Great New Jane Austen “Quote” in Article on Vermont Access Coalition Activities

Posted on July 19, 2011 by richardzorza

Justice Denise Johnson sits on the Vermont Supreme Court and Chairs the state Access to Justice Coalition.

She has written a fine article in the Vermont Bar Journal, about that Coalition’s admirable and comprehensive activities.  Well worth a read for showing how such a group can combine a number of different strategies.

That alone would earn a mention on this blog.

But what hits the jackpot is the Jane Austen reference that starts the article:

To paraphrase Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a person with a legal problem must be in want of a lawyer.

Naturally this earns a footnote:

Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice 1 (1813) (“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”).

As to substance, the Justice’s conclusion is particulalry apposite:

The ultimate goal, in my view, is to develop a mechanism whereby we are able to identify what cases for low-income people must absolutely have a lawyer to obtain access to justice, and try to provide that lawyer free of charge. For others, we will have to help them help themselves, through the courts or LawLine or other advice clinics. Ensuring a free lawyer for cases that really need one may be “pie in the sky” for several years to come, but at the very least, we can work on developing a comprehensive delivery system in this state that does not depend on a single kind of entity, like legal aid programs, to deliver service everywhere. We can use pro se assistance, pro bono services, low bono programs, advice clinics, and so on to try to meet need.

Posted in Access to Justice Boards, Access to Justice Generally, Legal Aid, Pro Bono, Self-Help Services, Triage | Tagged | Comments Off on Great New Jane Austen “Quote” in Article on Vermont Access Coalition Activities

LSC’s Sandman on Innovative Pro Bono Ideas Including Technology

Posted on July 18, 2011 by richardzorza

The Pro Bono Institute has posted a nice video on YouTube of LSC President Jim Sandman talking about pro bono.

Particularly useful are his suggestions (which should carry a lot of weight with managing partners at large firms — after all he used to play that role) for greater support for technology and marketing for legal aid programs as part of the firms’ pro bono committment.  The video is below, jumping directly to that portion.

Posted in Pro Bono, Technology | Tagged | Comments Off on LSC’s Sandman on Innovative Pro Bono Ideas Including Technology

Nice Introductory Video on Texas Court Processes for the Self-Represented

Posted on July 18, 2011 by richardzorza

This is a great model introduction to court processes now up on YouTube, thanks to the Texas Access to Justice Commission, the Lubbock County Bar, and Texas Legal Services Center.

Here it is:

Note the nice job they do promiting both TexasLawHelp (jumps to that point)

and the chat feature (jumps to that point).

Thanks to the SC Access to Justice Blog for drawing attention to this.

Posted in Self-Help Services | Comments Off on Nice Introductory Video on Texas Court Processes for the Self-Represented

Bureau of Justice Assistance Has New Confirmed Director, Denise O’Donnell from New York

Posted on July 14, 2011 by richardzorza

I missed this.  The Bureau of Justice Assistance’s new Director Denise O’Donnell, was confined by the Senate in late May.

Given BJA’s critical role in federal grants to the justice system, this is an important appointment.  Here is a list of their initiatives, and more detail on programs here.

Denise E. O’Donnell has been New York State Deputy Secretary for Public Safety.  Extract from biography from DOJ site here:

In recent years, O’Donnell has served as the New York State Deputy Secretary for Public Safety, overseeing 11 homeland security and criminal justice agencies. She also has served on the Conviction Integrity Advisory Panel for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office; the Criminal Justice Council of the New York City Bar Association; and the Criminal Justice Section of the New York State Bar Association.

O’Donnell has also taught at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo and served as a lecturer with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Education.

Posted in Funding | Comments Off on Bureau of Justice Assistance Has New Confirmed Director, Denise O’Donnell from New York

Commission on Uniform Laws Issues Uniform Act for Autheniciation of Online State Legal Material

Posted on July 14, 2011 by richardzorza

The Commission on Uniform Laws has approved a Uniform Law designed to standardize the authentication of online state legal materials.  Here is some of their press release.

July 12, 2011 — A new act approved today by a national law group establishes an outcomes-based, technology-neutral framework for providing online legal material with the same level of trustworthiness traditionally provided by publication in a law book.  The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act was approved today by the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) at its 120th Annual Meeting in Vail, Colorado.

