Listen on:
Former Alaska Legal Services Corporation (ALSC) Executive Director and current Frontline Justice Founding CEO Nikole Nelson joins LSC President Ron Flagg for a conversation on using community justice workers to expand access to legal services on Talk Justice. She explains Alaska’s success with the initiative and discusses her vision for bringing justice workers to more communities.
Nikole Nelson:
So first off, I would say let’s get going. I mean, the crisis is getting worse. So start somewhere. Start now. I mean, the time for waiting has passed. Let’s start experimenting. Let’s start moving things forward that might actually address the justice gap.
Speaker 2:
Equal access to justice is a core American value in each episode of Talk Justice, an An LSC Podcast, we’ll explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders’ Council of the Legal Services Corporation.
Ron Flagg:
Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Ron Flagg, president of the Legal Services Corporation and your host for this episode. Today our guest is Nikole Nelson. The last time Nikole and I talked on this podcast was a year ago when we discussed Alaska Legal Services corporations efforts to mobilize non-lawyers for limited scope legal assistance. At that time, Nikole was the organization’s longtime executive director. Since then, Nikole has become the founding CEO of a new organization called Frontline Justice. Through Frontline Justice. Nikole is further expanding her focus for closing the justice gap by empowering community justice workers. Nikole, thanks for speaking to us today. Again, at least for the second, if not third time on our podcast when we lay some landscape for our conversation, what is the state of access to justice in heavily rural regions of the country like Alaska, and what are the barriers to access to justice, and not just access to justice in courtrooms, but access to government programs and government dispute resolution mechanisms. What does that look like in rural areas?
Nikole Nelson:
Hi, Ron. It’s great to be here for, I think the third time and happy New Year too, everyone who’s listening to this. So yeah, when we’re talking about the landscape of access to justice in our rural communities, its services as one might imagine are hard to come by. We have, at least in Alaska, right? There are these very small populations that are spread across vast expanses of territory. Oftentimes in Alaska, they are not road connected and that’s the case In other rural communities. They might be road connected in other communities, but there still are these vast distances where there are smaller populations and oftentimes just basic infrastructure is quite limited. So for instance, in Alaska, there are very few private attorneys that are outside of urban areas, and I think that I’ve learned from the legal services, corporations, rural justice task force, that’s something that’s pretty common across the nation.
And so we have the population of attorneys are mostly in urban areas with very few private attorneys in remote and rural areas. And that’s compounded also when folks are trying to seek justice because oftentimes there might not be a local court, you might not have public transportation. Other access to healthcare is more limited in my experience in remote and rural communities as well as are just the basic, a lot of basic infrastructure services that folks in more urban areas would come to expect. So there might be limited broadband. You might not have, for instance, a domestic violence shelter or a local public assistance office or access to something high level healthcare services. And also there might not be a homeless shelter. So again, oftentimes there are legal deserts in our remote communities, but often the justice issues surrounding those are compounded by a lack of other infrastructure services as well.
Ron Flagg:
The overlay that you’ve just described is also in Alaska and for that matter, other rural areas around the country combined with the presence of tribal populations, and it’s particularly pronounced in Alaska. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Nikole Nelson:
Sure. So Alaska, I like to say we are proudly homed to 229 tribal nations, which is roughly about 40% of the tribes that exist in the US and our tribal nations are scattered and dotted across the vast expanse of Alaska, which Alaska’s territory is bigger than the next three states combined. It’s bigger than California, Montana and Texas combined. And so we have these very small tribal populations that are often not road connected. There’s a wide variation, people speak different languages, and there’s also a different cultural expectations within these communities as well. And this, my experience has been in the lower 48 with the tribal nations that exist in the lower 48. Oftentimes tribal reservations are nations are located in remote communities. So where there are language and cultural barriers that also sort of compound an ability to access justice and justice related services.
