How a 22-Stop “Listening Tour” Improves Justice Across Colorado

Episode Notes

Transcript

Elisa Overall:

We always need to be checking back with the needs of the state to see essentially our priorities aligning with the issues that are being experienced on the ground by folks who are interacting the users of the justice system.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice an An LSC Podcast, we’ll 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.

Lee Rawles:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Lee Rawles, longtime legal journalist and your host for this episode. I’m excited to be talking to Elisa overall about the work of the Colorado Access to Justice Commission, especially its Listen and Learn tour. And the report that accompanied it, the commission held 22 listening sessions that gathered input from more than 300 court staff, judges, attorneys, and various community service providers. The resulting report is a comprehensive assessment of the most pressing civil legal needs in Colorado and the barriers residents face in the justice system. Elisa, who we’ll be calling emo, joined the Colorado Access to Justice Commission as executive director in 2021. Recently, she was awarded the Allie Gman Legal Visionary Award by I-A-A-L-S, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System. Emo, thanks so much for joining me. Thanks for having me. So emo, can you tell us a little more about the Colorado Access to Justice Commission’s work and this report?

Elisa Overall:

Yeah, of course. The Colorado Access to Justice Commission is a nonprofit entity and a commission of the state where stakeholders from various different sectors get together in a problem solving space and really think about the ecosystem of access to justice. So what I mean by that is folks from the judicial department, lots of judges and people who are really deep in the courts, people from the private bar, so solo attorneys, big law people from the legal aid world, many different legal aid attorneys from, of course, our main legal aid organization and others, and folks from places like the Governor’s office and our state capitol all join into one space and break out of their silos to be able to really think more strategically about how we can implement solutions to some of these barriers that are upstream, that are more policy-based and more systemic, so that we can make small tweaks and sometimes big tweaks upstream and have a number of users of the justice system benefit because of them.

Lee Rawles:

So emo, the Access to Justice Commission was a nonprofit that was codified into state law in 2023. How did that shift things?

Elisa Overall:

The Access to Justice Commission was a nonprofit, but it had only been a nonprofit for a few years. The different states around the nation, many of them have access to Justice Commission similar to ours, but usually they have a home. They live in the courts, they live with the Mandatory State bar in Colorado. We never did have a home because nobody at the time that the commission came together in 2023, no one took full ownership of it. Instead, it was a non-legal entity with a number of high, highly invested stakeholders from all these different sectors of the legal community that would come together and work on solutions. But it was not a nonprofit for the first 17 years of its existence. So it actually became a nonprofit once I came on board in 2021. So we were a baby nonprofit, and my job was really to secure a foundation for this organization, for this entity, and to make sure that it had resources and staffing to really do its work.

So becoming a 5 0 1 C3 nonprofit was very helpful to those ends. And also we needed the buy-in of our state legislature. Many of these solutions, systemic solutions that we would like to implement will require the cooperation and the partnership of the general assembly. So we took ourselves to them and really shared with them what it is that we are, why it is that it’s important, and why it is that we think that they should want us to be a codified commission. And it gone really well. We got almost unanimous support from the legislature, and so in part it was symbolic. We became codified, and so we are in the law, but in part it also became highly functional. We have a line item in the state budget, and so we also, we have two legal entities. One is the nonprofit commission, the other is a quasi-governmental entity of the state. And so in that capacity, we abide by open meeting laws and sunshine, what we call the Sunshine Laws, open Records Act, et cetera. So we really hold ourselves up to a high standard of transparency so that the public can know what we’re doing and have trust in that. And we are also in part funded by the state.

Lee Rawles:

So we mentioned up top your Listen Learn tour, and this is the second one that you have completed. So can you tell us what you do on the Listen and Learn tour assessment?

Elisa Overall:

Sure. The Access to Justice Commission’s role is we have a few different hats including supporting legal aid organizations championing pro bono work. We’re really focused on empowering people with legal knowledge, and we’re also doing some interventions in legal deserts. But we realize that for us and for all the actors in the access to justice ecosystem in Colorado, we always need to be checking back with the needs of the state to see essentially our priorities aligning with the issues that are being experienced on the ground by folks who are interacting the users of the justice system. So periodically, the commission’s role is to unite, convene folks around the state and listen to those needs and document them in a needs assessment so that we can inform the work of other partner organizations and also ensure that we ourselves are on track. So that’s what the Listening Tour is all about.