Increasingly, state governments are publishing laws, statutes, agency rules, and court rules and decisions online.  In some states, important state-level legal material is no longer published in books, but is only available online.  While electronic publication of legal material has facilitated public access to the material, it has also raised concerns.  Is the legal material official, authentic, government data that has not been altered?  For the long term, how will this electronic legal material be preserved?  How will the public access the material 10, 50, or 100 years from now?  The Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act provides a consistent approach to solving these problems.

The Act requires that official electronic legal material be:

Authenticated, by providing a method to determine that it is unaltered;
Preserved, either in electronic or print form; and
Accessible, for use by the public on a permanent basis.
If a state preserves legal material electronically, it must provide for back-up and recovery, and ensure the integrity and continuing usability of the material.

At a minimum, legal material that is covered by the Act includes the state constitution, session laws, codified laws or statutes, and state agency rules with the effect of law are covered.  In addition, states may choose to include court rules and decisions, state administrative agency decisions, or other legal material. 

Hopefully this will accelerate the process of making sure that there is free access to as broad as possible a range of such content with legal authority.

However, the following from the press release suggests the limited scope, and thus perhaps limited impact, of the Act:

The Act does not affect any relationships between an official state publisher and a commercial publisher, leaving those relationships to contract law.  Copyright laws are also unaffected by the Act.  The Act does not affect the rules of evidence; judges continue to make decisions about the admissibility of electronic evidence in their courtrooms.

A review of primary online material such as at the Legal Information Institute at Cornell indicates just how spotty free online publication of such materials is (and its no fault of the Institute, which does wonderful work in a chaotic environment).

 

 

Posted in Technology | Tagged | 1 Comment

Nice Resource Center for Publc Libraries as Access Point

Posted on July 12, 2011 by richardzorza

In another of the ongoing follow-ups to last year’s Public Libraries and Access to Justice Conference, the Newton Mass public Library has launched its Legal Resources Self Help Center.

Intended for the public library user and nonlaw librarian, this Legal Resources Self Help Center LibGuide provides authoritative and accessible web links for legal topics and forms, legal self help books, laws, cases, regulations and other resources, plus handouts, class instruction and conference presentation materials.

Teach yourself and teach others using the Basic Legal Research and Legal Research Instruction tabs. Learn basic legal terms, how to read a citation, review your civics education, and continue to proceed through your search for legal information.

If going to court, two helpful manuals have been published online through the Massachusetts Court System.  These have been linked under the Massachusetts Courts tab.  The first, released in June 2010, is entitled Serving the Self-Represented Litigant: a guide by and for the Massachusetts Court Staff.  A second guide, Representing Yourself in a Civil Case: Things to Consider When Going to Court.  Together they are excellent preparation when faced with the prospect of going to court.

Here is the front page:

Continue reading →

Posted in Libraries, Technology | Tagged | 1 Comment

Might This be an Opportunity to Get Legal Information into Health Centers?

Posted on July 11, 2011 by richardzorza

HHS Announces:

HHS and The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology introduce new Investing in Innovations (i2) Initiative

Could we use this initiative as a way to get medical legal information into public health clinics, hospital waiting rooms, and the like?

Could we train health care providers to act as a gateway to legal information, particularly that relating to public benefits?  In a sense such gateways could be modeled on those that we are building for the library community.

Here is more from the HHS announcement.

As part of the initiative’s rollout, ONC has awarded nearly $5 million to the Capital Consulting Corporation (CCC) and Health 2.0 LLC, to fund projects supporting innovations in research and encouraging health IT development through open-innovation mechanisms like prizes and challenges.
“The initiative demonstrates ONC’s recognition of the importance of investing in innovations and provides a platform that will attract an expanded community of innovators to the full range of the agency’s programs.  It opens the door to new opportunities for open collaboration from a wide range of diverse individuals and organizations that will increase the national rate of innovation and adoption of health IT as we improve health care of all Americans,” said Farzad Mostashari, M.D., Sc.M., national coordinator for health information technology.
The i2 Initiative will consult stakeholders across the health care sector including hospitals, doctors, consumers, payers, states, employers, advocates, and relevant federal agencies to obtain direct input on execution and to build partnerships.
The core of the i2 Initiative is an effort to use prizes and challenges to facilitate innovation and obtain solutions to identified health IT challenges.  Recognizing the promise of prizes and challenges, the President has called on agencies to promote innovation by using such innovation tools to address intractable problems. The use of prizes and competitions is widely regarded as a powerful tool to attract innovators from all walks of life to address hard problems with the added benefit of only rewarding best-in-class work. The approach makes possible rapid response to emerging issues that are difficult to address with more traditional funding approaches.

