Billions of people are unable to access courts and legal systems across the globe, research suggests, and a 2018 study by the World Justice project suggested that things are getting worse, not better.

To address the problems of legal access and the rule of law, attorney Vivek Maru launched Namati in 2011. Operating in 160 countries, the organization seeks to empower people and communities to be able to understand, use, and shape the law.

The organization does this in a variety of ways, such as compiling and tracking legal data and advocating for international organizations such as the U.N. to incorporate access to justice into development goals. But the biggest focus of its work is growing and maintaining a network of grassroots legal advocates, who are sometimes also called community paralegals or affectionately dubbed "barefoot lawyers."

These advocates work on a wide variety of issues in different countries and communities, ranging from blocking forced marriages in Sierra Leone to stopping land grabs in Uganda to securing birth certificates for ethnic minorities in Bangladesh.

Maru, who graduated from Yale Law School and founded Namati after four years as senior counsel in the Justice Reform Group of the World Bank, talked to Law360 about democratizing the law and increasing access to justice around the world.

What did you set out to do with Namati? What is your vision for the organization?

Law cuts through everything we care about, whether it's inequality or environmental destruction or poverty and opportunity. The law is so crucial for all of the problems that we face worldwide. And yet, the law isn't working for people.

The U.N. had an estimate about 10 years ago — we're working on an update to it — that 4 billion people worldwide live outside the protection of the law, lack basic access to justice. And so that is a problem we're trying to take on.

So why community paralegals?

Historically, the methods we have for giving people access to the law, they're inadequate if not totally broken.

I'm a lawyer by training and some of my best friends are lawyers, but our profession has limits. We tend to be expensive and focused on formal court channels that are impractical for a lot of problems people actually face. And we've also shrouded law in this expert culture, made it intimidating and complicated.

So the genesis of Namati, the mission of Namati, is to change that relationship between people and law, to change it from something that is an abstraction or a threat into something everyone can use and shape. That's our mantra, actually: To know, use and shape the law.

Where did that idea initially come from?

The journey that led to Namati started in 2003. I lived in Sierra Leone for four years, pretty soon after the 11-year civil war ended there. When I moved there, there was a consensus that among the root causes of that brutal conflict were breakdown in justice and arbitrariness in governance.

So there were a number of groups that wanted to help people deal with the injustices in their daily lives going forward in Sierra Leone. But it was really an open question what that would look like, because at the time there were less than 100 lawyers in the country total, and more than 90 of those were in Freetown, the capital. So if you go to the provinces, even a rich person couldn't get counsel.

So what we started experimenting with was what we call a community paralegal approach, who are basically intermediaries — people who can be a bridge between the formal system on the one hand and real life on the other hand. We took inspiration from South Africa, which has had community paralegals since the 1950s. They would help people under apartheid defend themselves against that system.

I think I got obsessed with this idea of community legal workers to actually help people squeeze justice out of systems that were really dysfunctional, and this possibility that if you can equip people to understand and use the rules themselves — to get past this expert culture — that really powerful things can happen.

What are some of the things that have most surprised you since you launched?

One positive surprise was whether this approach of community legal workers — of demystifying the law and equipping people to understand and use it themselves — could really be effective in taking on really tough justice problems where there is a big power imbalance.

That was an open question for us. It's one thing to, say, help a mom get child support for her kids from their dad when there's not that huge of a power difference. But what about farmers who've had their land stolen by the military in Myanmar? Or fisher people whose livelihood is being destroyed by a coal plant or a cement factory run by one of the most powerful corporations in the world?

And I think one of the things that has surprised me — not that we win every time, by any means — is that when people are equipped with knowing what the rules are and are able to take a shot at using those rules, we're able to get solutions in a surprising proportion of cases.

What are your goals or plans moving forward?

In a handful of countries where we've been at it for a while, we have set really ambitious goals for the systems we're engaging in. We would love to really have an impact on the system as a whole.

For example, environmental regulation in India. One of our big goals there is to transform that regulatory framework so the people most affected by pollution have a central and necessary role in the regulatory process. Right now it's totally top down, and the folks that live in the shadow of mines and industrial facilities, they have almost no say in what happens. We'd like to change that.

Our experience has been that when people like that are able to exercise their rights, you get results that are good for them and for the planet.

All Access is a series of discussions with leaders in the access to justice field. Questions and answers have been edited for length and clarity.

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