100 Episodes of Talk Justice—What We’ve Learned So Far

Episode Notes

Transcript

Cat Moon:

Especially in the for-profit law firm space, folks don’t often really share fully what they’re doing, what they’re building, and that competitiveness element just does not exist in the access to justice space. And I think that gives people here this freedom and openness,

Speaker:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice an An LSC Podcast will explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the General Public Talk. Justice is sponsored by the Leaders’ Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Today’s episode is special. They’re all special, but today is particularly special. This is the hundredth episode of Talk Justice. We wanted to take this opportunity to do at least two things. We want to look back and talk about some of our favorite moments of the show and the biggest lessons we’ve taken from it. We’ll also zoom out and look at the bigger picture considering how the discourse around access to justice has developed in legal spaces and for the general population. Joining me today, we have our two longest running co-hosts of the show. Cat Moon is professor of the practice and co-director of the program on Law and Innovation at Vanderbilt University Law School, where she also serves as the founding co-director of the Vanderbilt AI Law Lab.

Cat joined Talk Justice as a host in December, 2022. Jason Tashea is founding director of the Judicial Innovation Fellowship at Georgetown. Jason hosted the first episode of Talk Justice in August, 2020 and stayed with the show for its first two years. He appears today as a co-host. Thanks to both of you for being here today and for over the past four years. Jason, you go back to the beginning. What did you set out to achieve at the outset of Talk Justice? What was in your head, maybe the empty space and civil justice discourse, other things in mind? How did you see it?

Jason Tashea:

Thanks, Ron, and thanks for having me. I think the credit really goes to Carl Rauser, who runs the LSCs Communications Department, who came to me and said, we have this idea. We liked what you did when you were at the ABA Journal, which is where I was a journalist for a number of years. He’s like, do you want to come do that with us on the civil side of things? And I said, yes, in part because it was a pandemic at the time, and this was the only way to talk to people. And so it was a sanity check for me, but also I was eager to understand the civil side of things more. At that point, I’d only been working in civil justice reform for a year. The previous eight years were in criminal justice reform, so I was a newbie, which makes me potentially an odd choice to start this program, but I think a good one because I could stand in for the audience with my ignorance and ask a bunch of questions that maybe somebody more steeped in these topics would’ve asked. So it was as much an opportunity to help LSC push these conversations out to a broader audience as much as it was an opportunity for me to just educate myself and hopefully others through that process of hosting these shows.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, I think you did a heck of a job both in educating our audience and from what I’ve been able to observe the last few years yourself as well. Cat, when you joined the show, you really carved out a space in the justice tech world. What has been your approach to contributing to what is really a fast paced tech space and making sure access to justice gets a seat at the legal tech table?

Cat Moon:

Thanks so much, Ron, for including me in this conversation. And I just want to shout out to Jason for getting Talk Justice off the ground and really establishing it. I think that it has an incredible following because the hosts and the programming have just been really meaningful and intentional, and this is what I hope to do and what I’m trying to do because I believe that the folks in the Access to Justice space are really doing some of the most interesting and cutting edge work when it comes to legal technology right now. I think in part because folks in this space have to be scrappy and have to really have ingenuity and be self-motivated and often doing a whole lot with not a lot of resources. And this is incredibly inspiring, frankly. And so shining a light on this Talk Justice makes that possible. And one thing I’ve noted is that it’s interesting to me to see and talk to and explore the work that folks in the access to justice space are doing to scale and leverage technology. And this is interesting in part because in law generally there’s this competitive nature, especially in the for-profit law firm space. Folks don’t often really share fully what they’re doing, what they’re building, and that competitiveness element just does not exist in the access to justice space. And I think that gives people here this freedom and openness to really share what they’re doing to invite others in, to learn from them and to learn from others. And Talk Justice gives us this amazing platform for that sharing to happen. And I just think it’s so important,

Ronald S. Flagg:

Having spent over 30 years in private practice, it’s really a completely different context. There is competition, there are a limited number of clients who can pay top dollar, and law firms are competing for them. Legal aid, that’s not the arrangement. The issue is not getting clients. The issue is how to serve the millions of clients who have needs and who are currently being turned away for lack of resources and in the tech space, how to leverage technology so that instead of turning away half the people who come to our door, we can provide them some sort of services. And that really does beg for a collaborative approach.

