Glenn Rawdon's Speech, Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere, on How Technology Transforms Civil Legal Aid

In October of 1999 Bill Gates published an article for Forbes titled: Everyone, Anytime, Anywhere, The next step for technology is universal access. He spoke of a time in the future when the computer, consumer electronics, and telecommunications industries would come together on the PC, TV, and telephone. The different parties would come together, the hardware platforms would meld, and the result would be universal access. He called this coming together Convergence.

I believe that the Access to Justice Community is now at our point of convergence. The partnerships of the players have never been stronger. Just look around this room. We are holding a forum on improving Access to Justice at the White House attended by senior government officials, Judges, Bar Presidents, Law School Deans, law firm leaders, corporate general counsel, and a host of others all striving for the same goal, access to justice for everyone.

And the technology? About the same time Bill Gates article came out, LSC found out we were getting special funding from Congress to make grants to our programs to use technology to better serve clients and to provide resources to those clients whom we could not serve so that they might better serve themselves. We called this the Technology Initiative Grant program, or TIG for short.

This year marks the 15th  anniversary of TIG. Since the program started, we have funded over 525 projects that have made many improvements to the system: more sophisticated case management systems; websites in every state with a wealth of legal information in multiple languages; instructional videos; an infrastructure to develop and support automated forms; and improved systems for intake, such as hotlines and online intake.

What about the convergence?

This past December, LSC released the report of the LSC Summit on the Use of Technology to Improve Access to Justice. This was a process involving 75 leaders in legal services, the private bar, courts, libraries, IT development, legal academia, and other communities involved in providing access to justice; two one-­‐and-­‐a-­‐half day working sessions; and preparation of numerous papers and analysis.

The result of the Summit was a vision for how technology can serve as a tool for access to justice. This vision focuses on five main areas:

Creating automated forms and other documents to support self-­‐help and limited scope legal representation.

Taking advantage of mobile technologies to reach more persons more effectively.

Applying business process/analysis to all access-­‐to-­‐justice activities to make them as efficient as practicable.

Developing “expert systems” to assist lawyers and other services providers.

of persons otherwise unable to afford an attorney for dealing with essential civil legal needs.

I want to home in on the phrase “some form of effective assistance.” This doesn’t mean a lawyer for everyone for every matter; that’s just not realistic. What it does mean is not turning anyone away with no assistance at all, which is what happens all too often today. 

How do we achieve this? By providing three different levels of assistance:

Information – for those whose problem lends itself to self-­‐help and who have the ability to do it themselves if they have the right tools and information