 So, good afternoon. Welcome to the Schulich School of Law and the Dean here, King Brooks. We're delighted that you're able to join us this afternoon, and it's always a pleasure to co-host the F.B. Wickwire Memorial Lecture in Professional Responsibility and Legal Ethics with our friends at the Nova Scotia Barrister Society. I'm delighted that this lecture, named in honor of Ted Wickwire, a man who received his L.L.B. here in the days when we granted L.L.B.s in 1962, gets housed here at the school. First, the lecture honors a man who worked tirelessly to ensure lawyers maintained a level of uncompromised professionalism. We're fittingly proud of his contributions to the legal academy, the university, and the profession. Second, this lecture reflects an ongoing relationship between the school and the Nova Scotia Barrister Society that's of enormous importance to us. Speaking for the school, that relationship is one that enhances significantly the richness of our program and the people who teach here, and that informs daily our understanding of law, legal education, and legal practice. Finally, let me say that I'm proud to have a lecture that focuses on professional responsibility and legal ethics here at the faculty. We house the leading scholars in this country, among them my colleague Jamie Baxter, who will do the introduction in a moment, in this substantive area. Our students have been required to take a course in this area for years. In fact, they've been doing so for decades in front of colleagues at other schools, and I will just draw attention to my other colleague Brent Cotter, who's another one of the leading thinkers in this area, teaching here this term at the school. So I'll turn the floor to Jamie Baxter, who will introduce today's speaker. Please enjoy. Thanks, Kim. Before I do the intro, I just wanted to make a brief note that our lecture today is taking part in the Environmental Law Students Association Carbon Consultancy Initiative. So this is a new project here at the school that empowers students and faculty to measure, reduce, and offset their carbon emissions. So we've measured the carbon footprint for this lecture, and we're going to offset it through some really innovative and progressive local offset projects in the community. Okay, so I'm delighted today to welcome Professor Rebecca Sandifer today to deliver the Law School's Wicquire lecture on this year's theme, Rethinking Outreach for Greater Access to Justice. I think we could all agree, or likely we would be, there's no greater professional responsibility than ensuring equitable access to our justice systems and to effective outcomes in those justice systems. And I think that challenge, the challenge of access to justice is now firmly entrenched in our collective consciousness, even if appropriate and effective responses sometimes remain elusive. So I think one of the great hopes in that work is well exemplified by the work of Professor Sandifer and others working on similar research to unearth, I think, if it's accurate to characterize it this way, to unearth the social conditions and social dynamics that are bound up with our growing inequalities of access. So I think there's much to say about Professor Sandifer's work, but I'll just say a few highlights and about her background. She's an associate professor of sociology and law at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has held national and international appointments as a faculty fellow at the American Bar Foundation, as a visiting chair in the rule of law at the Hague, and as a Helman faculty scholar at Stanford University. She's the author of a couple of books on these topics, particularly in the empirical study of access to justice, which I think is, really, as a core one of the really fascinating areas of work that she delves into, and numerous papers and reports on the topic, including her most recent report on access across America, which I think is the first study to really look at a national and state-by-state portrait of access to justice in the U.S. and we have been doing some similar thinking here in Canada as well. So truly, our researcher and writer that I think exemplifies the kind of rigorous big thinking on these topics that we can really look forward to, and I thought more than that, I'd like to welcome Professor Sandifer to Dow, to Halifax, and to Canada as well. Thank you very much. That was a very generous and warm introduction. It's truly an honor to be here today and a privilege to get to talk to you about this research, and I'm honored that you think that this is better than sitting in the sun, although I hear there's a course requirement involved, but that's okay, not for all of you. When I started doing this research about 10 years ago in the United States, no one in the U.S. had been doing it for about 35 years, and so I had no one to talk to. And so I began to go to international conferences, and one of the very first people who I met who became a very important colleague to me at large was Ab Curry, who's probably known to some of you who worked for the Ministry of Justice for many years and now works with Trevor Farrow on the COSA project. So Canada has been ahead of the United States for a long time, and it's a pleasure to come back to a place that feels sort of full circle to me. When I started my work on this, it was invaluable to me to have your colleagues who knew so much more about it than we did in my country, as I'm going to call it. So I want to talk about some research from my country, and I want to talk about research that approaches ordinary people's experience of civil justice situations from their perspective rather than from the perspective of the justice system. And I think that this kind of shift in focus of about 180 degrees is going to be essential if we're going to bridge some of the gaps of access that we see. And I think one thing that will become clear throughout this talk is that some of those gaps are specific to poor people, but they're also about, if you're thinking about having a career as a private practice attorney and working with ordinary people, they're about a latent market that's out there that's being missed for reasons other than just money, for reasons of the way people think about and experience their own situations. So if you look at the past 45 years, maybe 60 years of research, not just in the United States but in most of the West, on things that we might call access to justice, people typically approach it from a perspective we could call the mobilization of law. So what you're interested in is who uses law? What do they use law for? How do they use law? Do they use it on their own? Do they use it as a social movement? What kinds of problems do they use it for? And then you ask, okay, what happens when they use it? And there's a really important stream of that, what happens when they use it research that focuses on the experiences of ordinary people. And it asks them basically how good was that for you when you use law? It produces a really interesting finding, which is people care about how their own matters turn out. They have an interest in outcomes. But just as much as they care about outcomes, they care about the process that led to that outcome. So you have this wonderful, rich stream of research on what's called procedural justice that finds that if people feel like they have a voice in their own matters, like they were treated fairly by a neutral person, like they had a chance to tell their side of the story, they're much happier with how things turn out even if they lose, and they're much more likely to comply with the result. So even in this strand of work which focuses very much on things from the perspective of law, we see that people's experiences are tremendously important in understanding how law is going to work and whether or not people are going to go along with its dictates. So I want to shift from that lens to the other side. So instead of starting with law, let's start with people. And let's approach this as what I would call civil justice as a social institution. So not how would this work if people turn to law or how does it work in the minds of the legal system, but how does it work as people actually experience it and carry out their daily lives trying to deal with the very common justice situations that they run into. So we know that people don't take most of their legal problems to lawyers, but we don't know what they do do with them. So what do they do? And how do these events affect them? So we know from the procedural justice research that the experience of going through the legal process affects them. How does having these events affect them materially and psychologically in their lives? So this project starts with a piece of the ground, and that piece of the ground is something that Hazel again a few years ago when she started a stream of research called Paths to Justice, calls a justiciable event. So if you think about your life, even just the last week, your life has had all kinds of problems in it, right? You've had a routine stream of things that happened to you that were problematic or adverse. Could be that you were in an argument with your employer about the terms or conditions of your employment. How long am I supposed to work? What do I have to do to get tenure? When does my shift start? Was this appropriate discipline? It could be that you're involved in a relationship with someone and that relationship is disintegrating. Depending on the nature of that relationship, you're going to have some problems and then that's going to create its own problems. What are we going to do with the stuff that we put together together? What are we going to do with the kids that maybe we produced during the time we had this relationship? You've got to figure that out. And then you're engaged in all kinds of very specialized relationships