Lee Rawles:

And we mentioned there was another one, the 2021. Was there anything that you wanted to do differently this round based on what you learned from your 2021 listening tour?

Elisa Overall:

Yeah, this time we really wanted to approach it sort of a little more scientifically. This is qualitative data. We’re not doing randomized samples. The format of the listening tour is such that we’re inviting communities and different leaders from the communities, different stakeholders and representatives to come into one relatively small virtual meeting and share about what their constituencies are facing. So by nature, that’s qualitative study, but we were able to this time really focus on some of the ways we can make it a little more of a scientific type of needs assessment. So we could do things like ensure that each session was really conducted in the same way where we’re asking the questions the same way when we analyze the data, how to make sure that we’re addressing some of our implicit biases and other methodologies that we are not expert in. But we got some great guidance from among others, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, who they do studies for a living.

Lee Rawles:

Well, I love this, but can you paint us a picture? What were the listening sessions? What was the experience like? I heard that there were three questions asked in each session. Can you talk about what each session looked like?

Elisa Overall:

Yeah, sure. One of the neat parts of the process was the invitation part. So instead of us coming up with our own list of, Hey, you know who I think in this community way over there might want to come to this, we asked our contacts and our partners already in that community who they thought really needed to be at the table from their region. And so our community partners, they helped us create the invitee list. And then from there, when people showed up to this virtual meeting, we have a Supreme Court Justice Justice Hart who did the moderation of the sessions. She did a wonderful job asking these three fairly open-ended questions. The first one just being, what are the types of civil legal issues that you are seeing in your communities? The second was, what are the barriers that your communities are facing? And then the third, what are some solutions that are being tried and are being successful or that should be tried? So each session had those three questions, and there were a lot of different answers, but we were easily able to extract a number of themes.

Lee Rawles:

So there were a lot of different answers. You said. Did the direction of the discussion really vary or were the sessions fairly similar, but they maybe would bring up different points?

Elisa Overall:

There were a lot of similar points, but when there were more people from community organizations that are non legally focused, we had a lot more richness in terms of how the legal system is actually impacting people’s lives. And that was our purpose in ensuring that half of our invitee list was going to be community based organizations and non-legal organizations, was so that we could challenge a lot of our own assumptions and see our blind spots. And it was wonderful to have those organizations. And when there was robust participation from them, I noticed that the baby gloves were off. I think lawyers tend to sort of, when they get together in rooms with other professionals and judges, et cetera, they kind of become the more polished versions of themselves. And these community organizations are usually advocacy organizations. And so they really came in and let us have it in a good way about all the ways that the justice system is really making their clients’ lives harder.

Lee Rawles:

So this was real world civil legal services. People stopped being polite and started being real.

Elisa Overall:

Yes, exactly. Real world access to justice.

Lee Rawles:

Well, you have conducted, of course, the two listening tours, and I believe a couple surveys before then. Over this time, despite a lot of persistent challenges, you have identified some areas of meaningful progress. Can you talk about those?

Elisa Overall:

Sure. Progress is made, and also I think a lot of ground has in some ways been lost in even just the last year or a year and a half. But the progress that we cataloged in our report included some wins at the legislature. For example, there is a new civil legal aid fund that was created a couple of years ago that accumulates something to the tune of $4 million a year for civil legal aid grants to be distributed across our state. And that’s grants to legal aid organizations. So that was a big milestone. The judicial department has really stepped up to the plate since our 2021 report. They took our findings and recommendations really to heart and used it as a bit of a checklist of changes that they wanted to focus on internally. And they created pathways to access committee internally in the judicial department, which had not existed, nothing like that had existed before to focus on their side of the street, what can they start to work on in terms of language access, remote proceedings, making forms more accessible, using plain language, et cetera. So that’s another way that our 2021 report, I think really led to some noticeable change.

Lee Rawles:

Well, that has to be really heartening to see that the 2021 report was taken seriously and things happened. What are your hopes for how this report will lead to specific action in Colorado?

