A Toolkit for Advancing Data-Driven Unauthorized Practice of Law Reform: Domestic Violence Advocacy Case Study
The seven-question framework:
Domestic violence survivors’ most frequent unmet legal needs include protection orders, custody, and divorce. Survivors experience those unmet legal needs in a domestic violence services landscape where domestic violence service organizations and domestic violence advocates do less than they can or would like to because of the chilling effect of unauthorized practice of law restrictions.
Question One:
What are the unmet community needs that the service model would be addressing?
DV advocate-identified legal needs
The research team asked DV advocates to rank civil legal needs in order of how often they perceive survivors to experience that need. The top three needs identified by DV advocates were protection orders, custody, and divorce. Other legal needs experienced by survivors as identified by DV advocates include child support, terminating rental leases, enforcement of crime victims’ rights, and civil actions for discrimination and harassment.
Civil legal need
|
Survivor need rank according to DV advocates 1 being highest need, 13 being lowest, ranked against each other |
|---|---|
Protection orders |
1.38 out of 13 |
Custody |
2.81 out of 13 |
Divorce |
3.36 out of 13 |
Eviction |
5.56 out of 13 |
Property protection |
6.63 out of 13 |
Housing debt |
7.2 out of 13 |
Employment |
7.81 out of 13 |
Benefits |
8.04 out of 13 |
Immigration |
8.04 out of 13 |
Credit card debt |
8.44 out of 13 |
Medical debt |
8.92 out of 13 |
Foreclosure |
10.59 out of 13 |
Other legal needs |
Child support, terminating rental leases, enforecement of crime victim rights, discrimination and harrassment civil cases |
Key findings:
There is a demonstrated chilling effect in training on legal information versus legal advice that leads many advocates to stay as far away from the line between legal information and legal advice as possible.
DV advocates described a chronic fear of violating UPL rules.
DV advocates report that capping advocate services at legal information often fails to meet survivors’ true legal needs.
DV advocates are frustrated with the siloing of legal advice from the other services they are providing.
When survivors ask DV advocates for legal advice, advocates are put in a position to set difficult boundaries with the survivors they serve.
DV advocates carry an emotional weight associated with being unable to provide survivors with legal advice.
More broadly, DV advocates view their information-only role as inadequate when attempting to support survivors without counsel in a landscape where abusers often have counsel and are leveraging the legal system to perpetuate the abuse cycle.
Perspectives from the DV Service Community:
“[survivors have a] lack of awareness of their rights, especially when the other person has a lawyer.”
“[s]how someone the law…without answering questions.”
“That [legal advice] is what survivors need. And that’s what they want. And so even though they understand and the survivors I work with, they’ll be like, I know, you can’t provide legal advice, but can you tell me what to do.”
“It would be magnificent for me to pick up the phone and be able to help a person entirely in that phone call instead of traumatizing them further by sending them elsewhere for them to start all over again.”
“I was trained to be very cautious.”
“We won’t even tell people what exists out there.”
“I still want to be the person to provide this service. And I’m trying to do it in a way that is only legal information, not legal advice.”
“I spend all day helping people who are sobbing, basically saying, I’m their only hope, And so it’s easy for attorneys who sit in a back room and don’t see that to be like, ‘Why are you like doing this?’ And you know, it’s a lot harder when you’re actually the person up front dealing that all day, every day.”
“[t]here are things that [advocates]…truly are, would be competent and capable of, but [they] really can’t go there.”