that are transactions around services or goods with all different kinds of providers, your cell phone, insurance, your landlord, and you're having problems with those people too. Because of the moment in history when we live, a tremendous amount of the ordinary stuff that we experience as problems has been colonized by law. There are rights around it. There's contract law. We enter into contracts. And so where this project starts is that set of stuff, ordinary experiences that all of us are having all the time, that is governed by civil law. So we start with the experiences that, because they are institutionalized as actionable by somebody, are the potential material that would make it to the justice system. And then we ask what happens to this potential material? When does it make it to the justice system? What else happens with it? So that's where this project begins. And it gets at that experience in two different ways. And I want to talk about findings from these two different methods of getting a public experience. One is by asking people or giving people the opportunity to describe in their own words their experiences with common problems. So they get to surface what's significant to them when they remember the experience. They get to tell you the important sources of assistance they went to. They get to talk about it in a natural language. And so that evidence comes from two multi-focus group studies that were done in the first decade of the 21st century in two different middle-sized cities in the Midwest. So about 250,000, 350,000 people, people were randomly selected to come into a neutral space like a room in a library. They got $50 in cookies and juice to hang out for a couple of hours and talk about challenges facing Americans today. And the first part of that conversation was giving them a little card with a list of challenges, problems at work, rats in your apartment. Take a look at this. Think about things like this. Tell me a story of an event like this that you experienced and what you did about it or maybe you didn't do anything about it. Just tell us a story. So this sort of in people's own words with their own choice of emphasis. What is it? How do they understand and talk about these experiences? And then the second bundle of evidence comes from a door-to-door survey that was done in the fall of 2013 in a third middle-sized city in the middle part of the country. Now, why do I love middle-sized cities? Because most municipalities in my country anyways and also in yours are middle-sized. I mean, New York and LA are really fascinating and all, but there's only one New York. But these middle-sized cities generalize to lots and lots of communities. And the Midwestern part of the United States, at least where I live, is considered very ordinary. There's nothing exotic or weird or creepy or special about any of these people. And so their experiences represent a lot, a lot of ordinary people. So this survey went door-to-door and it took a random sample of households or a representative sample of households, and then it took a randomly selected adult. So you go through this sort of two-stage sampling process to get the randomest sample of people that you can. And then those folks were given what is now a fairly standard kind of survey methodology where the first part is lists and lists and lists of situations people commonly confront. They all happen to be justice problems, but I didn't tell people that. There was just a list of situations with employment, like you think your employer owes you overtime and he's not paying. A list of situations with insurance. You think your insurance company is unfairly not paying a claim, etc. So you give people lists of, this is for 92 different problems and you ask them, in the last 18 months, has this happened to you? Then if they say yes for one or more problems, you select one of those and you get a life history of it. A very, very detailed life history. When did it start? Who was involved? What did you think the situation was? Did you think you were in the right? Did you think you were in the wrong? Who did you go to for information? When you went to that person or that organization, what did you expect to get? Did you want moral support? Did you want assistance? What did you get? So you get this sort of very systematic picture of the history of this thing that someone has told you has happened to them. And the reason for doing this kind of survey is that it lets you get a representative picture of experience and the incidence of these kinds of problems and allows you, because you're asking the same people, the same questions and the same order, to get a comparable picture across different kinds of people. So we have one set of information that is very sort of scientific in the sense that you're using something like a thermometer to take a temperature and you're getting another bit of information that is allowing people much more freedom to describe their own experience. So what I want to do is talk about what we found through these two different ways of getting a public experience and I want to focus particularly on some of the insights that this gives us for how we might change the way we do outreach. And I want to emphasize again, this would be true for legal aid but it would also be true for the gigantic, untapped, late in market for legal services that the private practice bar is missing because it's missing some of these insights. So I want to talk first about the scope of the impact of these problems. Now surveys like this have been done here by Abcurry and others. They've been done in the United Kingdom. They've been done in Western Europe. They've been done in Australia. And what you see is that these problems are very, very common. When I did that door-to-door survey in the United States, it was coming out of, the United States was coming out of the greatest economic contraction since the 1930s. So the rate of incidents you see in the United States at that moment is not the highest in these surveys, but it's quite high. So if you ask about 92 different justiciable events that a random selection of adults have experienced over the past 18 months, fully two-thirds will say at least one of these has happened to me. If you report one, you're much more likely to report more than one. So the average is 2.5, I believe. So lots and lots and lots of this activity, and this is true not just in the United States, it's true in Canada. The second thing you find is that this activity happens in core areas of life that affect households' ability to survive, to have shelter, and to continue to have household integrity. So the most common kinds of situations that people report involve their employment, involve benefits, which is for many people another source of livelihood, involve debt, which is money that you owe other people, involve other things about money, or involve housing. So these are bread and butter issues, and handling them well or poorly can make a huge difference in terms of how these families and households get by and make it through. The second thing you see, and this is true in Canada as well as in the United States, often in the US, particularly when we're talking about legal aid, we emphasize the fact that many, many poor people have these justice problems and that they come in bread and butter areas and that this is very threatening to the stability of poor households, which is true. But in fact, these are everybody's problems. They happen to every segment of the population, but they don't happen with equal likelihood to every segment of the population. So this is for this middle-sized community. What you see here is that in the US, and you would see a different pattern with different groups in Canada, blacks and Hispanics are more likely to report these events than are whites, but all groups experience them. There's no significant difference between men and women, and then although all income groups experience some from among these 92 different situations, poor people are substantially more likely to have encountered at least one in the previous 18 months than people who are not poor. So very widely spread, but the burden of them does not fall equally on different groups in the population. Now, these events, as I've suggested by pointing out where they occur in your household's life, livelihood, shelter, can be very impactful. And there are a range of ways where we can see the impact of these events. One is to just ask people. So in that survey where people reported whether or not they had one of these different kinds of situations to say, okay, you told me you had a situation with your landlord or a situation with your ex-partner. As a result of that, as a consequence of that or as part of that, did any of the following things happen? That is, what problems has your problem caused in a sense? And what you see is that the majority of these problems cause another problem, or almost half of these problems cause another problem. And the kinds of effects they have range from interpersonal violence or concerns about interpersonal violence to damage to relationships, to psychological consequences like lost confidence or being fearful, to material consequences like a loss of income or damage to your health. And one of the things that was most striking to me when I started to look at these data was the fact that over a quarter of problems lead to health problems. These are physical health problems, mental health problems, or stress-related ill health. And this pattern of people saying, I got sick because of what amounts to a legal problem holds even if you take out things like personal injury and clinical negligence where the injury is part of the problem. People say that their debt problems lead them to have health problems, for example. So it's very clear that the impacts of these situations can be across a range of