Elisa Overall:

Well, I have high hopes for things like regulatory reform on our commission. We have every intention of continuing to push for a change to how we see legal professionals. And maybe it’s not just lawyers that can help people who have legal issues. Maybe it’s also, we’ve already made a lot of progress in this vein in Colorado, maybe it’s also licensed legal paraprofessionals is what we’re calling them. That’s the mid-level version of a lawyer that does not have a lot degree, but they are licensed to practice in certain areas, and they passed a similar version to theBar in that area. They have ethical obligations and the same process of consumer protection that we have for attorneys. So taking that concept and pushing it further so that we can expand the supply of help to meet the demand, which we know is overwhelming and really great. So one way of doing that would be community justice workers, so equipping professionals who are already working in other fields with a lot more legal knowledge so that they can incorporate that into their practice when they’re serving their clients, and hopefully, eventually even practice law in some limited settings.

So that’s one way that we hope this report will move the needle, is to begin to socialize specifically our Supreme Court justices and our legal community with the concept of community justice workers.

Lee Rawles:

Well, and the full report really does pull together the whole list of the challenges and persistent barriers. And so we do encourage people to go read that. But if you could just highlight some of your top concerns based on the findings, what would those be?

Elisa Overall:

One of our top concerns in our state is really that there is, there’s no centralized guidance for people who have to interact with the courts. Just a centralized place with very easy user-friendly, helpful guidance on here’s how to file a form, here’s where to file the form, et cetera. Our judicial department’s website is not meeting that mark at the moment. We are also trying to invest in a statewide legal help website, not unlike the sites of many other states, but we really saw that that is a pervasive need that people expressed to us over and over and over again was they can’t go online and find guidance. Another major barrier that we found from the judicial department, on the other hand from the judges, was that we need more judges and our state is in a bit of a budget crisis, but the judges and their staff reported that their workloads are absolutely unsustainable. The lawyers also reported that the wait times for things like decisions are quite long, and that really just isn’t underinvestment in the actual gears that make the justice system work, and our state really needs to beef up its investment there.

Lee Rawles:

Are there other states that you’re looking outwards towards and learning from their solutions?

Elisa Overall:

Yes, absolutely. Specifically with regard to a centralized online space for legal guidance, we are looking to all kinds of other states that have been doing this for 20 plus years. I’m thinking of Ohio and Washington and Illinois, places that have a really, really strong centralized web presence for self-help, self-help materials for people to be able to find for free that We also are specifically kind of riding the coattails of Oregon Law Help, which is slightly newer to the legal help online arena. And they just launched their website a few years ago. And so they’re a little more similarly positioned to us, and they’ve taken us under their wing as a kind of a mentee state. So lots of help abound from other states, and we’re always really seeking to see what others are doing, see how we can retrofit it, implement it here, and maybe even improve.

Lee Rawles:

So obviously this is a report that takes a lot of work and people devoted to making it happen. Do you have any plans for when you would take the temperature of the community again? Do you hope to do this at three year intervals? What’s the plan?

Elisa Overall:

Yeah. My hope is that we can keep doing this every four years, four years gives us enough time to actually work on some of the recommendations and implement some of the ideas that we have, but also gives enough time for change to be felt and registered. So I think we found a good sweet spot of an interval, and hopefully we can keep revisiting it. It is a really big undertaking. It took a real team to put this together, incredible output of effort from all the communities that we visited. So it’s not something to take lightly, but I do hope that we can keep doing it every four years.

Lee Rawles:

And if there was a piece of advice you had for another state that was interested in doing this kind of a listening tour or report, what would that be?

Elisa Overall:

My advice would be to really go into this process with open ears. Of course, we know what the main civil legal areas are, what the main barriers are, right? There aren’t enough lawyers. The main areas are housing, family law, some consumer, et cetera. So we come in with a lot of assumptions, but really try to listen for everything else. And I think that in a lot of ways we can be surprised. And also that the process itself of listening is really part of this project. There’s a certain amount of procedural justice that people feel when they’re included, and communities feel when they’re included in a listening tour, when they have a Supreme Court justice willing to show up and just talk with them on a face-to-face level and in an open and honest way, that means a lot to people. And I think it exhibits an openness to working with users of the justice system that is not just symbolic.

Lee Rawles:

And if people were interested in reading more about your findings from the Listen and Learn tour, how could they do that? Where could they find it?

Elisa Overall:

Anyone who wants to learn more about the commission or read the report, there’s also a nice executive summary of the report. If you’re shorter on time, can visit our website at Colorado access to justice.org. That’s Colorado access to justice.org. And there you can find our reports and a bunch of other information about the work that we do.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you to Elisa overall for joining me today and sharing about the terrific work our team in Colorado is doing to listen and learn. And thanks to all the listeners for tuning in to this episode of Talk Justice. Be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss an episode.

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