Cat Moon:

It absolutely does. Yes. So Ron, you have this unique insight to civil legal aid because of your role at LSC, and this podcast has really done such a great job of highlighting the amazing work of many of LSCs grantees. I’ve talked to a number of them in the episodes I’ve hosted, so I just want to give a big shout to shout that out and give you a chance to talk about that particular aspect of the show because it’s an important one.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, thanks much Cat. Highlighting our grantees is, I think the favorite thing I get to do on the show. I view our grantees as heroes. They’re often first, or at least second responders in case of disasters, and their work is so impactful to the communities and clients they serve. So I just want to share a couple episodes that illustrate this last May, 2024. I was part of a conversation about how lawyers can help revitalize neighborhoods. We usually think about legal aid as serving one client at a time, but this program that is the Talk Justice program highlighted a legal services program sponsored by Legal Services of Missouri to really start tackling the legal problems that create lingering neighborhood blight. So looking at a community in a neighborhood in a holistic way. So for example, various legal issues can be tied to abandoned buildings such as an owner dying without preparing a title or estate planning, or a shell company in another state or country owning the property or a lien on the property from a lender who has gone out of business.

And untangling these titles requires legal expertise. So lawyers can play an enormous role in getting vacant properties back to productive use in communities. And this model is what legal services of Eastern Missouri has pursued in St. Louis. And it was proceeded by legal services of Western Missouri and Kansas City. Legal Services of Eastern Missouri has received two pro bono innovation fund grants, which helped them grow the program and engage private law firms in the community to sponsor a neighborhood, not just providing service to one individual. And then a second episode from last year also I think is timely given what’s been happening around the country. And that was on how collaboration powers legal aid’s, hurricane response. And it featured our grantees in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, which had just suffered through horrendous hurricanes, multiple hurricanes in 2024. And throughout the conversation with the legal aid providers, they stress the importance of legal services becoming ingrained in the disaster response ecosystem so that other non-legal aid recovery organizations know how to refer people to legal aid.

And legal aid knows where to refer clients with non-legal issues. And our grantees in that program also described how collaborating with pro bono volunteers is critical. In North Carolina, for example, where Legal Aid North Carolina serves all hundred counties, hurricane Helene’s, devastation created enormous surge in need and to help legal aid North Carolina meet the challenge, the North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice issued a so-called Catrina rule, which enables out-of-state attorneys to provide legal services. As of last November, almost 600 out-of-state attorneys had registered to help low-income Helene survivors under Legal Aid North Carolina supervision. So I think these are not only interesting topics, but also we hope that others around the country can learn from what they hear on our podcast. Now we’re a lucky bunch in that we get to talk to many brilliant, passionate people for the show. Could you both share one thing that a guest said that really stuck with you? Jason, what comes to mind?

Jason Tashea:

To your point, there’s just been so many good conversations we’ve had over the years. It’s hard to pick out a line. So to answer your question more broadly, I wanted to pick out a theme, and I think it was part of my own education that I was mentioning was that I understood legal aid coming in to be a fairly narrow band in regards to its role in the justice system. And I think my biggest takeaway was talking to these folks is that it’s much larger as you’re talking about with the lawyers that are helping deal with neighborhood blight, the conversations I had around medical legal partnerships or disaster relief, like what you’re talking about with Helene, these legal aid has a systemic role in society that I don’t think people understand. And I think this podcast does a very good job of capturing and one of the reasons why I think it’s been such a meaningful platform for the past four years.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Cat, what are your thoughts?

Cat Moon:

So I take your charge literally and did pick out not one, but two particular things that guests share. So I am cheating just a little bit, but the first, which is probably partly recency because it was something shared by Satish Nori in the most recent episode that I recorded, but it really, I think captures the energy of almost every conversation I’ve had with folks on this podcast. And Satish said, and for the first time in my career, I’m seeing a path forward out of the kind of mess of intake and triage that we’re all stuck in a way forward that allows us to do that type of work that only we can do. And he’s talking about the human kind of work. I think what Satish is capturing is that this hopefulness that we see with really truly scalable change and impact thanks to technology, I think Satish captures that so well.