activities in your life and that people associate really negative consequences with the incidents of this stuff in their daily lives. The stuff that's happening across the population to lots and lots of different groups. Another way to understand the depth of impact is to go back to those focus groups where people talk about the experience that they had. And this starts to give us some insight into where our entry points might be. And so I'd like to let one woman describe to you a situation that she encountered. Now, when she's telling you this story, she's in a high middle income focus group. She's probably about 50 years old. This is something that happened in the past, but she remembers it quite well. And so she said, when I was pregnant with my oldest one, her natural father passed away. And when I went to Social Security and other agencies, Social Security told me that I could not receive death benefits because it was not common knowledge that he was the father of my child because he did not tell anybody. So I got nothing. And my daughter is growing up without knowing that I had help. I had no help from his family either because the day he passed away, his sister asked me to contact her and whenever I tried, she was never available. So I pretty much just let it go. And I had people telling me, well, why don't you go get a blood test? Well, I can't because he was cremated. Well, why don't you go to his parents? Well, I can't because he was adopted. So I was a single mother with no help, with an $8-an-hour full-time job, and that's what I went through. So in her experience, she's being very efficacious. She's reaching out in the context that she understands and trying thing after thing and failing every time. And so her situation is to be resigned with nothing and an $8-an-hour job and a child who is legally entitled to federal death benefits under US law that she does not understand how to connect to. So wide psychological as well as material impacts of these kinds of situations. The other thing you see in her story is something that's quite characteristic of how most people handle most of these situations most of the time, and that is that they do it on their own. They strike out on their own and try to figure out a way to work their way through this. And sometimes we would probably be happy with that, and other times maybe it will make us a little bit nervous. One way to see how often people handle things on their own is to, if they report a situation, say, okay, here's a range of six or seven different kinds of people you might have talked to in the course of handling this situation, who did you talk to? So across the range of about 1,400 problems that were reported in that survey that went door-to-door in the fall of 2013, they say that people usually do something about a problem. So for about 16% of problems they say, actually, I did nothing. Nothing at all. For most problems they do something, and the thing that they're most likely to do is to try to resolve it on their own. What in this graphic is called self-help, which that woman absolutely described for you in dealing with her death benefit issue. The next thing they are most likely to do is to turn to a very particular kind of third party, and that is a third party who is a member of their family or a member of their friendship group. They turn to their immediate social network. That's the next most likely thing you do if you turn to someone. And then the final thing, the thing you are least likely to do is to go to some kind of third party. People go to a whole range of third parties. So about 22% of these problems make it out of that network to somebody. And people are extraordinarily creative in figuring out who the somebody might be. So people go to city agencies. People go to membership organizations like AARP. People go to their church. People go to their dry cleaner. They do all kinds of things. What they very seldom do is actually go to attorneys. So for this collection of problems, about 8% of them connect with a lawyer. Doesn't mean the lawyer provides service or representation or takes it to court. It means that person goes to a lawyer and has some conversation about this situation. There's another 8% of them that have some kind of court involvement. And in the U.S. context, and I would imagine here too, those are not the same 8%. So the kinds of situations where ordinary people end up in court are situations where there's no other way to solve the problem. In the U.S. you cannot get divorced without going through a judicial process. So you're going to go to court if you're going to get divorced. Or where they're the object of someone else's legal action. So they are being foreclosed upon. They are being evicted. They are being sued for debt. That's when ordinary people in the U.S. context typically will end up in court. And typically 40 to 80% of the time, depending on the kind of case in the jurisdiction, typically they'll end up in court without legal advice or representation. So folks handle this on their own or with their immediate social network. What does that mean and what are they thinking? Because there's a whole range of resources that exist out there, many of which are free. There's a lot of information. What is the thinking that's keeping them from connecting with that information? Well, one way to find that out is in classic survey style, just to ask them. So for the population of people who say I had a problem and I did something about it, but I didn't go outside my immediate social network, we could ask them why. And I want to emphasize two things about what I'm about to show you. So you can ask them, did you give them a list of reasons in classic survey style and you say pick any or all. So there are two things I want you to note in this result. One is in the U.S. context when we talk about access to justice, most of the conversation is about money. And it's about two kinds of money. One kind of money is the funding for civil legal aid, which in our context is a pittance. And part of the money conversation is we need more funding for civil legal aid and I absolutely agree. But there's another money conversation that happens in the U.S. context and that is lawyers sit around and they say why are people not calling us? I know it must be because we're awfully expensive. They would just love to come to our offices and hang out with us and have us intervene in their problems and solve them for them because we are so wise and desirable and they're not calling because we charge people too much. I'm not saying anything about how much lawyers charge and whether it's too much or whether it's perfectly appropriate but this is not what people are saying. So for only 17% of these problems do people say yeah the reason I didn't do anything was because I thought it would be too expensive. That's not the calculus that folks enter into. The reason, the common reason that people don't do anything about these problems don't reach outside their immediate social network is because they think they don't need to and there are two reasons they think that they don't need to. One is that they don't need advice. They have a subjective sense that they understand what's possible, what can be achieved and how to achieve it and they've got this one. And then there's another chunk of them that think it's not going to make any difference. That is they yet again feel like they understand the situation, they know what the possibilities are and there isn't anything anyone can do. For some chunk of this people they're right. For some chunk of this people they absolutely do know everything they need to know to identify the problem and get what is either the best result they can get if that's what we care about or the legally accurate result if that's what we care about. And those people are okay and as a society and as providers and as policymakers we should applaud them. But there's some chunk of people in that I'm not going to do anything about it because it's not going to make any difference group who are wrong. That is who either misunderstand what their options are and take actions that will lead to bad outcomes for them or who misunderstand the fact that there's nothing that could be done. And so one of the challenges of outreach, whether you're talking about outreach for the private bar or outreach for legal aid is meeting the people in those two bars who are wrong. Who are wrong about not being able to do anything who are wrong about the fact that they have a correct understanding of the situation. And in order to meet those what I want to say is we're not meeting what we're doing now is not working. Otherwise they would be coming to you. So we have to think about what we could do differently that would help us find the people in those two bars that we want to connect with. So we need to change perspective. And as a first lens on perspective I want to give you an idea of how people think about their own problems from these two different lenses. The tell me about your problem lens and the let me march you through a litany of characterizations lens. So one thing you can do once someone tells you that they have a situation is to say okay well what kind of situation is this? And you can give them a list of descriptions. Is this bad luck? Is it a moral situation? Is it a bureaucratic situation? Is it a legal situation? Is it part of God's plan for you or for people? Tell me which of these any or all applies to the situation that you've had. Well the first thing you see is that nobody thinks any of these problems are legal problems. So for 8% of problems people say this thing that is governed by the civil law that is institutionalized as actionable by somebody involved in the situation for 8% of those situations that people actually experience they think they're legal. People are much more likely to think that the situation