The organized delivery of pro bono legal services is a supply-and-demand challenge where the demand for help is essentially limitless. The access to justice crisis is expanding at such a rate in British Columbia that the growing need for pro bono legal services is critical and unending. Here, as elsewhere, and despite significant advances in the usefulness of artificial intelligence, more and more people are lining up for the chance to receive free legal counsel. Last year, Access Pro Bono (APB) heard from over 60,000 low- and modest-income British Columbians in desperate need of a volunteer lawyer’s help.

Luckily, APB has a supply of about 2,700 volunteer lawyers — an impressive testament to how much B.C. lawyers care about increasing access to justice in their communities. This level of community care makes APB the largest legal service provider in the province, and one of the largest pro bono organizations in the world. Still, the organization’s supply of volunteer lawyers is not nearly enough to meet the civil and family legal needs of British Columbians who come calling.

Faced with this service deficit, APB could be excused for prioritizing the interests of its volunteer base to broaden its capacity to bridge more of the yawning justice gap. Yet the organization’s primary objective is instead to serve British Columbians according to their legal needs, and to meet them wherever “they are at.” It strives to deliver fast and effective services based on the diversity of needs and experiences of all of its many clients.

Centering the Client

APB is an enthusiastic proponent of this type of client-centred service. The organization subscribes to principles of human-centred design, evidence-based analysis, collaboration, and innovation in all aspects of its service design and delivery. It applies Access to Justice BC’s Triple Aim Framework to its program development, with its three core pursuits of better user outcomes, better user experiences, and lower system costs.

But client-centred service demands a lot of attention. It begins with a fundamental concern for the client experience, and requires service providers like APB to identify the problems (legal and non-legal) that clients encounter in a system, to clarify their needs and goals, and then to take an experimental and iterative approach to solving their problems.

The main challenge of client-centred service is responding to client needs that are forever changing. Non-profit legal service providers must be adaptive and creative in how they identify and meet the emergent legal needs of diverse cultural and geographic communities. This often means being more innovative and risk-tolerant in service design, and abandoning conventional dichotomies like the provision of pro bono or full-rate service depending on a threshold analysis of client means.

The Missing Middle

Most British Columbians fall somewhere in the justice gap where they earn too much income to qualify for legal aid or pro bono legal services, but also cannot afford to pay legal fees at full market rates. As a consequence, most British Columbians encounter profound challenges in accessing critical legal services when they need them. These challenges often contribute to adverse legal outcomes like the loss of child custody, eviction from the family home, and missing out on severance for wrongful termination.

APB is one of several lawyer incubators, non-profit law firms, legal aid programs, and other organizations in the United States and Canada that are working together as the Above the Line Network (ATLN), with the collective mission to provide greater access to justice to the vastly underserved market of modest- and middle-income earners. ATLN also advocates for changes to judicial, legal, and regulatory systems that promise to transform how legal services are delivered to people with unmet legal needs.

As the operator of many pro bono programs and its high-volume Lawyer Referral Service, APB is in a unique position in B.C. to match cost-effective service to the high demand for free or affordable civil and family services. Depending on where a client’s income falls along a sliding scale, they are routed to pro bono or reduced-rate legal services. APB receives about 5,000 requests for legal help each month, and the organization has something to offer everyone.

Everyone Legal Clinic

Speaking of everyone, the Everyone Legal Clinic is APB’s international award-winning public interest law training clinic and incubator, and its first foray into reduced-rate or “low bono” legal services. Its mission is to increase access to justice for all British Columbians by way of low-cost and fixed-fee services, while also increasing the diversity and legal aid capacity of B.C.’s legal profession.

The Clinic creates new articling opportunities for law graduates from diverse and underrepresented backgrounds, supports the nascent practices of community-minded lawyers, and increases access to affordable legal services for modest- and middle-income British Columbians residing in rural and remote parts of the province. Over its three years of operations, the Clinic has engaged 20 supervising lawyers in overseeing the training and virtual practice of 49 articling clinicians.

Several Clinic alumni have opened legal aid practices in underserved B.C. communities. Other alumni have opened solo and small-firm practices providing legal aid and low-cost legal services in places like Kimberley, Burns Lake, Golden and Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. The Clinic’s greatest success has perhaps been preparing each of its alumni to adapt with confidence to the changing nature of B.C.’s legal marketplace, and to find or invent their own role in meeting client needs as newly licensed lawyers.

Adapting to Emergent Needs

The Clinic has also been inventing new roles to better meet client needs, particularly in the underserved area of tenancy law. Among Canadian provinces, B.C. has the highest proportion of renters spending more than half of their income on rent and utilities. Last year, the Canadian Rental Housing Index reported that 16% of B.C. renters spend more than 50% of their income to cover rent and utilities — putting them at high risk of homelessness. Yet few renters qualify for free legal services from B.C. non-profit organizations, and fewer ever receive legal counsel when they need it. They too fall in the justice gap.

Without increasing its supply of legal counsel versed in tenancy law, APB is only able to assist about a third of the renters who seek its free legal help. To better meet demand, the organization is training and deploying articling clinicians to deliver free tenancy law services on a type of internal legal aid tariff. Facilitated by a grant from the provincial government, this new tariff-based program assists vulnerable tenants to assert their tenancy rights in various ways, from contesting unlawful evictions and rent increases, to recovering security deposits and compensation for repairs.

By creating this new stream of free legal assistance and representation, APB expects to keep hundreds of British Columbians securely housed during the current housing crisis. The new program also serves to raise the guaranteed baseline income for articling clinicians, which is something the Clinic has struggled to do without much in the way of institutional funding.

More Help Wanted

However much APB innovates to better serve the missing middle, pro bono service remains its core mandate. It’s in the organization’s name, after all. And it could use more help — serving the unmet legal needs of British Columbians requires all hands on deck. To that end, APB is holding a recruitment drive for volunteer lawyers in early 2025. It invites all B.C. lawyers to join in the gratifying experience of serving individual and community legal needs, with the greater aim of ensuring access to justice for all.