Legal Research

Technological means to access to justice?

By Patricia Hughes

Recently, I attended a session that brought together Legal Aid officials and representatives of legal clinics, among others, to discuss how to improve access to clinic services by members of racialized communities. I want to mention only one point that a participant raised at the meeting and that is the use of technology to provide information to people using the legal system (or wanting access to the legal system), ostensibly to increase their capacity for “self-help”.

It appears, perhaps not surprisingly, that those for whom the technological resources are often developed — those lacking access to legal resources in other forms (most particularly, lawyers) — receive the least benefit from it. There may be many reasons for this: computer-based technology or similar tools require a certain degree of literacy, they require a certain degree of technical knowledge (even though we may think this is pretty minimal), they require access to the technology in an environment that the individual feels reasonably comfortable raising his or her problem (we think that having available terminals in libraries and other public places may be sufficient, but this may not be the case), they require a basic knowledge that allows the recipient of information to interpret and apply it.

In short, while these resources may be useful as a complement, they do not seem particularly helpful as a substitute for direct human resources.

As the Law Commission of Ontario proceeds with several of its projects, including our family law process project, I’m interested in whether slawyers have any information they can share on this point.

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on September 15, 2009 (boomark / email).