is just something that happens. So for 56% of problems it's either bad luck or it's something that happens because there's some controlling intelligence that's making it happen to me. But it's just part of the way the world is designed. That's perfectly consistent with that other finding about why didn't you do anything about it? Because there isn't anything to do about it. Because this is just the way it is. Another important category of situations here and these are the situations where people understand them in ways that suggest that people do not want us interfering in their situation. So they say this is a private situation. This is something my community or my family could handle. And when we're thinking about outreach our challenge is looking at that landscape of situations that people think are none of our business and deciding whether some of them maybe are. That's a tricky thing but it's something that as a society we probably want to know. And looking into that much larger group of situations that people think are just something that happens and identifying those situations where we as a society if we want to have rule of law don't want that stuff happening. We want people acting on that kind of stuff. And so connecting with that, that in that big mess is our challenge. I want to suggest that the way to do this requires us to just like to understand it. We had to go 180. To connect with it we have to go 180. So we have to meet people where they are, not where we are, at the moment when they recognize that we could be useful. And we need to give them exactly something useful and not a lot else. And this comes from both this research but also research into adult learning and adult problem solving. So we want to think about ways that we can design interventions that are just in time and just enough. I want to give you an example from people's own experience of interventions that they felt were just in time and just enough. And one of them you're probably going to like and the other one is going to make you uncomfortable but both of them have an insight about how we might meet with folks. So the first example of just in time and just enough comes from an account that a woman is giving about a foreclosure. And in her account of the foreclosure, you see some themes that run through many of people's descriptions of their situations. Many situations are bundled together. So it's rare that you have just one justice problem, you'll have a cluster of them. And the way that this woman's house ended up in foreclosure is that her son had severe educational difficulties and she was working with the school and trying to manage him. And so she thought she could go off her job income and live on his disability income and manage his care. And during that time she could not keep up her house note. So a member of her family steps in for nine months and pays her mortgages. This is a classic kind of turn to family first issue. But then her aunt couldn't keep doing that. And so the house ends up in foreclosure. She says, that guy that came to my house on the first day of January 2003 and handed me my foreclosure summons, he was the most important person that I met and talked to about this foreclosure information. He was like a father figure to me. He said, don't get nervous, don't get scared. He said, I've seen a lot of people that I've handed this out to. I walk past their houses a year later and they're in their house still. He said, every Tom, Dick and Harry is gonna come at your door trying to talk to you about, oh, I can do this, I can do that. He says, don't listen to them. They're snakes in the grass. And they're just gonna steal the house out from under you. That was the most important information he gave me. Now, why does this creep some people out a little bit? Because she's getting legal advice about her foreclosure from the agent of the bank that's foreclosing on her house. This may make us uncomfortable. However, in her mind, this is a trustworthy person who shows up at the moment that she recognizes that she is in some serious trouble and he offers her two really important things that she still thinks are incredibly valuable at this point two years later. One is, there is scamming activity in your neighborhood. Be aware of that and alert. And the other is, this is happening to a lot of people and they're managing it and so can you. So information about risks to look out for and moral support and reassurance that you can get through this. She felt that was an incredibly powerful and impactful intervention. That's something that we can learn from. I want to present a different example from where we have an intervention that also catches someone just in time and just enough that might make you a little bit more comfortable. And this again is an instance where the problem, the civil justice problem is created by other kinds of problems. In this situation, it's the result of a crime. So this was a young man who, he had his first job, he had gotten paid, he was coming home, he was going by the bank, he cashed the check and after he had the check, the check cash, he was robbed and he was shot during that robbery. And so by the time he was talking with me, he was disabled, but before that, of course he was in the hospital for some period of time, receiving treatment for the results of being a victim of a crime and the result of that victimization was a whole parcel of civil justice problems. So he says, my hospital stay was a total of 33 days and I went to the public aid office, I applied for a medical card, for food assistance and every time they'd find some reason to deny it. The bills were steady coming. They were actually beating me home before I left the hospital and I was sitting in my hospital room, I had just gotten the respiratory therapy and a sister came in. He's in a Catholic hospital, it's a sister of mercy, literally. And she said, I want to tell you about a program we have set up here for people who can't pay their medical bills. And she said, I'm going to give you this number and she said, whenever you do make it home, I want you to give me a call and so I did that. They actually raised about $112,000 for me to pay bills. I'm still paying off some right now but they paid off 75% of my bills. They were pretty much the only ones besides my family that were willing to help me. So you see here again, he realizes he has the problem, somebody shows up, connects him with help, it makes a huge difference. It's that intervention or people's families as the options that show up again and again and again, both in the focus groups and in the surveys. What you see here is that if we want to connect with people, whether these are people who are going to pay for your service or people who are going to get a service that's subsidized by somebody else, is that the interventions that catch them are targeted. They're specific to the problem that the person actually confronts. You see this also in a value, there's a tiny number of evaluation studies of these kinds of intervention programs. And the folks who use these intervention programs veryably say, I do not want a bunch of information about problems I don't have. I don't want to know in general about my financial responsibilities or how to plan my life with respect to expenses and income. I have this problem, I need assistance in solving this problem. So bridging the gap is going to require us to target the problems that people actually have. The second thing you see is that this stuff is very timely. It shows up at a moment when people are open to being helped because they recognize that they're in trouble. So figuring out how to catch people at the moment when they recognize they have a problem is going to be key in bridging this gap. And then finally the other thing you see is that these are trusted sources of information. Trusted because it's a nun, trusted because he's fatherly, but finding a way to either brand things as trustworthy or to find trustworthy intermediaries and use them as the tool of intervention is going to be key to bridging this gap. And what I want to do now is turn to some examples of programs that try to do this in different ways. And I want to end on two different kinds of challenges. One is this when you can be there physically and the other is the challenges of distance that I know folks in Canada and Australia and the United States where you have big countries are very, very unrightfully concerned about. So one way to be timely, trusted and targeted is to be on site, is to be co-located. And this is actually a fairly prevalent model of trying to do this around specific problems. One example that you see in the United States builds on the fact that we know that when people are in trouble they turn to their religious tradition, whatever it is. So in the United States, most states at this point have a thing called an Access to Justice Commission. These things have no power. They have no money. But what they do is they try to bring together multiple stakeholders and people who are opinion leaders in the legal and social service community and get them to model and use moral suasion to develop innovative solutions to access justice problems. So the Tennessee Access to Justice Commission came up with the Tennessee Faith and Justice Alliance. And they say what this does is recognize the fact that when people are in trouble they turn to God. Where do they turn to God? They go to wherever it is that they worship. So this program sets up partnerships that are basically referral networks. You train the faith community that when people come in complaining about domestic violence or things that are happening at work or other kinds of very, very common situations that feel like the will of God, like bad luck that happened to all of us, there actually may be remedies for those situations. So you train the faith providers