Page 89 - Impact: Collected Essays on Expanding Access to Justice

Help Desks
Legal help desks are the most well established means for expanding access to justice with services that are short of full representation . In New York City, there are an array of legal help desks, which primarily provide information . Housing Court Answers (formerly the City-Wide Task Force on Housing Court) runs the oldest such help desks, having started providing this service for housing court clients in 1981 .39 Civil Legal Advice and Resource Office (CLARO), which is run by the New York State Courts Access to Justice Program, provides information for clients confronting consumer debt cases .40 Legal Information for Families Today (LIFT) has provided legal information for family court litigants since 1996 .41 And Project FAIR has been providing legal information to appellants with administrative fair hearings before the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, primarily on public assistance, SNAP (food stamp), and Medicaid matters, in New York City since 2001 .42
Complementing physical help desks, on-line or virtual help desks also provide access to legal information for those with access to the internet . LawHelpNY provides extensive legal information concerning a wide variety of substantive legal issues as well as information on available free civil legal services .43 The New York Courts have established CourtHelp, which provides more focused information for pro se litigants navigating a variety of courts .44
Legal help desks represent the highest volume of legal assistance to unrepresented litigants . They allow non-lawyers to better understand how the legal system operates, both in terms of the often arcane procedures and the substance of the cases that fall within the help desk’s mandate . These help desks are highly successful at providing limited services to thousands of litigants each year . With so many unrepresented litigants in the courts and before administrative agencies, help desks play a pivotal role in ensuring that these litigants have access to at least some legal information to assist them with their cases .
Navigators
The Committee on Non-Lawyers and the Justice Gap launched the Court Navigators Program in 2014 to provide assistance to unrepresented litigants in Housing Court in Brooklyn and in the Civil Court Consumer Debt Part in the Bronx .45 The Committee engages in a variety of methods of support for unrepresented litigants, ranging from what can best be termed as moral support to describing the court process to assisting unrepresented litigants in answering court questions .46
39 See About Housing Court Answers, hous. cT. answers, http://cwtfhc.org/about-us/ (last visited Mar. 14, 2016).
40 See About CLARO, ciV. legal. adVice & resource off., http://www.claronyc.org/claronyc/default.html (last visited
Mar. 14, 2016).
41 See Mission and History, legal info. for families Today, http://www.liftonline.org/about/who-we-are/mission-and- history (last visited Mar. 14, 2016).
42 See Project FAIR, n.y. legal assisTance grouP, hTTP://nylag.org/uniTs/general-legal-serVices/ProJecTs/ProJecT-fair (last visited Mar. 14, 2016).
43 See About Us, LawhelPNY, http://www.lawhelpny.org/about-us (last visited Mar. 14, 2016).
44 See courThelP, https://www.nycourts.gov/courthelp/ (last visited Mar. 14, 2016).
45 See Lippman, supra note 27, at 1586-87 (describing the Navigator program).
46 See new york sTaTe courT naVigaTor Program, commiTTee on nonlawyers and The JusTice gaP, naVigaTor snaPshoT rePorT 5 (dec. 2014), available at http://nylawyer.nylj.com/adgifs/decisions15/022415report.pdf.
Alternative Models
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