Most Americans struggle with a legal problem at some point, whether it’s a dispute with a landlord or a challenge accessing public benefits. Yet low-income people typically can’t afford a lawyer, and more than 90% fail to get enough help with their civil legal problems.
To expand access to high-quality legal assistance, the nonprofit Frontline Justice is leading a campaign to develop a new type of job role—frontline legal helpers. As part of that effort, a recently launched taskforce is working on standards and credentialing for training these workers.
The Big Idea: Community justice workers won’t be lawyers. In fact, the campaign’s leaders say lawyer-only solutions don’t scale, and that focusing on lawyers can exclude people who are closest to the problems of unmet legal needs.
The model for these new jobs instead is similar to that of community health aides, who along with paramedics and nurse practitioners, have helped to expand access to healthcare in the U.S.
“A justice worker could be anyone with any level of education and in any role,” says Nikole Nelson, Frontline Justice’s CEO, including a “social worker, minister, or medical professional with an advanced degree, or a trusted community member who has no formal postsecondary education but who has life and work experience and connections that position them to provide legal help to others as a volunteer, part of an already-existing job, or in an entirely new role.”
Nelson speaks from experience. She helped pioneer a successful community justice worker program in Alaska to tackle the state’s legal desert crisis.
Policy reforms may be required to clear a path for these workers. For example, a waiver from the Alaska Bar Association allows community justice workers to represent clients in court. Now more than 20 states, including California, Texas, and Arizona, are considering related regulatory tweaks or developing models for these jobs within their current systems.
Rural areas tend to have big unmet needs for legal help. But so do large cities, where the volume of requests tends to overwhelm existing systems. As a result, Los Angeles and Dallas are among major metro areas that are exploring what’s possible with community justice workers.
Nondegree Training
To open the door for this category of job, the campaign is seeking to create accessible alternative education and training pathways—and to avoid over-credentialing through law school or unnecessary degree requirements.
The goal is to develop right-sized training based on the tasks a justice worker will perform, Nelson says. A preparation program could be focused on a discrete legal task, like helping someone apply for SNAP benefits. Or it might be about a more involved legal process, such as filling out a court-approved form for a divorce.
“The training will ideally also be stackable and include some recognized and transferrable certification or other signaling device that can be recognized and relied upon throughout a state’s legal community,” says Nelson.
The new task force that’s working on these solutions is a partnership between Frontline Justice, Ascendium, and the Education Design Lab. It’s tapping a broad range of experts to develop national standards for training, as well as curriculum materials, assessment tools, and professional development opportunities.
Courts, lawyers, and legal aid experts are key allies for the campaign. “We also need support from those outside the legal field to move things forward,” Nelson says, including people who “are most impacted by the lack of available legal help, and those with expertise in low-barrier adult education and alternative education pathways.”
Designing for Scale: Standardization should include a job task analysis to identify core competencies for justice workers across states, says Roy Swift, executive director of Workcred, a nonprofit focused on nondegree credentialing. That effort would help ensure that the training is legally defensible.
“The job task analysis could lead to a certification or an assessment-based certificate program,” Swift says. “This would also facilitate mobility across states.”
The campaign is committed to avoiding unnecessary training or licensing requirements for justice-worker training, says Nelson.
The Kicker: “We need all the help we can get to assure that everyone has the protection of our laws,” she says.
Note: Ascendium, which was a partner in the work featured here, is a funder of Work Shift. We keep decisions about news coverage separate from sources of revenue. You can read our policy on editorial independence here.