Introduction

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This report provides a review of recent developments in regulatory action and program activity aimed at improving access to justice through assistance provided by non-lawyers in community-based not-for-profit settings. We call this type of assistance “community justice help”. The purpose of this report is to explore and identify the potential for supporting and expanding the roles for community justice help in Canada.

The primary focus of our review is Canada, but recent developments in comparative jurisdictions are also considered. The report identifies some relevant regulatory action with potential to expand the scope for non-lawyer roles in general and community justice help more particularly. It also identifies a significant level of program activity in the realm of community justice help.

As developments in Canada head further along the path of enabling and providing community justice help, they incrementally contribute to shifting the currently predominant lawyer-centric paradigm of the regulation and delivery of law-related assistance in Canada. The current paradigm has long permitted non-lawyers in a specified range of roles to provide law-related assistance, including some roles involving community justice help. But the paradigm has remained lawyer-centric in the sense that permission for non-lawyer roles and community justice help has always been the exception rather than the rule, both in terms of the structure of regulatory frameworks and the quantitative provision of law-related assistance in the formal legal system.

To the extent that it is occurring, the shift away from a lawyer-centric paradigm matches and, indeed, can be associated with, a shift in the understanding of access to justice itself. This latter shift exists in the switch to a focus on defining and understanding access to justice in terms of the experience of the general public with so-called “everyday legal problems”, rather than in terms of the operation of the formal justice system.1

A key insight of the ongoing research in Canada and elsewhere on everyday legal problems is that people take a variety of pathways in addressing their problems (including taking no action at all), of which lawyers and the formal justice system are only one and, crucially, not necessarily the one that should be the predominant priority of efforts to improve access to justice. This may be especially the case for people living on low incomes and experiencing other forms of social disadvantage and marginalization. In other words, as the approach to understanding access to justice has become less centered on lawyers and the formal justice system, so too has the lawyer-centricity of the regulation and delivery of law-related assistance, as well as alternative and supplementary assistance options (including community justice help), become a focus of attention.

The attention that this report devotes to recent developments in regulatory action and program activity in the realm of community justice help seeks to be both descriptive and evaluative. We review recent developments in community justice help and what limited literature and other information is available about the quality and effectiveness of non-lawyer assistance in general and community justice help more particularly, especially to the extent they have been compared to the services provided by lawyers. On the basis of the review of the available evaluative information, this report concludes that community justice help is generally of good quality, responding to people’s multifaceted needs, and is no more prone to deficiencies in quality or effectiveness than lawyers’ services. Consequently, this report recommends that next steps in relation to community justice help should aim to support and enable it.

This report is organized into eight sections, including this introduction. Section 2 explains the methodology used for researching this report. Section 3 provides some foundational definitions of forms of law-related assistance and situates non-lawyers and community justice help on that definitional landscape.

Section 4 examines the objectives and components of the regulatory framework for the legal profession and the provision of legal services in Canada and the comparative jurisdictions of the United States, Australia, and England and Wales. The first part of this section focuses on explaining the “lawyer-centric” nature of the current regulatory paradigm in Canadian jurisdictions, while noting the place for non-lawyers and community justice help within that paradigm. As part of this overview of the current Canadian situation, the section identifies the ways in which a selection of reforms and other initiatives are nudging lawyers towards improving access to justice. The section then moves to a review of the regulatory paradigms in the comparative jurisdictions, including consideration of the scope for non-lawyers and community justice help.

Section 5 seeks to explore the relationships between access to justice, lawyer-centricity and community justice help. The section offers a definition of access to justice and a snapshot of research findings on so-called everyday legal problems and the extent to which people achieve access to justice in addressing those problems. The section then explains how non-lawyers can be an important element of efforts to improve access to justice for marginalized communities. This leads into a consideration of indications that relatively greater lawyer-centricity is associated with relatively less access to justice. The final part of the section briefly reviews the concepts of legal capability and legal empowerment as they relate to access to justice and community justice help.

Section 6 canvasses the spectrum of law-related assistance and services provided by workers in not-for-profit community-based organizations – or community justice help – and gives examples from Canada and comparative jurisdictions that illustrate the breadth and nature of community justice help. It also notes where community justice help programs have undergone program evaluations. Finally, it includes a brief review of how organizations providing community justice help take advantage of technology to support their work.

Section 7 considers available literature that sheds evaluative light on the quality of law-related assistance provided by community justice helpers and looks at the comparative quality of services provided by lawyers and non-lawyers.

Section 8 is the conclusion to this report. It identifies knowledge gaps and next steps consistent with the recommended approach of supporting and enabling community justice help into the future.

An appendix provides more detailed overviews of the regulatory frameworks in Canadian jurisdictions.

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