During my Spring 2015 class at Stanford d.school/Law School on Intro to Legal Design, we were lucky enough to have Sacha Steinberger visit us and present on her Project Legal Link. I drew up some notes during her presentation, about what she’s working to do — bringing social service providers into the world of legal services.
Here are my sketches:
Even if a social service case worker spots legal issues in their client’s situation, they often don’t know how to effectively reach out to get legal help for the client.
Sacha has identified the social service caseworker as a key ‘legal portal’ — someone who can help get lay people to legal services that they need, and start them on the journey to resolving their problems around housing, debt, relationships, employment, custody, and other common problems that people have and don’t know there is legal recourse for.
So what does Project Legal Link do, to help improve social services’ capacity to serve as an effective legal portal?
The ideal new workflow would be that social service providers would be this portal, and would do the following:
Sacha’s approach is to make it easy for social service providers to know what to do when spotting legal issues and referring for legal help — and empower them to serve their client in fuller ways.
With smarter caseworkers, then the client will get a fuller team of people to help them.
