Georgia Justice for All Strategic Action Plan
Strategic Planning Grant: 2016
Implementation Grant: 2018
Georgia is prioritizing empowering religious leaders as justice for all stakeholders, creating and expanding self-help centers in law libraries as self-help resource centers; identifying and assessing structural impediments to access to justice, and committing to documentation and evaluation.
Its action plan includes:
- Developing and delivering a training curriculum for religious leader training;
- Developing models of community-based access to justice programs to be implemented by religious communities;
- Creating self-help centers at county libraries that provide triage, diagnosis, and referral services, substantive and procedural information law and assistance, court submission, preparation, navigation tools, and planning and preventative assistance;
- Developing and delivering a training curriculum for law librarians;
- Creating awareness of the barriers presented by forms;
- Conducting marketing analysis on the usage of unbundling legal services; and
- Clarifying definitions of unauthorized practice of law and limited scope representation.
Its implementation projects include:
a. Creating a regional self-help resource center in a regional law library (Dougherty County) to provide access to legal resources for lower- and middle-income Georgians in surrounding 25 counties.
b. Meeting the needs of civil litigants and referring them to the most appropriate form of service, including specific information on GeorgiaLegalAid.org, self-help center assistance, a Georgia Legal Services Provider office for full- or limited-scope representation or a pro bono attorney for full representation on a free or reduced fee basis.
c. Expanding access to civil justice in rural Georgia by increasing physical access and help resource center staffing to handle in-person demands for forms, forms assistance, legal issue education and training.
d. Providing proof of concept for how enhanced staffing resources for a law library help center can expand as a self-help resource center and providing increased services in a multi-county model.
Point persons: Mike Monahan (State Bar of Georgia/Georgia Bar Foundation) and Tabitha Ponder (Georgia Committee on Access to Justice)