Ron Flagg:
So Nikole, of course, you worked in the environment you’ve just been describing for over 20 years with Alaska Legal Services Corporation, a legal aid program whose mission it was and is to serve all of the areas you talked about in addition to obviously Anchorage and Juneau and Fairbanks, the tens of thousands of square miles of Alaska that have very widely scattered populations. In the course of your work with Alaska Legal Services, how did the concept of training community workers to really be part of the resources of legal aid and more importantly, not just resources to legal aid, but resources to the people in need of legal services. How did that concept come onto your radar?
Nikole Nelson:
Yeah, that’s a really great question. And I’d like to say this kind of goes back to the resource deficits that are oftentimes apparent in rural communities. But one thing that I think Alaska does well and also a lot of our rural communities is we do community well. That is a really great asset. And so coming together to problem solve with other members of the community is something that is an asset that in my experience, rural and remote communities bring to the table. So really how community, the idea for community justice workers evolved was really a community collaboration. I want to say it’s around 20 16, 20 17, our Alaska Legal Services and a number of our other community partners came together through Access to Justice committee that was convened by our Supreme Court. That committee brought together folks who were not just law adjacent, these were folks from across our community who were impacted by unresolved justice problems.
We came together to see if we could figure out how we could turn the curve with respect to the justice gap that our state faced, and quite frankly, the whole nation faces about this time, Alaska Legal Services. While I was there, I was learning more about medical-legal partnerships, which are a great way of banning together with our healthcare partners to try to address health impacting civil legal needs. And just about this time, our court, under the guidance of our Supreme Court, we did some asset mapping to figure out in our communities who had a bigger footprint than the legal system and that we might be able to borrow some of that to help expand our reach into really rural and remote communities. And at the table at these convenings were some of our healthcare partners from the Alaska Tribally operated healthcare system. Immediately this partnership, we really hit it off because there was a lot of commonality.
Our healthcare partners really wanted to address the health harming civil legal needs and we’re willing partners to help us sort of expand our reach. Well, it turned out that coming together for us was really transformative. Not only was Alaska Legal Services able to partner with the tribally operated healthcare system and providers to expand our reach into rural and remote communities, but it also transformed the way we started thinking about doing our work. We realized that our healthcare partners had really been trying to address the same issues that we had for about 40 years, and they had a lot of really great ideas and some of those related to stratifying the practice of health. So you have this full range healthcare in the provision of healthcare of providers that there aren’t just doctors, right? They’re doctors, they’re nurse practitioners, they’re community health aides and behavioral health specialists and dental health therapists within Alaska.
And so we really were inspired by this idea of building out the justice analog to a community health aid, which in our mapping of our system across Alaska, we could see that the community health aids had the biggest footprint down to almost the smallest village. There was a community health aid there and we thought, well, you know what? Wouldn’t it be great if we could expand our reach and have community justice workers that are in every village too? And one thing that our way of thinking sort of evolved too, to realize that in some smaller communities there might not be a need for a full-time community justice worker who only did justice work. And so maybe we could just do some targeted trainings to help people identify and resolve simple legal issues that were really common across the board that were really impacting people’s lives in a big way.
With that in mind, we started a recruiting and training and building asynchronous distance learning modules to help train and recruit community members who were doing a wide variety of jobs across the board to learn how to address very simple legal procedures that were having a huge impact and left unresolved of community members. So flash forward as of October of last year, and I should check in with Alaska Legal Services since then, but as of October of last year, there were over 325 community justice workers who have been recruited. They were in 38 different communities across Alaska, most of which are not road connected, which is amazing. And they were providing assistance to folks in things like appealing public benefits, denials, helping with some preventive legal issues, like making sure people had a will in place, which was something that had been really identified as a need within our community, helping with workers, unemployment benefits and domestic violence. I think it’s been a great success and it’s really been inspiring to me to think that we are really reaching out and being able to extend the reach of the justice system in really rural and remote places.