that there are legal aspects to some of the situations that people come in with. And then you create referral networks between each of these religious organizations and some kind of legal services provider. It could be a pro bono program. It could be a volunteer lawyer program, which I don't know, I assume you have something like this. It's like cut low bono, cut rate, kind of middle income legal services. It could be a legal aid agency. So you cite referral and knowledge inside church or synagogue or mosque to catch people that way. Probably the signature example of this in the U.S. context is the thing that's come to be called a medical legal partnership. So in 2010, I did a really simple mapping of we call it the civil justice infrastructure of the United States at the level of states. So is there a statewide pro bono program? Does the courthouse put forums in ordinary language? Do they have self-help centers? So very basic things that different states could do to increase access to justice. And one thing that was popping up in a very few states only five years ago was a thing that they were calling a medical legal partnership. Now there are over 300 of them. They're all across the country. Back in 2010, they were only in the states you would expect, Massachusetts, California. Now they're in states you wouldn't expect, Arkansas, Louisiana, right? This model is proliferated. And what happens is a medical services provider partners with a legal services provider under the recognition that in fact many of the health problems that some populations face have a legal component. And a classic example is asthma. So lots and lots and lots of people of all income levels have asthma, but poor people in the United States are more likely to have asthma than non-poor people. And poor kids in particular are likely to have asthma. One of the things that contributes to asthma is environmental toxins. And environmental toxin is a product produced by the cockroach. If you've ever lived in a cheap apartment you know that you are living with cockroaches. And so one thing that these medical legal partnerships do is they send a lawyer out to the home of the child who's having repeated asthma attacks and have that lawyer do an assessment of conditions and compare those conditions to the housing code in the community and then work with the landlord. Sometimes it's easy to work with the landlord, sometimes it's hard to work with the landlord, but work with the landlord to improve the conditions in this instance, the cockroaches, call the Orcan Army. That's going to reduce and does reduce the incidence of the asthma attacks and improves the housing stock. It's a win-win maybe for everybody, but that particular landlord. This is a very, very common model. Another thing you see is libraries. So law libraries are an important source of legal information for members of the public who've figured out that they have a legal problem and they want to try to figure out what to do. But public libraries are a place where everybody goes. And there are places in particular where populations that don't have access to other kinds of shelter during daylight working hours can go. In the United States you have, especially in big cities, populations of homeless people that spend their day in the library. And this causes problems for the library because the library was not designed to be a place where people use like a residence, right? So there are issues of space, there are issues of the use of restrooms, blah, blah, blah. So libraries are trying to figure out how to handle this. But, of course, cities are trying to figure out how to deal with homelessness. So what five or six libraries in major cities, San Francisco, Denver, have done in the United States is put together multi-provider teams, interdisciplinary teams of a social worker, a lawyer, a psychiatrist. They go around the library, they identify people who look like they might be homeless, they talk to them, and then they connect them with services. So often they're eligible for veterans' benefits or disability benefits that they're not collecting when they're collecting those benefits. They could then be paying for housing instead of sleeping rough or living in temporary shelter. Then maybe legal issues that they're facing. So you sort of go around this population where you can find it. Now, what works for all of these models is that there's a group of people who are going to go to one place when something bad happens. So there's some problems in life that work that way, that that's the way we handle them and that's the way they're organized. But, of course, not all problems are handled that way. That woman got her for closure summons all alone at her house, for example. And these are models that work if you can find the people, because they're all sort of in the same place, and if you can put yourself there. So these are models you're going to see in places that are well-resourced like cities where you have these providers and you can send them to the library. But if you're thinking about Australia, Canada, the United States, you have big expanses of space with hardly any people in them, and these expanses of space don't have the resources or the just sort of material infrastructure to do this. So those are challenges of bridging the gap across distance. And I want to suggest a maybe kind of controversial model that's done this very effectively, and then I want to raise some issues on the internet before I conclude. One way to bridge the gap really effectively across distance is advertising. So in the United States, legal professions are organized at the level of states, and so state legal professions decide what kinds of advertising are permissible. Most states allow some amount of lawyer advertising. The lawyers who have grabbed hold of this with gusto are personal injury lawyers. And so if you're ever visiting the U.S. TV, you'll see during the news Jerry Sokolov or Habish Habish Davis will come on and say, have you been injured in an accident? I can protect your legal rights. Sometimes it's organized around injuries in general. Sometimes it's around a specific problem. So did you have this medical device? Did you have a problem? You may be entitled to compensation. Do you have mesothelioma or lung cancer? Did you work in a place with asbestos? You may be entitled to compensation. So this advertising is doing an enormous amount of conceptual work for you when you're watching television. It's helping you identify that you may have a problem and it's telling you that that problem is a legal problem and that problem has a solution. This turns out to be really effective and you see its effectiveness in a couple of ways. One is there's no income difference in the rate at which Americans take personal injuries to personal injury lawyers. Now part of that is the fee structure. The U.S. is a contingent fee so no money down. Pay only if you win, kind of. But I mean that's how you enter into it. But the other issue is everybody understands because they have been taught through the miracle of television that that's what you do or that that's a possible root solution for this problem. You see it also in the focus groups. So remember I told you those focus groups had two parts. One, tell me about your situations, blah, blah, blah. Because here's some really simple one-sentence scenarios of Jennifer, Emily, or Kevin and their situation. One with employment, couple with housing. Very, very simple situations. And then you talk about what should so and so do in this situation. And more than once people would say, I don't know what so and so should do about this thing with her employer but if she had been injured in an accident, she could call and they would fill in the blank of the name of the personal injury firm that does the advertising. Now that to me is indicative of how effective those messages can be in connecting people to a particular way of thinking about their problem and that problem to a particular kind of provider. We might think about more creative ways to use this tool in terms of reaching out across distance cognitively. Now I want to say just a little bit about the internet. So when you're thinking about reaching people across distances, the internet is really seductive because you can infinitely replicate whatever you have to an infinite number of people across a huge distance at almost no cost. And that's wonderful. The fact that you can produce it so cheaply is wonderful. People are not very good at this point in history in connecting with information that is available on the internet. People are terrible searchers. So at University College London, there was a great study done by Katrina Dinvier on young people. So these are people who have had the internet their entire lives, who use computers all the time. We would think that they would, if anyone knows what to do, it would be them. So she takes high school and college students in London and she sits them down and she gives them a test. She says, here are some questions about your rights that have answers, they're not vague questions. Go on the internet and answer them. And the answers are out there. They're out there with age concern, youth alliance, right, they exist. Organizations have put them out there. None of these kids can find them. None of these kids can find them because they don't show up in the first three hits, which are the only hits that anyone looks at. None of these kids can find them because these kids can't tell the difference between reliable and unreliable information. Whatever shows up, that must be true. It's the internet. Some keep lies off the internet if they would hurt us. So people are not very good consumers of this stuff. Setting that aside, there are some challenges on our side. I think we could be doing better at making ourselves accessible and trustworthy to