The “Flourishing” report, which was prepared as part of the public legal education and information (PLEI) sectoral planning project at the University of British Columbia (UBC) school of law, says there is a wide array of high-quality, easily accessible, clearly written legal information available in B.C., which the authors call the “public legal education and information ecosystem.” Public legal education provides people with awareness, knowledge and understanding of rights and legal issues, together with the confidence and skills they need to deal with disputes and gain access to justice.
Project leader Catherine Dauvergne, a law professor at UBC, said she and her co-authors Aara Johnson and Shannon Srivastava used the ecosystem metaphor because there are “very porous boundaries and lots of organic growth and organizations involved in this work.”
Catherine Dauvergne, University of British Columbia school of law
People struggle to locate and understand publicly available legal education, the report says — even when they know it is available. The report’s authors say people seeking legal help often feel confused by what they perceive as “legal jargon,” and efforts to produce plain-language resources alone cannot close this communication gap — a deeper understanding of legal capabilities is required to address this issue. Another common issue the report identified was that many people encounter a cascade of dead-end or inappropriate referrals — it is taking people far too long to get to the resource that will assist them.
The report makes 30 recommendations to improve the ecosystem, but four are highlighted as being the most impactful on B.C.: the creation of a hub organization to support and strengthen PLEI; launching a dedicated phone line for legal information; backing up that phone line with significant new technological investment in enhancing the referral process; and fully integrating the B.C. First Nations Justice Council into the PLEI ecosystem.
Dauvergne said jurisdictions like Australia and the U.K. have a coordinating organization, and the researchers felt it would be helpful because “doing more research about what works and what doesn’t work is going to be key to strengthening this ecosystem.”
“Some of the organizations that do this work are tiny,” she said. “A hub could really support the whole ecosystem, as well as members of the public, in direct ways.”
Dauvergne said many interviewees talked about how frustrated they were with the system and how they gave up trying to get a solution to their problem, and so the report authors felt a single “one-stop shop” phone line would also be a good step.
“People talked really regularly, both professionals working on the front lines and individuals trying to find resources, about how incredibly frustrated they were by getting different referrals, following up leads, not getting to the right place, and many people simply giving up on trying to get a solution to their problem because they spent so much time trying and got nowhere. And then to pair that idea of a phone line with a really well-coordinated referral system, which goes after the same problem.”
The PLEI project was co-sponsored by the Law Foundation of British Columbia and B.C.’s Ministry of the Attorney General. Dauvergne said that although they haven’t had any formal feedback from the province, they have a great working relationship with them.
“And obviously if something big like a hub organization or phone line is going to be implemented, I think the ministry will have to be involved,” she said. “But we just presented our report right at the end of June.”
Dauvergne said what she would like to see five years from now — when further research is conducted about what has changed in the ecosystem — is people with dramatically lower stress levels who are getting answers to their important legal problems, in a much more straightforward and clear way.
“The research in Canada about the impacts of legal problems on peoples’ lives is really just getting going,” she said. “We believe these indicators can be improved — it’s not that public legal education will solve the access to justice crisis. It is only one piece of the puzzle, but if people can spend less time in frustrating referral loops, not getting what they need, and will be able to find their way to resources that can help them much more quickly. So, it’s a modest goal, but it would be impactful.”
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