Ron Flagg:
I want to elaborate and create a few benchmarks here to put the numbers you just mentioned into some perspective. You mentioned 300 community justice workers trained in providing services. Along the lines you’ve described, do you recall how many legal staff did you have at Alaska Legal Services Corporation when you left toward the end of 2023?
Nikole Nelson:
Yeah, when I left at the end of 2023, we had roughly 45 legal staff. So if you’re looking at expanding, that’s a really exponential expansion of the offerings that we could provide the community
Ron Flagg:
Eightfold, if I’m doing the math right. And you said I think that the community justice workers were in 38 communities.
Nikole Nelson:
Yes.
Ron Flagg:
How many offices did Alaska Legal Services Corporation operate at the end of 2023?
Nikole Nelson:
12? 12?
Ron Flagg:
So threefold increase. So if you’re living in a remote area of Alaska in a small rural community, you could be literally thousands of miles from the closest legal aid lawyer or legal aid staff member. And who knows how robust it existent at all your internet connection would be. It’s a life changer, really.
Nikole Nelson:
It is. And one of the other things that’s really shockingly great number for me too, a try, as we might Alaska Legal Services legal staff are not reflective demographically of the clients that we hope to serve as much as we like. There simply aren’t as many Alaska native lawyers as we would like there to be. And one of the things that’s been really fantastic about the community Justice worker program is that despite the fact that Alaska Legal Services staff is probably about 12% at the end of 23 Alaska native, our client community is about 45% Alaska native. Our community justice workers, about 44% at the end of 2023, were Alaska native. So again, I think that we are bringing services and resolution of problems closer to people who are living those problems. And so I think that it’s bringing us closer to having more just resolutions that are more reflective and receive more input from those who are at the center of them.
Ron Flagg:
You’ve talked a little bit about this, but I’d like to have you elaborate on it. What sort of problems are people encountering in remote villages in Alaska and how amenable are those sorts of problems to the help that community justice workers can bring?
Nikole Nelson:
Yeah, so my experience has been over 25 years that our folks in our rural and remote communities experience the same critical legal problems that everybody else does across the board, but they’re compounded by also this lack of access to other resources. Just to give an example, if I’m living in Anchorage, which is a big city by Alaska terms, and I have a legal issue that comes up, say it’s related to a family law matter. Well, first off, I could maybe, if I could afford to call and try to get a consult with a private attorney failing that I could try for help at Alaska Legal Services. There are also a couple of other community partners who might be able to provide some legal assistance also. I might be able to go down to the courthouse and see if they could access the self-help center and failing those things.
There are also any number of, there’s a library that might be able to be a law library. So there are all these other resources that are here. And depending on what my problem is, if it related to public assistance, I could probably go down to the local public assistance office and try to resolve that. I could ride a bus to make that happen. But if I’m experiencing that same problem in a remote or rural community, I might not have access to a courthouse that’s local, other service providers who could help me resolve those issues. And so my legal problem just gets exacerbated and compounded and it’s left unresolved. And this can go on for several generations. So in many communities in rural Alaska when there has not been a probate or a will in place, then a house ownership of a house might be in dispute, and then that house can’t be rented out or fixed, and this can go on for a long time and cause problems within the community as well. All that to say is I think that in our remote and rural communities, people have a lot of unmet civil legal needs that could be fixed with really simple legal procedures as I’ve come to think of them, if people had the knowledge and the ability to get some pretty simple help.
Ron Flagg:
So when we talk about as you have community justice workers providing assistance to people, whether they’re with benefits or family issues at bottom, that is a form of legal assistance. And that immediately as lawyers brings to mind concerns that we’ve seen over the years about providing of legal assistance by people other than lawyers. And that typically immediately brings to mind the reactions of the courts, the reactions of the organized state bars, both of which are sometimes resistant to change generally and certainly resistant with respect to who’s providing legal services. So you had to confront those very real challenges in establishing the community justice worker program in Alaska. How did you go about doing that, and what was the reaction of the courts and the state bar?
