By Quinten Steenhuis
innovation
There’s a story about an old man who sees a boy picking up starfish one by one, after a storm washed them ashore by the thousands. As the boy throws a starfish back into the ocean, the old man tells him that his effort won’t make much of a difference. The boy replies: “It made a difference to this one!”
This story offers a useful metaphor for pro bono lawyering. I believe that both the boy and his grandfather are correct. It’s critical to provide free legal aid to an individual who needs it, but as the grandfather’s comment suggests, we also must consider the scale of our efforts.
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Photograph from Getty Images
winter 2023
Helping one person at a time
For 12 years as a legal aid attorney at Greater Boston Legal Services, I helped tenants, one at a time, who were losing their home to eviction. During my legal aid career, I eventually helped almost a thousand tenants this way, arguing a case in front of a judge, filing forms, or reaching an out-of-court settlement.
That one-on-one work was meaningful. For those I was helping—the veteran with a traumatic brain injury who got to stay in a safe and familiar home, the young mother whose family didn’t have to move—it didn’t matter that only one in ten tenants in the Boston Housing Court had an attorney. Despite the overwhelming scope of the problem, I was able to make a difference to real people facing dire circumstances, and help them to improve their situations.
The old man in the story was right to question the scale of the boy’s impact. When we are faced with an enormous injustice, it’s not enough to help a few individuals. We need to solve that injustice with efforts that match the scale of the problem.
In 1971, there was one attorney for every 570 residents of the United States. In 2021, there was one for every 250. Despite that progress, nearly 90% of low-income Americans each year still go without any meaningful help for their legal needs. We need to shift the rules of the game.
That’s what I did with MADE: Massachusetts Defense for Eviction. After a decade of helping tenants one at a time, I wrote a software program in 2019 to provide the same step-by-step help to tenants across the state, any time day or night. Since then, MADE has helped more than 1,200 tenants each year—more than I helped in all of my years working the old-fashioned way. I call this new approach “grow bono.”
An international team of volunteers led by Suffolk Law’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab took a similar approach with CourtFormsOnline.org. Users type in their legal issues in their own words, and then the tool directs them to the relevant TurboTax-style smartform to assist them. In its first month, 4,000 tenants across the country used the site to file forms to prevent their eviction.
Some law firms are getting in on this work as well. In 2020, Chapman partnered with Legal Aid Chicago to build an app that could help thousands of people with past criminal records for cannabis possession get their criminal records sealed for free. Utah has followed a different approach with its new Clean Slate law, which went into effect in February 2022. Nonprofits had worked for years to help people with arrest records. But those one-at-a-time efforts only helped hundreds. The new law automatically erases the arrest records of thousands of eligible Utahns, all without requiring a single form to be filed.
Here are a few things you can do to push your organization toward this larger-scale “grow bono” approach:
Improving scale
If your firm already has an innovation department or staff who automate internal work, consider teaming up with them to build apps to increase access to justice, maybe partnering with a local legal aid organization.
Join efforts like Suffolk Law’s volunteer-powered CourtFormsOnline.org. There is room for projects just like it all over the country. You don’t need to be a coder! These projects require volunteer attorneys to bring their specific legal expertise, as well as editors, translators, and project managers. There may be an organization in your state that is already looking for help. If there’s not, start one! Local Legal Hackers groups and Code for America brigades may be a good place to start looking for coders.
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Helping each individual “starfish” matters, but we should also be trying to help thousands. Working toward pro bono at scale is critical if we hope to address gaping inequities in access to justice.
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