Innovation for Justice Launches New Nationwide Toolkit for UPL Reform and Domestic Violence Advocacy

By Cayley Balser

October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, and a good month to highlight a project that focuses on connecting survivors of domestic violence with the necessary help and services they need. In the spring of 2023, Innovation for Justice (i4J) began a project examining the potential of unauthorized practice of law (UPL) reform to advance domestic violence (DV) advocacy. This nationwide project gathered the UPL restrictions and exceptions in all 50 states and DC, and collected survey and qualitative data from 85 interviews with domestic violence advocates and organization leadership, as well as DV subject matter experts, representing 40 jurisdictions.

As LSC has identified, low-income individuals in the United States do not receive adequate — or any — help for 93% of their legal problems. I have been working with i4J since 2020 to design innovative legal service models that seek to address the justice crisis in the US. This summer, we published our findings from this national project.

Innovation for Justice (i4J), a social justice innovation lab jointly housed at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law and the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business, designs, builds and tests disruptive solutions to the justice crisis. Our interdisciplinary research teams engage in participatory action research that exposes inequalities in the legal system to create new, replicable strategies for legal empowerment using design and systems thinking research methodologies. At i4J, we believe that change does not happen in silos; innovation calls for broad insight, engagement and support. We collaborate with community partners in the nonprofit, government and private sectors, as well as lived-experience experts from the communities in which we work, to create data-driven models for legally empowering systemically disinvested communities.

Why did this project focus specifically on DV? We know that 98% of low-income domestic violence survivors experienced at least one additional civil legal problem in the past year, and 87% experienced at least five. While organizations providing support services to DV survivors often refer survivors facing civil legal issues to legal aid organizations, 88% of low-income survivors receive inadequate or no legal help. Survivors may receive legal navigation assistance from DV advocates, but DV advocates are trained to give legal information, not legal advice, in order to comply with unauthorized practice of law restrictions.

This project focused on answering five identified research questions through the creation of an online toolkit. These research questions are:

  • Nationally, what gaps in their ability to help survivors do lay legal advocates experience when they limit their help to legal information, not legal advice?
  • Do lay legal advocates think UPL reform and the ability to give limited scope legal advice as part of their services would be helpful to them and the survivors they serve?
  • What civil legal needs do lay legal advocates most want / need to advise DV survivors regarding?
  • What additional legal training would lay legal advocates want and need to feel equipped to give limited scope legal advice?
  • What do subject matter experts consider the best practices for lay and licensed legal advocacy for DV survivors, in areas such as training/certification, supervision/mentorship, and professional responsibility?

The online toolkit that answers these questions, and has further information about the landscape of DV services, a database with existing UPL restrictions and exceptions, and a comparison chart of existing community-based justice worker programs operating with UPL exceptions, visit https://uplpolicytoolkit.org/.

Empowering individuals who are not lawyers to provide legal advice through UPL reform is just one part of the civil justice problem-solving ecosystem that is necessary to address the justice crisis in this country. It will take policy reform, pro bono initiatives, legal aid, human-centered courts, and more to make sure that anyone who experiences a justice need is able to get the help that they want.

Cayley Balser is the Service Impact Area Lead at Innovation for Justice, a Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law, and adjunct faculty at the University of Utah David Eccles School of Business and S.J. Quinney School of Law. Cayley’s multidisciplinary research interests focus on access to and integration of trauma-informed approaches within legal education and services. She is a member of LSC’s Emerging Leaders Council.

Innovation for Justice Launches New Nationwide Toolkit for UPL Reform and Domestic Violence… was originally published in Justice Rising on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.