Nikole Nelson:
Yeah. Well, first off, we started building our training programs and we really, I think the key to success there was really making sure that we were targeting what I like to call low hanging legal fruit that has a big impact on those who aren’t getting the services, but issues that can be resolved with very targeted training. And so we started building out training programs and also tracking people’s success rates. And so by the time we went to ask our bar Association and the Supreme Court to approve a waiver that would allow us to expand our community justice worker program, we had already had a track record of a hundred percent success rate in the cases that had been taking on, again, these areas where there’s very low hanging legal fruit that’s very simple solution, but people aren’t being able to access it. And so that was one area we had collected the information and been thoughtful about what sort of targeted training and services we were providing and assuring that there was quality service in place and a way to do that.
I want to acknowledge that again, leadership for this program came from our Supreme Court. We had a subcommittee that was led by our Supreme Court Justice Henderson that was called Regulatory reform, which is not a very fun name for a subcommittee, but it actually did a lot of groundbreaking work within our state. And that subcommittee identified from the get go that the reason that we as a community wanted to think about expanding the practice of law to folks who are not lawyers was really focused on addressing the access to justice crisis that our community is facing. When we thought about that, we really identified what the unmet needs were. We demonstrated that there really wasn’t a way for the lawyers in the community to meet this need. And then we also got input from our community partners who weren’t lawyers saying that they wanted this overwhelmingly, they wanted access to these services, they felt good about them and thought that it was something that might work.
And with that information, we went to our board of Governors of theBar Association and received unanimous support from the board of Governors of our bar Association. And then that went to the Supreme Court. Our Supreme Court approved our waiver again with almost unanimous support. One Justice said, and his dissent was really, look, this shouldn’t be just limited to Alaska Legal Services. Other organizations ought to be able to do this. So really there was widespread support within our community when it was built on this foundation of really trying to address the justice gap and doing it in a very targeted, thoughtful way and collecting evidence of success.
Ron Flagg:
So the program that you’ve just described, and you obviously a leader in its development, but you were at the time the executive director of Alaska Legal Services. How did you view this program? You created it so you can’t have thought it to be a threat to your existence, but how did you reconcile it with all of the other resources available to you and to clients and potential clients around the state? How did you view this program as sort of a part of your portfolio of resources?
Nikole Nelson:
Yeah, so that’s a good question. I have to say, I’ve been a legal aid lawyer since coming out of law school. I live and breathe legal aid. I’ve been trying to cure the justice gap for the last 25 years. And as a director of the program, as a staff attorney, as a supervising attorney, I don’t think there’s any sort of legal aid project program that I have tried. And no matter how hard I have spun over those 25 years, I still couldn’t get us to the place as an organization where we weren’t turning people away. And that was heartbreaking for me. It’s heartbreaking to not be able to provide services to your community members. And so really when I thought about that and kept struggling and trying as I think most of the folks who come to work at Legal Aid do we want to be able to serve everybody.
And this, to be honest, when we first started this project, and I want to say we did so with funding from the Legal Services Corporation, so thank you for that. I didn’t know that it was going to work, but it seemed like something that we should try. And so after we developed the first initial training programs and we started recruiting community justice workers to come through the programs, I have been one over because it works and it is growing faster and more exponentially than anything I have seen in my 25 years of doing this work. And it’s growing so effortlessly and organically in a way that nothing else in my 25 years of experience has grown in that way. This leads me to believe it has the potential to scale and do the thing that we’re all really hoping to do, which is really make sure that everybody in our community who needs legal help is able to access it.
Ron Flagg:
Here’s to that, just again, to put this all in context and these statistics as well as I do in our LSCs 2022 Justice Gap study, we found that 92% of the problems based by low income Americans, whether they’re rural or urban based, receive no or inadequate assistance. So I think our willingness to try new things has got to be broad because clearly the status quo isn’t working for over 90% of the problems that are faced by our low income neighbors around the country. You’ve just talked about growing the community justice worker program. I’d like to ask you, what are the obstacles to doing that? Both, let’s take Alaska first, where some of the initial obstacles that might exist today in other states, you’ve overcome the regulatory, but so what are the obstacles there? And then as you look more broadly across the country in the areas that don’t yet have community justice worker programs, what are the obstacles to starting the programs and expanding them?
