By: Steve Grumm

Happy Friday, dear readers.  Greetings from day two of the National Legal Aid & Defender Association’s annual conference.  (It’s their centennial, in fact.  Happy 100th, NLADA!)  There is much terrific programming here.  It’s heartening to learn of so many innovative approaches to delivering high-quality client services.  And it’s great to catch up with friends and colleagues from the legal services community.  But the dire funding circumstances which legal services providers – and defenders, for that matter – face are part of most conversations I’ve had.  So there is much to celebrate, but some things to lament as well.   

This week: legal services funding woes in North Carolina; ditto in Ohio; a “Justice Index” to measure the health of court systems?; an access-to-justice report in New York State.

• 12.8.11 – here’s a look at how funding woes impact legal services in North Carolina: “On Nov. 15, Congress cut $56 million from the federal Legal Services Corporation for 2012. This cut is as plain as it is severe: federal support specifically for the provision of legal services to low-income people will drop by 15 percent next year. In North Carolina, these cuts will directly reduce funding by about $1.5 million.  The full picture is worse. Federal legal services funds for North Carolina were cut by $700,000 this year. Our state legislature sliced 25 percent from legal aid budgets this year. These cuts forced LANC to shut down four offices across the state and eliminate 30 staff positions. The 2012 cuts will likely cause more reductions in staff and services next year.”  Read the full op-ed in the Charlotte Observer. 

• 12.7.11 – bad news from Ohio: “Legal Aid of Western Ohio, Inc. (LAWO) announced it will close its Mansfield office due to severe funding cuts. The closing will also result in the elimination of two attorney positions and one administrative assistant position in the Mansfield office.  The closing is scheduled to take place by December 31, 2011.”  Here’s the story from WMFD. 

• 12.5.11 – a “Justice Index” to measure the health and effectiveness of state court systems?  Writing in the National Law Journal, David Udell and Cara Anna of the National Center for Access to Justice at Cardozo Law propose using data to help policymakers find solutions to access-to-justice problems: “Which states’ courts are in the worst condition? Which, despite the challenges, are making litigation simpler and less expensive? It’s hard to fix a problem when you can’t see clearly what’s going wrong. There’s no way to tell how one state’s legal system is performing or how it compares with others. It’s time to change that. We need a national Justice Index.  A Justice Index follows on the innovative idea by Yale law professor Heather Gerken of creating a Democracy Index to evaluate America’s election system. A national Justice Index would be a high-profile annual ranking of each state’s approach to legal assistance and the way each handles civil and criminal cases. That ranking would be supported by published data that could be mined by policymakers, the media and the courts themselves.”

• 12.2.11 – the Task Force to Expand Access to Civil Legal Services released a report about the state of AtJ in the Empire State.  From Thomson-Reuters: Access to civil legal services for low-income New Yorkers is severely lacking, which not only impacts the livelihood of poor litigants but drains precious resources from the state’s court system, according to a new report released by a task force created by the state’s chief judge.  ‘At best, no more than 20 percent of the legal needs of low-income families and individuals are met, because civil legal services providers lack the resources to meet them,’ says the report issued Thursday by the Task Force to Expand Access to Civil Legal Services.”  Here’s a link to the Task Force’s report.