Even if this initiative is not the best path, surely there must be one we can take.  Right now this is a huge missed opportunity.  The whole idea of a national legal information website network was that we could be able to market effectively to potential access networks.  This opportunity remains far from fully exploited.

Posted in Libraries, Medical System Comparision, Technology | Tagged | 1 Comment

Richard Moorhead asks: “Hackgate, Where Were The Lawyers?”

Posted on July 11, 2011 by richardzorza

Richard Moorhead nails it again in his blog:

US scandals (Watergate, Savings and Loan, Enron and latterly Lehman) have tended to prompt the question: where were the lawyers? Indeed, Watergate is widely credited with being the first crisis to prompt a flourishing of legal ethics scholarship. Interestingly, this has not tended to happen in the UK. Solicitors have tended to avoid the controversy surrounding corporate scandals. The reasons for that are for another time but there is also a possibility that Hackgate might be about to change that. Certainly lawyers are being dragged in from the shadows and onto the stage of this particular story.

Richard goes on to explore the details.

Of course, the apparently smaller role is in part the because of the lesser political role of lawyers in British political life.

Posted in Legal Ethics | Tagged | Comments Off on Richard Moorhead asks: “Hackgate, Where Were The Lawyers?”

Study of Broad Benefits of Health Insurance for Poor

Posted on July 9, 2011 by richardzorza

Thursday’s NYT has a very important article on the broad benefits of Medicaid for the poor.

What happened was this.  Oregon had some spare Medicaid money, but it was only enough for 10,000 people.  So they allocated the slots at random.  That’s a perfect natural randomized experiment.

National Bureau for Economic Research did a study, and here is the abstract:

In 2008, a group of uninsured low-income adults in Oregon was selected by lottery to be given the chance to apply for Medicaid. This lottery provides a unique opportunity to gauge the effects of expanding access to public health insurance on the health care use, financial strain, and health of low-income adults using a randomized controlled design. In the year after random assignment, the treatment group selected by the lottery was about 25 percentage points more likely to have insurance than the control group that was not selected. We find that in this first year, the treatment group had substantively and statistically significantly higher health care utilization (including primary and preventive care as well as hospitalizations), lower out-of-pocket medical expenditures and medical debt (including fewer bills sent to collection), and better self-reported physical and mental health than the control group.

Some quotes from the NYT story:

The study found that those with insurance were 25 percent less likely to have an unpaid bill sent to a collection agency and were 40 percent less likely to borrow money or fail to pay other bills because they had to pay medical bills.

Dr. Finkelstein said she had thought that the people were so poor to begin with that they just did not spend very much out of pocket on medical care when they did not have insurance. “Yet look at the results,” she said.

Dr. Baicker interviewed people for Part 2 of the study and was impressed by what she heard.

“Being uninsured is incredibly stressful from a financial perspective, a psychological perspective, a physical perspective,” she said. “It is a huge relief to people not to have to worry about it day in and day out.”

The study is here (costs $5, with exceptions for federal government, journalists, and residents of developing countries).  The developing country exception is a nice idea.

Posted in Medical System Comparision, Research and Evalation | Tagged , | Comments Off on Study of Broad Benefits of Health Insurance for Poor

When Is A Website Practicing Law? Provocative Post By Richard Granat

Posted on July 6, 2011 by richardzorza

Richard Granat has a very interesting and reflective post on the e-lawyering blog on the question of when a website is practicing law.  (No surprise, Richard is a pioneer who is always thinking ahead.)

As the title “Is LegalZoom Just a Self-Help Legal Software Company?” suggests, the post focuses on LegalZoom and its defense against unauthorized practice of law claims brought against it in the US District Court in Missouri.