them. And I want to make a couple of suggestions. One is, if the problem is that people don't conceptualize their problems the way lawyers conceptualize their problems, putting a bunch of legal information tagged with law, justice and rights on the internet is never going to reach them. So there are wonderful projects in the United States where blah blah blah legal aid office has a website where you can live chat and look at information and question and answer facts about your legal rights. And that's great for the 8% of people who have figured out that that problem is a legal problem. But for the other 92% of people it's not very useful. So thinking about how to craft that information in the words that people use is going to be key in using the internet to connect with them. I would suggest that what this research suggests is that we organize that information one way that might work around problems. Unpaid overtime, trouble with neighbors, right? Because that's how people experience and think about these things. So organizing it the way they think about it and the way we think about it would be helpful. The second thing I want to make is a prediction. So you're all sitting here with your beautiful Macs using them for a range of purposes and becoming much more productive and organized. And computer technology is revolutionizing and will continue to revolutionize the practice of law. It's going to change the way lawyers do what they do for good. It's going to be 25 or 30 years before this is my prediction it changes the way we consume law. This is all going to be under the hood for a long time. And I want you to think about the last time you got on an airplane. So the last time you got on an airplane you probably checked in at a little computer kiosk and there was a bank of 10 or 15 of them and there were people who were really confused and getting really stressed out. And then you were there and you were just, you knew it because you do it all the time. And there was a person who stood there to help the people who were confused, to help the people who were really stressed out that they weren't going to accidentally cancel their reservation. Everything is going to be fine. Going forward for a while there's got to be some kind of human mediation. Maybe that human mediation is going to be a person in the library with the computer. Maybe that human mediation is going to be some kind of live chat. So Arkansas Legal Aid has awesome live chats. If you can make it to their website you can ask them questions in real time about what's going on with you. And for a while at least there's going to need to be the reassurance, the kind of real time connection of a human being pervade in some way to get people to connect with whatever we're going to offer them through the internet. Now these are challenges but think about all the amazing things that we've done over the past 30 years in Access to Justice I think that we can certainly meet all of these challenges and meeting them will achieve what that first woman was asking for. So if you remember what she said when she was describing her problem with death benefits she never said law or justice or rights or what's coming to me or what I'm entitled to. The most common word that she used in her description of her problem was help. Her search for help, her inability to find help, her need for help. So if we switch around and think about how to connect people with help great Access to Justice for the poor to be achieved here but also great Access to Justice and opening up a market for unemployed lawyers when you're looking at the for-pay the for-pay part of the bar as well. There's a lot of possibility here and I hope that moving forward we can take advantage of it. Thank you. So we have some time for questions so I'll open up the floor and I'll let Rebecca choose it. For the library engagement especially for targeting a certain home study show. That's a great question and the many of those programs employ previously homeless people to do the outreach to get at some of the issues of sensitivity that you're bringing up but there's a bigger issue that you're also bringing up which is what I've said is here are some different things that organizations are doing that are consistent with what we know about how adults learn and how people experience their problems and you're asking a great question do they work and almost none of this stuff has been evaluated. Now I'd like to point out almost none of the traditional stuff has been evaluated either there's an enormous amount that we don't know about how any of this works but given that we have very scarce resources I think we would want to know is it more effective to deploy teams of multi-professional service providers in libraries to build low income housing or connect people with services and come some other kind of way and I think that's another thing that has to happen if we're going to go forward in a smart way is for us to learn much more about which of these things are good at achieving what we hope they'll achieve. It only elevates the seriousness of the problem in their mind whether that elevation is needed or not so do we need to combat the image of four years only being for these super serious roles it's people have it's very interesting people have if you ask them their opinions about lawyers considered as a species that lives on another continent they have interest like the lawyers are very expensive lawyers are very wise but if you ask people who have actually used lawyers do you think how do you feel about what you paid they'll say it was fine what was it like well he wasn't so good about returning my calls but I mean I think people's image of lawyers is less of a barrier than lawyers image of people so lawyers expectation that what's going to happen is someone's going to come in and present their problem to you and then you're going to solve it for them in your helpful professional wise way is not working at connecting with all of these folks I think it's less the way they think although you raise an important issue about does involving an attorney make it scarier I don't want to involve an attorney because I don't want to acknowledge that it's really scary but how much of it is is on our side in terms of doing things exactly the way that we've always done them and waiting for people to recognize how wonderful and accessible and glorious we are and I think it's I would rather try to change 200,000 American lawyers than 320 million Americans I love this work I have two questions for you this is kind of a longitudinal question I'm fascinated by the people who are their friends result and so I'm interested in do you think that's changed over time do you think lawyers networks have become more middle-high income and so over time that's made the kind of justice gap in some sense in orders and second I'm interested in whether you have ideas for how legal education should address that so I can imagine having well this research suggests we really need to be doing a lot more to have students from low-income communities or who have commitments to lower-income communities in law school that's vital because actually it turns out that's how we fix these justice problems is by having these kind of people rooted in these networks and communities where they have friends and companions we're kind of interested in what we know about what a friend needs what kind of relationship you have to fit in that friend or what it suggests is that we should really consider every staff person who works in a legal environment to get some basic issue identification training so that all of those people can also be providing that kind of initial early contact response kind of work those are great questions I think that you raise a fascinating issue about as society becomes more and more unequal and we become more and more sucked into fairly homophilist like us groups we know that the most common way in which people connect with a lawyer is they get a recommendation from someone that they know so if if we're closer and closer tied into groups that don't have access to someone who knows lawyers that may be contributing to part of this that's a really fascinating question I think in terms of what law schools might do I think helping particularly providers who work in context with ordinary people to think about how to design their practices in a way that is accessible and comprehensible to ordinary people but also to develop business models that make that kind of service possible I think that there are many many reasons to want to diversify law and one of them is absolutely so that the profession and the institution have connections to all these communities these human connections because those are hugely important but thinking about this business model issue there's some low hanging fruit here how about a list with prices so how about a sign that says you can get a manicure for this much and a pedicure for this much these are the things we provide a will with no kids is this much a will with two houses is this much this is what we provide just that kind of transparency so that a consumer who has no idea what it is that lawyers do can have some sense of what they might buy and in fact this is the model that is followed I don't know if Canada is as up in arms about alternative business structures as the United States the United States is all the world over alternative business structures what alternative business structures means is that nonlawyers can own firms where lawyers work and provide services to third parties so in the UK there's a giant low cost big box store called the cooperative it's like Costco you remember so they have Costco law and there are cooperative lawyers that are in the cooperative and there's a sign that tells you what you can buy and the cooperative is a business and so it's actually the largest provider