Nikole Nelson:
So I think across the country, and this again was true in Alaska as well, the biggest obstacle I think too, really the growth of community justice workers are unauthorized practice of law prohibitions across the state and in the territories. So they’re either legislation or court rules that prohibit anybody who isn’t a lawyer from providing legal assistance. And these vary from state to state. And so that’s an initial barrier. So we have to change those laws and those policies in order to open up the space so that we can invite more people in. And so that’s the big barrier. And then the next piece of that is building the bench and building the field that is capable of providing these services and thinking about how we would develop a new type of legal worker and what that might look like. But I’ll say those obstacles are things that can change.
If you are, and I think you are asking me what I think what the biggest barrier is, I think it’s a mind shift change. I think that we need to really, people in my experience first need to understand that lawyers just aren’t going to scale. They’re just simply never going to be enough lawyers to provide services to everyone who needs them. And in addition to that, lawyers might not always be the right person or the most effective option. And so we’ve sort of locked ourselves into this position where we’re thinking of lawyer only solutions and lawyers. Sure, there’s always going to be a need for lawyers as we’re in the practice of law, but lawyers don’t need to do all things. And so I think we’ve locked ourselves into this one solution that’s created an intractable problem that simply doesn’t scale. I think once we’ve realized that that’s not possible, we can open our mind to different ways of doing things.
And I think switching into that gear and thinking about different ways that this might be possible is really the mind shift and the biggest obstacle to change. And I want to say, I’ve been talking a lot about this for a very long time, for several years, and sometimes when things come up, and I think this is legitimate, particularly from the legal aid community, people worry, what if there’s harm to our client community? What about that? We don’t want two tiered system of justice where people who can’t afford services get something less than a lawyer and people who can paid for it have a lawyer. And I hear what you’re saying. I understand that our client communities lives are challenging enough and we want to make sure that they’re given the best. But I believe that community justice workers are the gold standard, right? Everybody should have somebody on demand legal services from somebody they trust that’s in their community. And I think this is really, it’s better justice, and it should start with the client communities that I went to law school to serve, because again, they’re disproportionately impacted by the inequities in life in general.
Ron Flagg:
Nikole, you talk about a vision shift and a shift in really seeing how legal services can be delivered to people, particularly in remote places, but really anywhere. But interestingly, one isn’t require an enormous amount of imagination to do that because we have a parallel place to look at, and that is the provision of medical and health services where a similar vision shift, if you will, or service provision shift, if you will, has happened over the last several decades. And I know you talked about the fact that your aha moment or your aha period in developing the community justice worker program was in doing work with your healthcare provider colleagues in Alaska. Can you talk about the parallels between healthcare provision and legal services provision?
Nikole Nelson:
Yeah, absolutely. So I learned a lot about how the healthcare systems manage their workforce through the medicolegal partnership that we developed in conjunction with the tribally operated healthcare system, our great partners at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, and one of my partners in creating and combining our two organizations was Dr. Bob Bonders. So Dr. Anders is both a lawyer and a doctor. He’s now at the Mini Healthcare Association in COTS view, but he was focused on a lot of the community health aspects of the tribally operated healthcare system and could really help explain how they were training community health aids and behavioral health therapists and dental health therapists to address health procedures. And again, what I learned from that process is they didn’t expect that a community health aide or a dental health therapist or a behavioral health therapist to be a generalist, to know everything there.