I’m going to add one more because I think this is really an important point because scaling with technology is probably not going to be as successful as it can unless an issue raised by Nora Inkstrom in the episode she appeared in with her husband, she makes this point, and this was part of an episode released in September of last year quoting Nora. What we found is in the 1930s under the shadow of the Great Depression lawyers decided to kill off the competition. They just decided to do that and they decided to do it even while sometimes publicly saying that they were doing it because these entities were a threat to lawyers wellbeing. And I share that quote because I think it points out that we might be our own worst enemies referring to lawyers in the legal profession if through our self-regulation we actually put a stranglehold on allowing technology to evolve and do the work that we’re hopeful it can do. I have a lot more I could say, but I’ll stop there.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, that’s a great place to stop because it’s a perfect segue into what I wanted to talk about. I have two, I’ve been lucky to talk to many extraordinary people on the show and one show that’s stuck with me, and it’s directly related to what you just talked about, focused on the growing use of trained non-lawyers, often referred to as community justice workers to provide legal services in discrete legal areas such as landlord, tenant or snap food stamp benefits. I often talk about the justice gap and the need to come up with innovations that will the needle. And so for me, Nicole Nelson, the CEO of Frontline Justice and an organization dedicated to expanding the use of community justice workers made a big impression. Nicole brings enormous insight and passion to her topic after heading up the legal services provider in Alaska where there are numerous, countless remotely located communities with no lawyers and there’ll never be a lawyer in those places, but the legal needs still exist, and how do we crack that nut?

And Nicole commented in talking about community justice workers, and I quote her, let’s get going. I mean, this crisis is on fire, right? Nationally, 92% of low income people’s civil legal needs are not being met. And I remember a time when it was 80%, the crisis is getting worse, the time for waiting has passed. Let’s start experimenting. Let’s start moving things forward in a way that might actually address the justice gap. And let’s start now. Nicole brought such energy and passion to her message. This was from a January 20, 24 episode, but I’m guessing if we talk to her and February, 2025, she would sound much the same message. If we were introducing a new listener to our show, what are one or two episodes that you would point them to and why? Cat, how about you first?

Cat Moon:

Well, you’re asking me to pick among the favorite among my children. That seems a little hard and I think my choice is obvious, and I would point folks first to the episodes that have been recorded at the Innovations in Technology conferences at ITC. And I think actually I appeared in perhaps one of the first ones that was recorded as a guest. Jason, correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe ITC was virtual that year because it was during the pandemic. So I recorded, I was one of the many guests who recorded an episode of Talk Justice as part of that conference program via Zoom. And that was a great conversation and I’ve had the privilege and honor of recording a couple of conversations now as well. And I think that they are just a fantastic introduction to the podcast and why it is so amazing. So I’ll stop there.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, your podcasts live from LSCs Innovations and Technology Conference have definitely been a highlight of all those conferences. Jason, what about you?

Jason Tashea:

I already mentioned the medical-legal partnerships episode, which to me was incredibly enlightening personally just to see that work that’s being done in coordination with doctors around the country. But one we haven’t mentioned that really sticks out in my mind is the Conservatives for Legal Aid episode we did. We had Congressman Tom Emer join us people from the Cato Institute as well as Mark Levin, who was, it remains one of the big brains behind the right on crime, criminal justice reform movement. And I think going back to that theme of this podcast has been an opportunity to show how broad the band is that Legal aid covers to show the bipartisan support of these types of programs from libertarians to just deep red, conservative electeds. It’s not a liberal issue, it’s not a Republican issue. It’s an everybody issue, and I think it really shows just how broad spectrum legal aid is and how important it’s to all types of communities across the United States. So that episode sticks out as a unique conversation that I don’t see very often in the justice reform spaces that we all bump into each other so often.

Ronald S. Flagg:

No, it’s a great point, and it’s one we emphasize in our advocacy all the time. If we go back a few years, one of my favorite factoids was this. This was back about five years ago maybe, or even before that, maybe seven or eight years ago. We had a letter circulating around the House of Representatives advocating for robust funding for LSC, and there were a couple hundred members of the house who signed it. One of them was the chair of the Freedom Caucus, then Mark Meadows, who subsequently became President Trump’s chief of staff, and the other was a OC. And I at the time said, and would ask today, how many causes do you think United Mark Meadows and a OC and Legal Aid does and did, and I hope will continue to do so because it’s not a partisan issue. It’s an American issue, and it’s one that should appeal to all of us.

