Report: Social Work Practices in California Legal Aid Organizations (OneJustice and The Legal Aid Association of California 2021)
This report seeks to illuminate one particular aspect of the legal aid landscape: the confluence of social work services and civil legal services, which can often be siloed into separate and fragmented service delivery systems. The idea of removing the boundary between the two fields, and housing both within a legal aid office, is often synonymous with conceptions of developing holistic and client-centered services.
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
OneJustice, The Legal Aid Association of California
Report: Access to Justice Commissions: Increasing Effectiveness Through Adequate Staffing and Funding (Flynn 2018)
This report is intended to help access to justice commissions take advantage of the high visibility of the commission movement and the many successful commission initiatives across the country. By leveraging this general level of support into ongoing stability for an individual commission, commission members can develop a strong, stable infrastructure, with professional staff, allowing them to focus all their energy on the pursuit of their civil justice mission.
Year published:
2018
Document Author:
Mary Lavery Flynn
Note: Sixth Amendment Challenge to Courthouse Dress Codes (Harvard Law Review 2018)
Courthouses with dress codes require the public to conform to particular standards of attire in order to enter.
Year published:
2018
Document Author:
Harvard Law Review
Case: Faretta v. California (U.S. Supreme Court 1975)
This case rules that an individual has a constitutional right to self-representation. While decided in the criminal context, the footnotes are especially relevant as we consider today the rights and responsibilites of pro se litigants in civil matters and the systems that support them.
Facts of the Case:
Year published:
1975
Document Author:
United States Supreme Court
Report: Business Process Analysis in Legal Aid: How Florida Rural Legal Services Partnered with Toyota to Improve Its Client Intake and Customer Service (Legal Services Corporation 2021)
Many organizations have experience with business process analysis (BPA), a method to analyze a company’s processes and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of its operations. In fact, there are multiple methodologies used to accomplish the goals of BPA. A notable one is the Toyota Production System (TPS). TPS was established based on several principles and concepts, including a customer-first culture, an acknowledgment that team members are the most important resource, continuous improvement, a go-and-see approach, jidoka, and just-in-time.
Year published:
2021
Document Author:
Legal Services Corporation
Article: Faster, Cheaper & As Satisfying: An Evaluation of Alaska’s Early Resolution Triage Program (Marz 2016)
The Alaska Court System, in partnership with the Alaska Pro Bono Program, created the Early Resolution Program (ERP) to address many issues with which courts across the country are grappling: how to efficiently and effectively manage divorce and custody cases involving self-represented litigants (SRLs), and how to triage cases to the appropriate resolution approach. This paper reported on an evaluation of the Anchorage ERP.
Year published:
2016
Document Author:
Stacey Marz
Article: Achieving Meaningful Partnerships with Nonprofit Organizations: A View from the Field (Mendel 2013)
This article addresses a topic of vital importance to the nonprofit sector: the dominant preference of institutional funders for visible partnerships and the reality that most of these are shallow relationships entered into by their participants to obtain funding. The article focuses on the not-so-subtle variations in the use of the term "partnership" by public, private, and nonprofit sector actors as a cause for misaligned performance expectations.
Year published:
2013
Document Author:
Stuart Mendel
Paper: A Case for Court Governance Principles (Becker and Durham 2010)
State courts have had ample reasons for questioning the continued viability of traditional approaches to organizing their work and to providing leadership. This paper proposed a set of principles for governing state court systems that was intended to provoke a debate about how court governance could best be enhanced to meet current and future challenges. The principles outlined in this paper were developed by examining what courts, as institutions, need to do internally to meet their responsibilities.
Year published:
2010
Document Author:
Christine Durham and Daniel Becker
Paper: Position Paper on Self-Represented Litigation (CCJ/COSCA 2000)
In this 2000 White Paper, a COSCA sub-committee notes that self-represented litigants are by no means a new phenomenon in the courts. However, the then recent surge in self-represented litigation was unprecedented and shows no signs of abating. While no single explanation could account for this national trend, the paper posits that the drastic reduction in funding for civil legal services has resulted in significantly fewer attorneys serving low-income individuals and was a significant contributing factor.
Year published:
2000
Document Author:
Conference of State Court Administrators
Report: Conference of Chief Justices/ Conference of State Court Administrators Task Force Report (CCJ/COSCA 2002)
This report summarizes the findings of the 2002 Task Force based on its review of current trends and initiatives related to self-represented litigation. Briefly, the Task Force found that recent increases in the number of self-represented litigants – although limited primarily to family law, small claims, and misdemeanor cases – make significant demands on both court resources and on the ability of judicial officers and court staff to provide an opportunity for a fair hearing while maintaining ethical requirements of judicial neutrality and objectivity.
Year published:
2002
Document Author:
CCJ/COSCA, Stephanie Cole, Margaret H. Marshall