2004 Report to Appointing Bodies

2004 REPORT OF THE COLORADO ACCESS TO JUSTICE COMMISSION

 David Butler

In the Colorado Lawyer of October 2002, I reported the pending creation of an Access to Justice Commission (“ATJ Commission”) and of local Access to Justice Committees in Colorado’s 22 judicial districts.  As Chair, I am now reporting on our work during 2003 to the persons and groups who appointed the Commission’s members. 

The purpose of both the ATJ Commission and the local ATJ Committees was to pull together and push forward the efforts already being made by many persons to help people encountering barriers in gaining access to our judicial system.  The fundamental principle of equal justice under the law cannot be achieved when there are major barriers to access for many people in our society.  These barriers are primarily economic for people with low and moderate incomes, but they include also ethnic, language, literacy, remote location, immigrant status, and physical or mental impairments.  The Commission is a planner, coordinator, and source of ideas and encouragement.  It is not a direct provider of services.

The ATJ Commission grew out of the less formal Colorado State Wide Legal Services Planning Group which began work in 1995; and the idea of creating local Access to Justice Committees arose from a continuing effort to organize local pro bono efforts which would involve lawyers, judges, court personnel, and other persons dedicated to advancing access to justice.

During the Fall of 2002, the ATJ Commission was organized and nearly all of its members were appointed.  These included 10 members appointed by the Colorado Bar Association, four members appointed by the Supreme Court, and one member appointed by each of the Legal Aid Foundation, the Colorado Lawyers Trust Account Foundation, and Colorado Legal Services.[i]   Room was also left for the appointment of members by the Governor, the President of the Colorado Senate, and the Speaker of the Colorado House of Representatives.  The President of the Senate, John Andrews, did make an appointment early in 2003; no appointment has yet been made by the Governor or the Speaker. 

Commission, Structure and Meetings

The Commission is independent of the Colorado Bar Association and of the Supreme Court, but through their appointments and support, both the CBA and the Court have greatly contributed to the Commission’s activities.  The Colorado Bar Association has hosted our meetings, and made Jo Ann Viola Salazar available to help the Commission.  It has also been helpful to us in paying specific expenses, including, as a prime example, travel expense to annual national meetings at which we exchange ideas with similar Commissions or like groups from throughout the United States.

We operate to a large extent through committees which include members of the Commission and volunteers from outside the Commission who contribute time and effort to the work of those committees.  I will describe briefly below some of the things that each committee of the Commission has accomplished during 2003 and the first part of 2004.

Pro Bono Committee

The initial assignment of this Committee, which is chaired by Aaron Clay of the Delta County Bar, has been to work with local bar associations to organize local Access to Justice Committees.  The underlying premise is that most pro bono services are not performed, and should not be organized, on a statewide basis, but rather within local areas.  The local ATJ Committees will coordinate and promote pro bono work by lawyers, paralegals and lay volunteers, but will also, as time passes, share knowledge and ideas with the Commission and with similar Committees throughout Colorado.  Our model for local ATJ Committees is flexible because there are many differences between locations, including, for example, urban and rural or small town populations, existing local frameworks for pro bono services, groups to be served, and differences in the issues needed to be addressed.  But a common thread is the desirability of broad representation, including, for example, judges, other court personnel, pro bono coordinators, officers of local bar associations, paralegals, lay volunteers, Colorado Legal Services lawyers and representatives of client service and advocacy groups in each area.

Getting the local ATJ Committees off the ground has been a challenging task, but our Pro Bono Committee has worked hard on that task and has made progress since the beginning of 2003.  It has also received welcome support from Bob Truhlar, as President of the Colorado Bar Association, who has consistently taken a special interest in this effort.

The original concept of the local ATJ Committees was that there would be one in each Judicial District, because this would facilitate the active participation of one or more District Court judges on each of the ATJ Committees.  However, as the Pro Bono Committee’s work continued, it became apparent that local ATJ Committees do not fit neatly into judicial districts.  Some districts have very few lawyers and need to be combined with others in order to create a large enough group to be effective.  In other cases, there are two or more local bar associations within the same judicial district, and each of them has been accustomed to promoting pro bono services on its own.  The Pro Bono Committee’s response to each situation has been to adapt to it, and not to try to push people into the same structure in each location.  Because some Judicial Districts have small populations and need to be combined to achieve a critical mass, it is likely that when the organizations are complete, there will be about half as many ATJ Committees as there are Judicial Districts.