Richard’s position is summarized here:

Continue reading →

Posted in Legal Ethics, Technology | Tagged | Comments Off on When Is A Website Practicing Law? Provocative Post By Richard Granat

DOJ Grant Information Page — With E-mail Updating Notification Available

Posted on July 5, 2011 by richardzorza

Special thanks to the DOJ Access Initative for its Grants Information Page, bringing together informtion about a wide range of Federal grants, including many that would not normally get the attention of access advocates.

For example as of his date, the civil area includes information about a Neighborhood Revialization grant program.

The page allows you to subscribe for e-mail alerts when there is an update.

Posted in Dept. of Justice, Funding | Comments Off on DOJ Grant Information Page — With E-mail Updating Notification Available

Making Mobile Gov Project

Posted on July 5, 2011 by richardzorza

The US government has a project dedicated to helping government make full use of mobile technologies.  As the site says:

We are starting by helping you discover information and make the case for mobile in your agency.
Next, we want you to join in and discuss the challenges to mobile gov.
Third, we will have a dialogue with people in government, industry, nonprofits, and the general public on how to design this mobile future.

Sounds like a great resource/opportunity for folks pushing the needed mobile agenda in access to justice.  Lets not let this one get by us.

There is even a Mobile Gov Community of practice.

More media coverage at Government Technology.

Thanks to Lisa Rush for passing this to me.

Posted in Mobile Technology, Technology | 1 Comment

CALI Confernce for Law School Computing Posts its Sessions Online

Posted on July 3, 2011 by richardzorza

This is an impressive set of online materals (video and often ptts too) for a total of about 50 sessions.

Some titles:

Competing with Facebook

The Future (of Web Development) is Now: Key Features of HTML5 that are Ready for the Web

Using Open Source Tools for Data Warehousing and Reporting

University of Texas: Exploring Our New Digital Teaching Courtroom

Lessons for the overall access to justice community:

There’s lots of cute technie stuff her.

This is about transforming a community (law schools)

There is some stuff on access to justice (apps for justice, dealing largely withe law students and the ATJ platform)

We have to be making much better use of our own conference content, as they do.

How about the NLADA and EJC conferences online.  The SRLN conferences online (we did stream, and are working on the video). TIG posts materials and links, and streams, but permanent video posting?

Posted in Law Schools, Technology | Tagged | Comments Off on CALI Confernce for Law School Computing Posts its Sessions Online

Montana Supreme Court Commission On Self-Represented Litigants Wins Case on Use of Its Copyrighted Forms

Posted on June 30, 2011 by richardzorza

It’s a default judgment, but significant nonetheless.

The Montana Supreme Court Commission On Self-Represented Litigants won a case about improper use of its forms by a commercial organization called “Legal Aid Administration, LLC”, (described in the complaint as a “limited liability company organized under the laws of Florida, doing business in the State of Montana” and referred to, perhaps confusingly, throughout the Order as “Legal Aid”.  Here is the Order.

Some key paras from the Order, entered and filed June 29, 2011:

Continue reading →

Posted in Access to Justice Boards, Forms | Tagged | Comments Off on Montana Supreme Court Commission On Self-Represented Litigants Wins Case on Use of Its Copyrighted Forms

Lawyer Surplus in the US — Action By Law Schools For New Delivery Models Long Overdue

Posted on June 28, 2011 by richardzorza

The New York Tines Economix blog collects data on the lawyer surplus.

Key scary statistic: “In fact, across the country, there were twice as many people who passed the bar in 2009 (53,508) as there were openings (26,239)”

The post also shares the state-by-state report with annual openings, bar exam passers, law school completers, surplus/shortage and median wage.  Take a look.

DC has the highest median wage, over $70/hr, and Montana the lowest, under $25/hr.

The access to justice implications are obvious.  There is massive need for legal help, but that is not being translated into jobs.  There has to be a way to create delivery system jobs that provide living wages while helping access to justice.  You would think law schools (particularly those at the bottom of the jobs hierarchy in the high surplus states) would be desperate to do more to create jobs for their graduates.  As times stay tough, they will eventually start to fall by the wayside as lack of jobs translates into lack of interest in law school places, falling tuition income, and less money for faculty and administrators.

See my prior post on incubator programs.

How about a major conference focused just on this problem?

Posted in Law Schools, Middle Income, Systematic Change | Comments Off on Lawyer Surplus in the US — Action By Law Schools For New Delivery Models Long Overdue