I likewise have Cat many favorites, and I also have three daughters, and I have great experience and being accused of favoring one over the other two. So I do this gingerly, but the two episodes that come to mind were an August 20, 24 episode, which was entitled A Deeper Look At Homelessness. And I was joined by Carolyn Perez, a colleague of mine at LSC, who really put a human face on homelessness. She said, one misperception is that homelessness is just what we actually see on the street, but the frightening part of homelessness is not just what we see on the street. We’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but we’re not seeing the iceberg itself. And that’s because most people who are experiencing homelessness are not visible. And she went on to describe some of the backstories of the clients she had served. It was tremendously moving and powerful, and again, put a face on what is often either a statistic or something that is remote, we feel remote from then also, last year we had an episode with John Grisham, obviously a bestselling author.

John told a memorable story that he didn’t make up in his head, but was a personal experience at the beginning of his career. And he described it like this when I walked up to the bench with my clients and when they realized that they being the court and the other litigants, these poor people had a lawyer, everything changed. Everything changed. Low income people get run over all the time unless they show up with a lawyer. And I realized the power of a law degree, the power of a law license at that moment. And I think those experiences in John Grisham’s career show up in many of his books, whether they’re about criminal or civil matters. Cat, you mentioned earlier your live podcast recordings at the LSCs Innovations at Technology Conference most recently at the 25th it C last month, you hosted a terrific conversation about AI for legal services. Could you talk about what those experiences have been like for you and why they stand out?

Cat Moon:

They are absolutely some of my favorite experiences, and there are a few reasons why. One is that they give us the opportunity through Talk Justice to tap into the incredible energy at ITC. It literally, especially this year, but I’ve felt it every time I’ve been, there is a buzz that you can feel energy in the air. Folks are so excited by what they’re sharing, what they’re learning. And so being able to be present in the midst of all that and to talk to people who are there to share and to learn and to give their stories and their experiences and experiments, the platform not only in that room, but then to go out to the larger world through the Talk Justice episode that is published later is just super exciting. And there’s something about recording the conversation in the room with a room full of hundreds of people and the opportunity to engage with them in the question and answer afterwards. You really feel like everybody in the room is part of the conversation. And that’s just really a magical feeling that is not quite the same when it’s happening in Zoom, although that’s not bad, but in the room it really is a different feeling. And I think that feeling that energy is translated into the episodes that come out of that experience. So I think it’s just brilliant that it happens, and I’m so grateful that I get to be a part of that. Thank you.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well, I’d be remiss if I didn’t put in a plug for our Innovations in Technology conference after that. Our next conference is next January in San Antonio, and you can find more information about it on our LSC website lsc.gov. Last topic, thinking beyond the lawyers and the technologists in our community who are focused on and dialed into the justice gap and follow the legal tech news, it’s really a very different story when we think about the general public’s awareness of the civil justice system. And that’s really the audience that I’d love to meet, that I’d love to help educate about what it is we all do, what it is our grantees do. Last year, LSE conducted a Harris poll that found that 56% of Americans mistakenly believe that they’re entitled to free legal representation for all civil matters. After all on, we’ve all seen hundreds of episodes of TV shows in which Miranda warnings were read, and we assume that’s the case in civil cases.

And when we look at the demographic of young adults between 18 and 34, that number of percentage of people who believe you have a right to a lawyer in a civil case jumps to a two third 67%. And our justice gap, LSCs justice gap research shows that trust is also a major issue. In 2022, we found that only 28% of low income Americans believe that people like them were being treated fairly in the civil legal system. So I’m talking to two great justice educators and communicators, and I’m wondering what you think could be a viable path forward to expand public understanding of civil justice and building trust in the system. It’s a big task. Jason. Some ideas

Jason Tashea:

I’m going to build off of the quote you read from Nicole Nelson where she said that we need to be experimenting. I think one of the reasons I was excited about this project initially when Carl came to me was that it was an experiment. We didn’t know if it was going to work, if it was going to find an audience, and if it found an audience, if it was going to grow that audience. None of that was predetermined. And yet we’ve figured it out. Everybody that’s been involved help figure it out, make this thing work, and grow it and build its audience. So then the question to my mind is what other experiments do we need to be doing in this space to push this messaging out more broadly? And I just think we need to go bigger and broader. I don’t think it’s ever going to be enough to educate people, largely because education is boring to most people.

