Stakeholder Workshop on Access to Justice

On April 4, the Harvard Law School Center on the Legal Profession gathered more than 30 leaders from across the access to justice community, drawing from the judiciary, legal aid organizations, government, entrepreneurs, the private bar, and law schools to collaborate on ideas to increase access to justice. The workshop followed a public conference on Inequality, Access to Justice, and the Rule of Law. In collaboration with Equal Justice Works and the American Association of Law Schools, CLP Fellow Dan Yi organized and led the day using design thinking principles.  

Participants were divided into three groups with experienced facilitators where they tackled one of three questions:

• What is holding us back from dramatically increasing the number and/or variety of people serving the legal needs of low-income individuals?
• What can we do to bring scalable solutions to bear on the massive amount of unmet legal needs? How can we better catalyze, incentivize, and encourage new ideas for legal solutions to flourish?
• What should we do to increase the fairness of legal systems and processes for everyone – whether you have a lawyer or not?

The highly interactive workshop began with lightning talks from select participants to set the stage about the team’s particular question. Participants were then pushed to identify as many opportunities as possible for tackling their challenge. Throughout the day, they drilled down further and further, ultimately selecting one solution and fleshing out a business model for implementation. Over lunch, participants heard from Jim Greiner, the Honorable S. William Green Professor of Public Law, on how he uses the Access to Justice Lab at Harvard Law School to understand what works and what does not work in furthering access to justice, based on his Lab’s trailblazing use of randomized control trials to measure effectiveness in legal settings.

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WATCH: Inequality, Access to Justice, and the Rule of Law

Over the course of the workshop, each team developed a roadmap for advancing a particular solution to their dilemma, before presenting their final ideas to the group. For instance, the group tasked with increasing the number and variety of people that could serve the legal needs of low-income individuals set about outlining how they might empower other professionals to provide legal help, from legal tech start ups to organizers to social workers. As with the public conference preceding, a reigning theme of the day was that lawyers must have humility—lawyers plays a role in broadening access to justice but cannot be the whole story.

Above, participants in the stakeholder workshop on access to justice brainstorm solutions to the problem of unmet legal needs.