tickets.

How it would work

Ideally, the resulting map would be populated with advice on each parking space in a region — telling potential parkers what common problems with the parking space are. Peer advice can help ensure that the parker would be able to comply with all of the laws that apply to her when she’s parking.  The map can also be a public resource, showing trends in enforcement & making it clear how government authorities are behaving.

The crowdsourced map could be integrated into other services, like Google Maps, or parking availability apps, that have already mapped parking spaces with some exactness. the information about

Why this idea?

This originates out of problems we’ve heard in user research, in which the parking signage does not communicate all the rules that actually apply to a parking space.  There are some common problems that people make mistakes with, and that cost hundreds of dollars.

This might be about the special rules that apply to a parking space — like when it is sufficiently on a slant that the parker must have their wheels turned toward the curb. Or it might be when there is a danger in that space — like where registration stickers are commonly stolen & then the parker will be ticketed for out-of-date stickers.

This could also be useful in tracking trends, biases, and overpolicing.

 

Categories
Advocates Current Projects

Pangea Legal Services, lowbono immigration support

Pangea Legal Services is a San Francisco collective of lawyers who are working to support immigrants with legal support — through a low-bono and pro-bono model that provides services on a sliding scale of fees.

Open Law Lab - Pangea Legal Services for immigrants with sliding scale fees

 

It works on asylum cases, deportations, DACA and U-visa applications, among other services. It also does policy work on behalf of immigrants.

Pangea’s ultimate goal is to be larger non-profit that provides legal services for fees that fit potential clients’ budgets — to bring greater access to legal support to immigrants.

Its self-description:

Vision

We envision a world where the fundamental right to move is respected and appreciated by all.  Our view is that all human beings are entitled to respect, documents, and a process through which to move, settle and resettle in the world.

Mission

The mission of Pangea Legal Services is to stand with immigrant communities and to provide services through direct legal representation, especially in the area of deportation defense.  In addition to direct legal services, we are committed to advocating on behalf of our community through policy advocacy, education, and legal empowerment efforts.

Organizationally, we aim to create a non-profit that is scalable through a sliding scale fee structure and can grow in immigrant communities around the United States.

 

Categories
Advocates Current Projects

Immigrant Justice Corps legal incubator

Immigrant Justice Corps is a fellowship program (or legal incubator) to train people to serve as legal assistants for immigrants in the US. Its application is currently open for a new round of fellows — with applications due in just over a week.  Both JDs and non-JDs can apply to serve immigrants through the Corps

Open Law Lab - Immigrant Justice Corps legal incubator

It offers two kinds of fellowships, Justice Fellows and Community Fellows. Justice fellows are placed with legal service groups and work with their host to represent complex cases. Community fellows are placed in organizations in community groups and conduct outreach & represent community members on more basic cases.

It accepts 15 Community Fellows annually, from a pool of non-JDs, including people with just a college degree.  It offers an unset number of Justice Fellows to recent law graduates and law clerks. This year there are 25 Justice Fellows.

Its self-description:

The Immigrant Justice Corps (IJC) is the country’s first fellowship program dedicated to meeting the need for high-quality legal assistance for immigrants seeking citizenship and fighting deportation.

Inspired by Chief Judge Robert Katzmann of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the IJC brings together the country’s most talented advocates, connects them to New York City’s best legal and community institutions, leverages the latest technologies, and fosters a culture of creative thinking that will produce new strategies to reduce the justice gap for immigrant families, ensuring that immigration status is no longer a barrier to social and economic opportunity.

Extension of the Community Fellowship application deadline:
The IJC is pleased to announce that the deadline for submitting applications for the Community Fellowship has been extended to May 15. Apply today!

 

 

Categories
Ideabook Triage and Diagnosis

Expungement.io App for youth

A group out of Chicago, the Mikva Juvenile Justice Council, is making an app to help young people understand & go through an Expungement legal process. The Knight Foundation is funding the project through its Prototype fund. The project aims “To create a prototype version of Expunge.io, a mobile app designed to aid juvenile offenders in navigating the legal process.”

via JJC Recommends App for Expungement.

Mikva’s Juvenile Justice Council met with the Cook County Board President, Toni Preckwinkle, to present their recommendation on creating an app for juveniles to get more information on the expungement process. The group has been working all through the summer to address the question of “what tools, policies, and practices do youth need to successfully transition from corrections to community?”

Through online research, site visits and talks with pioneers in the field, Mikva youth found that out of 25,000 arrests made in 2012, there were only 70 requests for expungement (expungement refers to the process of sealing prior convictions or arrests). Given this information, and the dearth of accessible information about the process, the Council suggested creating an Expungement App. This tool will serve to educate young detainees and parents about the process and help them find appropriate lawyers and classes.

The group is very excited about this project. “This will help make the expungement process more convenient for teens; teens can easily start the process from their phones,” they said.

 

Categories
Current Projects Professionals' Networks + Traiing

Modest Means Incubator project in California

Last week I attended the presentation about Modest Means Incubators at the State Bar of California. There were judges, private lawyers, law school admins, legal service providers, and court staff there to talk about how new models of legal practices can be built.

The goal is to provide new access to lawyers to those with low & modest incomes — and also to train new JDs with practical skills that can help them start their own practices.

Here are my quickly sketched notes from the session:
Legal Incubators