It is our hope and expectation that starting in the latter part of 2004, all or most of the ATJ Committees will be organized and meeting, and that each of them will provide annual reports to the Commission, get ideas from the Commission and other Committees, and share in web sites and other sources of information which will help each of them to provide quality legal services to those who particularly need them.[ii]

Education Committee

We gave the Education Committee a very wide range of objectives to consider and encourage education of many groups, including the public, prospective clients, the bar, law students, and individual lawyers taking on pro bono projects.  Judge Jo Ann Vogt of the Colorado Court of Appeals has co-chaired this Committee with Ilene Bloom, who served as the Director of Public Interest Law in a major Chicago firm and as a member of the Illinois Coalition for Equal Justice before coming to Colorado.  I have space only to list some of the many initiatives undertaken by the Education Committee.  Some are specific projects; others are simply liaison with others in developing and evaluating ideas which will not necessarily be endorsed by the Committee and Commission.

A fruitful focus for the Education Committee has been the development of incentives and programs for law students, including, as examples, increased emphasis on academic training in common pro bono areas, the expansion of student intern opportunities, and promoting faculty pro bono activity.  The Committee has also studied ideas relating to the relationship between Continuing Legal Education in Colorado and provision of pro bono services.  Some topics being considered are a possible requirement that a certain number of qualifying CLE hours be in substantive areas where pro bono work is especially needed, possible widening of reductions or waivers of CLE fees in those areas, expanded course offerings relevant to those areas, possible crediting (subject to limits) of hours spent on pro bono cases toward meeting CLE minimum requirements, and creation of a “master calendar” on the Colorado Legal Service and perhaps other websites which would list  programs and opportunities for persons interested in pro bono work.

Another area of work for this Committee has been the development of a model in-house legal department policy, in recognition of the fact that most in-house counsel have not historically been effectively keyed into pro bono services and programs.[iii]

Courthouse Committee

This Committee, chaired by Pamela Gagel, has worked with the Colorado Supreme Court and the State Court Administrator to try to improve access to the court system while at the same time finding ways to ease the burdens on court administrative staff caused by substantially reduced funding of Colorado’s court system.

The Supreme Court and Court of Appeals have been diligent in making procedural rule changes which are intended to reduce burdens on both litigants and court staffs.  The Commission and the Colorado Bar have discussed ways to educate lawyers about ways to make changes in old habits which would ease the burdens and, not incidentally, to avoid deterioration in services by shorthanded courthouse staffs to people trying to represent themselves.  An important part of this effort is an improvement in the availability and use of e-filing in those courts which agree to accept it.

Other areas in which this Committee or its Chair have been involved include training for Family Court Facilitators, development of judicial websites with forms and instructions, and coordination of a “Pro Se Summit” which brought together people working in pro se areas in the Denver Metro Area to inform them about sources of information and the work of other persons and groups in these areas and to discuss how unmet needs can be addressed.  We are hopeful that this project can be expanded to other areas in Colorado.[iv]

Resources

This Committee is chaired by Meredith McBurney, who was for many years the Director of the Legal Aid Foundation and of COLTAF.  Meredith now works with the American Bar Association in collecting and distributing information about fundraising activities for civil legal services throughout the United States.

The Commission, through this Committee, seeks to safeguard, and hopefully expand, the primary sources of funding for access to justice in Colorado.  In order of current size, these sources are:

1.                            The federal Legal Services Corporation.

2.                            The Legal Aid Foundation of Colorado, which raises most of its funding through voluntary contributions by lawyers and law firms.

3.                            Colorado Lawyers Trust Account Foundation (COLTAF).

4.                            State legislative funding for assistance to victims of domestic violence.

All of these, combined with voluntary pro bono services, provide only about 20% of the civil legal services estimated to be reasonably required by low income persons and others encountering barriers to access to our justice system in Colorado.  The key element in maintaining funding is continuing orientation and maintenance of contact with legislators and others who can make contributions or influence levels of public funding.  It is not well understood by those not directly involved in these issues that over and above the importance of meeting our responsibilities to less fortunate members of our society, there is a practical benefit to business and government because competent legal advice and representation of individuals reduces business and governmental costs in dealing with poorly informed pro se litigants (including persons inappropriately seeking legal redress for problems which do not belong in court) and in helping persons physically and emotionally harmed by domestic abuse.[v]

Conclusion

The Access to Justice Commission is off to a good start in bringing groups together, developing priorities, and beginning to work on those priorities.  But we are still just scratching the surface of what can and should be done to make equal justice under law a practical reality.  With support from you, through your thoughtful appointments and otherwise, and from volunteers within and outside the legal community, we can accomplish more and more as time passes.