of funeral services in the United Kingdom and their model for cracking the legal services market is to cross sell people who are doing funeral arrangements on things like ransom probate which is a very sensible way to try to get into that market so that's another way you might think about reaching out that's about a different business model but it's a business model that requires some regulatory change that creeps out some members of the current the current bar just an observation you started by referring to Abcurry and some of the earliest work that Abcurry did was that only 15% of people's legal needs are ever addressed by lawyers which means that 85% are not and when you begin to look at that 85% when you put your bar chart about the needs that people have almost none of those issues perhaps with the exception of housing where you own your own house do lawyers actually become engaged in most of it falls below that 15% so we as a profession avoid dealing with what are most individuals major legal problems so picking up on the Dean's comment I mean we we need people who are prepared to go set up a law office in law because that's where people are and we need people I used this metaphor earlier this afternoon another conversation why in Nova Scotia do people set up organizations including our major purveyor of alcohol why do they set up their stores in supermarkets because that's where people are and people buy groceries and they want to buy wine so lawyers should be where people are very much along your lines in order to deal with those major issues that people have in their lives most of which will never make their way to the downtown town so 20 years ago we talked about storefront lawyers we don't have any more storefront lawyers today than we did 20 years ago so as a profession I think I've dramatically missed the boat about developing means to address the vast majority of the legal issues that individuals and small business have almost every one of the issues you raise and slightly different label but small businesses can't afford lawyers any more than individuals that's a belated point to talk a little bit about it already but I really supported what you were saying lawyers alienating the public and that there isn't not speaking the same language that's kind of a huge barrier but do you not see I don't know if notes go to our health guides or special in this way I know lots of people that needed help and had legal problems and stuff but not very much hit just people and a lot of it could even be solved without going to a lawyer the number one thing that people in your survey there were a problem something to do with employment and we have an employment standards division and we'll send out inspectors and stuff and I know people who paid under minimum wage so for talking about access to justice is there not like a role of empowering people to not feel like I just got a will of God or bum luck here and to I don't know be willing to be empowered to ask for help and do things I don't know after just the one moment something bad happens I think that's a great observation and I think at least in the US context there are regulatory issues with who's empowered so in the US context only an attorney a fully qualified bar certified attorney can give legal advice at all and so that means what you can do to empower someone to handle their own situation is pretty limited you can give them a form you can give them reports you can give them information about the 25 different things that someone in your situation might do but you can't say I would recommend you do A or B and you can compare that to a country like the United Kingdom where the bar does not have a monopoly on advice so anyone in the UK can give legal advice and they do and so there's a whole range that spring up to fill that need and people love them people particularly love their Citizens Advice Bureau Citizens Advice Bureau were born after World War II because many people entered into precipitous marriages thinking that they were going to die and then they didn't and so they came back and they had to get divorced and so actually the British legal aid system was solicitors to help them get divorced and the CAB and so now these things have been around for 60 years they're everywhere they're very trusted and the volunteers that work in them can give you legal advice and people love to go to them get the complaint letter and send that and do it themselves but the ability to empower people to have that kind of knowledge to take action on their own behalf is constrained at least in my country by the regulatory regime we have around the profession I don't know about Canada can non-lawyers give legal advice here so you have the same oh they can give free legal advice oh are there providers that do are there non-profit providers that do oh lots of the social service agencies not for profit agencies give legal advice all the time so then if we're right then people who can have access to that which they don't have access in my system are then empowered in a way to act on their own behalf that my people can't be empowered to do a vehicle study luckily you talked about it it sounded like a large part of the issue with access to justice is this informational gap people either aren't aware of legal services that they need them or that they're available or the context and that sort of thing but I think there's another aspect that maybe we didn't talk about that much and that's sort of the economics of this I mean the reason people are good at getting or is please correct me I'm wrong but the way I understand it is the reason people are good at getting advice from car accidents and why it's actually medical is because there's a lot of money involved in those cases and when there's settlements the lawyer gets paid I mean I'm not the only person in this room who's going to leave with a law degree and almost six figures of that as much as I'd love to go to nursing homes and offer to have people sure their will to look after their families I can't afford to be doing transactional law I mean I'd love to but I can't and I know there's people in the screen who are going to do these sorts of things and just say when the bank comes from we all deal with it because they really believe in that but I think it's a problem that we don't hear a lot about from in school the information about social justice and the opportunities to help people but it's just not always possible and I wonder if you can comment on where legal education stands in terms of being able to help people I mean you raise an excellent point we don't actually know I've done some research on this in US context but it's hard to figure out how much debt actually keeps people from doing things they would otherwise do what happens in law school which is that people come in with very pro-social social justice desires and they leave without them and that's not just because they're thinking about your debt but you're absolutely right and this is a challenge that every law school is going to face now because applications are down is it possible to continue with a model where we ask people to take out six figures in loans and then carry those loans and they're 55 years old in order to enter the profession because that is a sustainable model probably not so law schools have got to figure out how to redo the way they do stuff to make that possible but there's another thing that the reason it's not possible to make a living doing nursing, wills in nursing homes is because the business model is stupid right because the business model is I'm going to spend five hours doing this totally routine thing what I should be doing is doing this routine thing 4,000 times but that's a completely different way of thinking about how to organize a practice and law schools in the U.S. are just beginning to sort of lower themselves to help train lawyers how to actually practice and so that's another place where legal education I think could make a big difference in terms of studying the models of supervision and how we might make them a little more effective, efficient and livable but also giving students some tools to be able to set up the kinds of community practices that some folks are talking about here talk about some of the limitations that are created by our side and how normal legal practice is very I don't think it's not paralyzed resistant to change I guess in adopting new things do you see any role for breaking up the lawyer's cartels to entice some change here or like force the market in a more open direction like don't so there's some interesting rather than answer that question normatively there's some interesting developments doing that and it will be I am curious to see how they play out I'll give you two examples so one thing one of the places where people routinely in the U.S. appear in court and have to go through judicial processes without legal assistance is divorce because you can't divorce any other way and those things can take place over a period of years because you're renegotiating custody agreement stuff so courts are overwhelmed by people who have no idea what they're doing you don't know what the rules are you don't know where to go back again and again for years to resolve these problems so the state of washington's bar has created its own competitor it has created a new occupation that it licenses you have to go you have to get a paralegal degree which is a community college degree you have to take three courses over the course of a year in a law school in a special in a given area of law so right now these providers are certified only in family law you have to take three bar exams ethics, general, and substantive you have to have malpractice insurance if you make it through all of that the bar will certify you as a limited license legal technician if you're a limited license legal