We need to make people feel these issues, and that is how we are going to break through. So that means working with broad mediums of entertainment, tv, movie, what Just Mercy did for criminal justice reform, what Aaron Brockovich did for tort litigation. It’s not the way we think about those movies, but it’s what got people interested and created cultural touchstones. We lack cultural touchstones in a meaningful way, in a way that coming out of the criminal justice world, there’s just endless amounts of stories. To your point, Ron, everyone’s heard the Miranda warning. They all know the first two sentences, thanks to Law and Order. We don’t have that cognate for civil justice reform. And I think that that’s just something that we’ve completely overlooked and we haven’t figured out how to bridge yet. The other piece I think maybe goes more to an educational piece is that from my view, we’ve largely as a community abdicated having a role in judicial elections around the country.

And I don’t want to step on anyone’s 5 0 1 C3 status by talking about this. It’s not what I intend to do. But judicial elections are becoming more expensive and they’re becoming more competitive. And we are not out there telling people running for judicial office that access to justice needs to be a plank on their website. And we’re also not educating the public that that’s one of the things they need to be vetting for when deciding who to vote for judge, which is always something every election cycle, that’s the call I get from friends. What judge am I supposed to vote for? It doesn’t matter how educated people are, they’re going to call the lawyer that they know and they’re going to hope that you have an answer for ’em. And sometimes I do and sometimes I do not. And that is just a complete gap on our part, and it is a place that we need to be putting some energy because it’s going to pay dividends if we have more people aligned with us in positions of power in important branches of government like the courts.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Well said, Cat, cure the world’s ills.

Cat Moon:

Yeah. I’ll add an augment to what Jason just said. So I agree completely with experimentation and rather than suggesting specific experiments, although I would be happy to rattle off some thoughts on that, I’m going to suggest an approach. And this approach is different than the approach that the legal profession, the justice system has traditionally taken. And it’s essentially a human-centered approach. And that is putting the people who we seek to reach, putting the people who we seek to educate at the center of designing experiments to accomplish that goal. And we need to be designing and executing tiny experiments. We need to be designing and executing large experiments, and we need to embrace human-centered design mindset. So we need to replace the fear of the unknown because we suffer greatly from this fear. We let it stop us from trying new things. We need to replace this fear with curiosity.

We need to approach things with a beginner’s mindset. And this is very much setting aside how we think things might happen and embracing a true experimental mindset. And we need to do so with radical collaboration. And I think examples that both of you have given in this conversation touch on that. So we need to really think about and reach out to and collaborate with people across disciplines, across professions, across all kinds of silos that exist and do this together with other people. So in many ways right now, this is the job of the legal profession in part because of who we say can help people with their legal problems. And there are so many opportunities to collaborate with people in healthcare delivery, people in community organizations to educate people to reach them. So all of this engages a human-centered design mindset opportunities. And so I just implore us to really embrace this and start experimenting. We’ve got to be bold. We’ve got to go big.

Ronald S. Flagg:

Great advice. Certainly the human-centered, client-centric approach is critical. Nobody running a restaurant would go forward without asking the diners how they like the food, but that’s often how we run the justice system. Cat, Jason, thank you for your contributions to today’s show, but more importantly, across the past a hundred episodes and what you do in your day jobs, it has been a joy to co-host Talk Justice alongside you and really an honor. And I’d like to also salute our other incredible co-hosts, Lee Rawles and Molly McDonough, and of course, thank you to the listeners. Whether you’ve been along for a hundred episodes or just this one, we’re glad to have you. Please let us know what you think of the show by rating and reviewing Talk Justice on Apple or Spotify. And until next time, stay well.

Jason Tashea:

Podcast guest speakers views, thoughts and opinions are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the legal services corporations views, thoughts, or opinions. The information and guidance discussed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes only, and should not be construed as legal advice. You should not make decisions based on this podcast content without seeking legal or other professional advice.