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Current Projects Integration into Community

How can social service providers get people to legal help?

During my Spring 2015 class at Stanford d.school/Law School on Intro to Legal Design, we were lucky enough to have Sacha Steinberger visit us and present on her Project Legal Link. I drew up some notes during her presentation, about what she’s working to do — bringing social service providers into the world of legal services.

Here are my sketches:

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Even if a social service case worker spots legal issues in their client’s situation, they often don’t know how to effectively reach out to get legal help for the client.

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Sacha has identified the social service caseworker as a key ‘legal portal’ — someone who can help get lay people to legal services that they need, and start them on the journey to resolving their problems around housing, debt, relationships, employment, custody, and other common problems that people have and don’t know there is legal recourse for.

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So what does Project Legal Link do, to help improve social services’ capacity to serve as an effective legal portal?image

 

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The ideal new workflow would be that social service providers would be this portal, and would do the following:

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Sacha’s approach is to make it easy for social service providers to know what to do when spotting legal issues and referring for legal help — and empower them to serve their client in fuller ways.

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With smarter caseworkers, then the client will get a fuller team of people to help them.

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Categories
Current Projects Integration into Community

Project Legal Link for legal-social service coordination

Project Legal Link - coordinating social and legal services - open law lab - Screen Shot 2015-04-24 at 10.34.04 PM
I’m excited to see the development of Project Legal Link, a new type of resource that links social & legal services together in the Bay Area.

I was introduced to it last year by the woman who is making it happen — Sacha Steinberger. Sacha is a lawyer, & and decided to focus on the problem of how people other than lawyers can get the right legal help for their clients and users who have come for help on other kinds of social issues. She noticed that it’s hard for non-lawyers to figure out who to be reaching out to, how to make an effective referral, and how to get the right info from group to group.

The Tipping Point Community is funding her work & it is wonderful to see how the site has developed in a short time. She has built a visually appealing, uncluttered & graphic way to help non-lawyers figure out legal options for their clients. There is enormous value in building a system that ensures more holistic care for people with life problems (legal & otherwise) and coordinates warm hand-offs and info-sharing among different service providers.

Here is how the project is officially described, and then find some more screenshots of the site:

In partnership with Tipping Point Community, Project Legal Link assists social service providers to help their clients access legal services. Specifically, we train and equip caseworkers at social service organizations to identify legal issues and refer clients to the appropriate legal resources. We organize the legal landscape so caseworkers don’t have to, and we assist caseworkers in understanding and navigating it.

WHAT WE DO: Our work takes three primary forms:

Train: we train caseworkers to identify and refer legal issues;

Refer: we provide curated referrals for clients’ issues; and

Support: we provide support to caseworkers with questions such as whether a legal issue exists and what to do about it.

Ours is not a one-size-fits-all approach. We get to know each organization, we tailor our services to its staffs’ and clients’ needs, and we support the organization’s work by focusing on the removal of their clients’ legal barriers.

WHY WE DO IT: At Project Legal Link we know that:

The need for legal services is great: low-income households face an average of one to three legal issues each year. If unresolved, these issues are a barrier to meeting basic needs.

The legal system is not intuitive: the legal world is cumbersome, intimidating, and hard to navigate.

Social and legal services rarely coexist: on the social service side, most organizations lack tools such as legal screening devices, referral lists, and trainings related to the legal world.

Caseworkers are the link: caseworkers often become trusted advisors for low-income individuals. In a network of support, the relationship between caseworkers and clients are among the strongest.

Our bet is that caseworkers are a critical bridge between low-income people and the legal services they need. Project Legal Link aims to build on the trust between the caseworker and the client and assist caseworkers in moving their clients out of poverty.

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Project Legal Link - coordinating social and legal services - open law lab - Screen Shot 2015-04-24 at 10.34.40 PM

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