technician within the scope of family law which is not all but a bunch of things around divorce and custody you can provide legal advice you can prepare documents you can tell people what to say in court you can tell them what to say in settlement negotiations but you have no right of appearance so you're like a super assistant to this person but you can't advocate for them and I suspect that that will change but that scope of action will grow over time and it will be really the idea is that instead of charging $250 an hour these folks will charge $75 an hour and that then people who are assisted by a limited license legal technicians will be able to afford the service the courts because they'll know what they're doing the documents will be better the results will be more equitable and more in line with the law the first of those folks will pop out into the world in April and it will be very interesting to see what happens both with them, will the public use them and then what will happen to the bar because one possibility is that it becomes this amazing source of referral because they have a limited scope of action they're going to run into problems that are more complex than they're allowed to handle they will take you to a lawyer but the bar's stream of business may actually increase, we don't know there's another kind of example that isn't from the for-profit world and it shows up in lots of different programs around the country but the place that's sort of most prominent right now is New York City and they're called court navigators and they were created without changing any rule they looked at the regulatory structure and they were like how can we stick something in here that will have a decent scope of action so a court navigator is a volunteer who's had a limited amount of training three hours, three and a half hours and what that navigator can do is help you through the courthouse through the process, here's the paperwork there's a script that they can read to help you fill out the form so that they're not giving you legal advice and then the other thing that these folks can do is they can accompany you to court, they can stand in your hearing and the navigator can answer questions addressed to him or her by a judge so they can't represent you they can't give you advice but they can speak on your behalf in a very limited way when addressed by a judge the idea is that that's going to reduce if I'm by myself being evicted that's going to reduce my stress level because this person who's not freaking out about being evicted is going to say no no no you show me that you have the receipt for the rent right there in that folder Mrs. Smith just give me that it also helps the judges because judges hate self-represented litigants they don't want to be seen to be being they don't want to be perceived as not being impartial by intervening and so if they can talk to this sort of semi-lawyer like person sort of lawyer stand-in guy maybe they'll be more comfortable in eliciting information that they're allowed to elicit in any ways and both of those developments are fairly new now the limited license legal technician is a competitor in the sense that it's the same market this is not so much a competitor because nobody was this is not a service somebody would buy but that's certainly where things are going in the U.S. context it would be very interesting to see how it plays out First of the bear when I first heard it it was very common for just in peace to make up deeds and make up wills and things like that people who were not qualified, not trained and of course this created in the registry system and over time we have proved that we've got a lot of qualified people who have that work and I don't see moving to paralegals as being the answer I think the smart man's working payment is just the same payment as someone who is not as qualified I think the root of the problem is the lawyers just have to put down their prices and not ask for everything when somebody goes in the door or there has to be more public funding I mean one of the regulatory moves that's related to your insight that about not asking for everything is in the U.S. context called unbundling so when somebody comes in to buy private legal services on the market okay tell me what's going on I'm going to do this part of it and you're going to do this part of it rather than I'm going to do a full court press of representation with a retainer and it's going to take I'm not going to tell you how long the idea is that it's cheaper for the person because they're getting just exactly what they can't do themselves but it's also lawyers are resistant to this for some reason because you're a very traditional profession it tells the person exactly what's going to happen and exactly how much it's going to cost and that reduces the creepy uncertainty of entering into this relationship with somebody who you don't understand what they're doing and that again is a relatively new development at least in the U.S. context that many practitioners tell me they've been doing it for years but if you talk publicly with the bar the bar is somewhat resistant to taking up that model at least publicly yes sir it's usually often when they should charge for a file many people today they think the bill will allow or in fact they'll set set goals for so many double-hours too many people are on the territory to work hard and finish a file when it gets tough my generation did we did all that stuff and it didn't matter at the end of the day we had to get the client enough out of the file to make it work well and keep a little bit for ourselves we never made an available rate to do the practice charge on some of our more regular files and graduating from law school in my view is not a predictor of success in the practice the dean is gone I was going to turn that one to her it's interesting you know I hear your and your students should hear your assessment of a generational change in the orientation that lawyers have to their work and I don't I don't have the speaking social scientifically I don't have the evidence to answer that question but your observation raises an issue about what could law schools do to help starting out attorneys to think about how to understand their own role so to what extent are they service providers to what extent are they professionals to what extent are they a helping profession to what extent are they some kind of expert we might ask law schools to help people at least keep clarity in their own minds about what they understand as their role as attorneys when they go out and some of them will take up the vision that you've just described of your own generation and some of them will have a different vision and then the profession can think about if that range of visions is unacceptable and if it is in the profession can think about ways to pull it back within an acceptable range good evening everyone my name is Jill Perry I'm the first vice president of the Nova Scotia Barrister Society and I'm very happy to be here tonight to give thanks to Dr. Sanderfer for her fascinating presentation I think it's evident how thought provoking it was from the great questions that have been generated from the audience too so I thank everybody for those great questions and it's also a great segue for me to get in my plug about the work that the Barrister Society is doing because a lot of the underlying themes that are the two main underlying themes for the lecture tonight are two main themes that have guided much of the work that the Barrister Society is doing now as the regulator at the profession those two main themes being one there is an access to justice and access to legal services crisis happening in society generally and two that the way that we regulate the profession of law is increasingly a dinosaur that needs to be looked at and what we've realized as we focus on those two main issues is that our approach to solving both problems has to be interrelated in other words you can't look at transforming how you regulate the profession without looking at how that's going to impact on enhancing access to legal services and similarly as a society we can't talk about improving access to justice issues without looking at the role that the regulator plays in that issue and in both cases what it comes back to is that the role of the regulator is about the protection of the public interest and we have agreed as the regulator in Nova Scotia that access to legal services access to justice is a really core and fundamental element of the public interest so I thought it really rang true when Dr. Sandofer opened her lecture by talking about by saying we're going to talk about this access to justice issue not from the respect of the legal system not from the respect of the courts and to me it reminded me of the constantly the need to go back as a regulator as a volunteer for the regulator to that idea of public interest and it should seem very basic that when you're going to talk about public interest when you're going to talk about access to justice issues it should be a given of course we're going to start from the perspective of people but I think that her lecture today really helped us to see that when you maintain that focus on people and participants in the system when you maintain that focus throughout a study and throughout the great work that you've done the nuance depreciation of the problem that it presents to us and not just nuance but the fact that it actually challenges some of the various assumptions that we may have as lawyers about what the problem is how people experience it and what it is that they need so I think that you've taken us a great way down the road of challenging those assumptions giving us more full for our fire as we continue in this work so thank you very much it was great if you could just come forward and take this time