The Office of Child Support Enforcement (OCSE) has developed a strong collaboration with the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) Access to Justice Initiative. The Access to Justice Initiative was established to improve access to justice in the criminal and civi ...

The SRLN Tiers Survey was developed for states to conduct a quick tiered inventory of their court based self-help services. Tier 1 services are asynchronous (one-way), Tier 2 services are synchronous (two-way), and Tier 3 services integrate multiple provi ...

Since 2007, Bet Tzedek Legal Services  has been running a self-help conservatorship clinic in partnership with the Los Angeles Superior Court. Originally designed to serve 150 self-represented litigants per year, the program served more than 1,400 self-re ...

This article presents the results from the first quantitative readability study of plain language court forms in the United States. Sixty citizens on a jury panel were selected to respond to brief questionnaires that tested relative comprehension of plain ...

The Justice in Government Project (JGP) at American University, with support from Pew Charitable Trusts, seeks to support funding for legal aid and improve initiatives that address the access to justice gap. The JGP's Civil Legal System Modernization ...

Ethics rule 6.5 is a powerful tool to diversify pro bono programs and to transform court services because it allows unbundled lawyers to perform real time services in court-annexed programs without the onerous clerical burdens and limitations under the tr ...

In February of 2021, the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators adopted Resolution 2 In Support of Continuing Efforts to Meet Civil Legal Needs. After extensive findings setting out the need, especially during the CO ...

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 ...

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 c ...

In this seminal article, Richard Zorza discusses the fact that we know little of the processes by which the millions of people who approach courts, legal aid intake systems, and hotlines are directed into them, or the access services they do or do not rec ...