There’s very targeted training and checklists and stop orders that help those who are already in the community understand how they can perform procedures, simple procedures, and when they need to stop and go upstream to work with another part of their team, a team-based care model. And so when I started thinking about legal problems, not trying to, I mean, it seems a little overwhelming if you think I’m going to teach somebody everything I learned in law school and through my years of practice to a person who has not had that experience, it seems very overwhelming. But if you break it down to very simple legal procedures and think about building out checklists, it becomes possible, right? You can see a pathway to making sure that there are certain things that can be done and you can create trainings and checklists and stock borders and just make sure that folks are being true to those things. So maintaining fidelity to the training program, it’s possible for people to, you could stratify the practice and make sure that you have people making sure that they’re providing quality services. And so that’s the big thing I learned was thinking about, oh, let’s train at folks who were in places where people already are. They’re already community helpers. They have a lot of knowledge, community knowledge from those spaces, and we just want to infuse just a little bit of legal knowledge on top of that that will make them very effective at resolving legal problems.
Ron Flagg:
This sort of model is not limited to rural areas. Those of us living in major metropolitan areas every day, as you said earlier, see nurse practitioners see, nurses see physician’s assistants, with the exception of nurses, none of those physicians existed a couple decades ago, and yet they’re now commonplace in the medical profession and the healthcare profession and permit people with broader medical training to use that training more effectively and in a targeted way and not say, administer covid shots when a pharmacist or a nurse or some other person trained in administering COVID shots can do that. Again, the development of the Community justice worker program that you’ve described began during your tenure as executive director at Alaska Legal Services. You’ve now moved on to Frontline Justice. Can you tell us about how Frontline Justice came to be, what its mission is? You’re the founding CEO and what we can look forward to seeing from you and Frontline justice?
Nikole Nelson:
Yeah, absolutely. So Frontline Justice is a project that is being incubated, I think is the right word to say by the Office of American Possibilities. And so the Office of American Possibilities is a program that is a moonshot launchpad. So it identifies problems that there are problems that exist within the us. There’s widespread bipartisan support for a breakthrough idea. And if that breakthrough idea were to exist, it would have a disproportionate impact on our nation. And so justice workers empowering justice workers had been identified by the folks from the Office of American Possibilities as one such project in the justice space. And so I’ve been brought on as the founding CEO to really spread the word about community justice workers and make it possible throughout the nation. I’m working with a really amazing team that includes three co-chairs. One is Cecilia Munoz, who was a domestic policy advisor in the Obama administration, John Bridgeland, who held the same role under the Bush administration, and then also Dr.
Becky Sandifer, who is the preeminent access to justice scholar in the nation. We also have Jim Sandman, your predecessor, serving as the chair of our National Leadership Council and Matthew Burnett as a senior advisor. So essentially, the STEAM has come together with the mission of really trying to over the next decade, make justice workers, community justice workers possible throughout the us. And so over the course of the next 10 years, we really hope to assure that in all 50 states in the territories to shift policy so that justice workers are empowered and enabled to help people address those civil legal needs. We want to grow best in class tools and training and resources to help justice workers thrive in the communities where they are, and then also help change the narrative in the US around what we should expect from our civil justice system and make sure that everybody understands that universal to right size on-demand legal assistance is within the realm of possibility. If we think a little differently about the way that we’re delivering it.
Ron Flagg:
If I’m in a state that faces a severe civil justice gap, and that would be essentially all of every state in the country and in a territory, what would your recommendation be to start the process that you went through in Alaska?
Nikole Nelson:
Yeah, so first off, I would say let’s get going. This crisis is, like you mentioned before, nationally, 92% of people who have civil legal needs are not having them met. And I remember a time when it was 80%, the crisis is getting worse. So first off, I would say start somewhere. Start now. I mean, the time for waiting has passed. Let’s start experimenting. Let’s start moving things forward that might actually address the justice gap. So that would be my first step is let’s start now. Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Let’s try to experiment a little bit and see how things can work. The Alaska model, I’m very fond of it because it works, it’s doing great stuff, but it may not be the only one. There are different ways that you can imagine that different communities could move forward with justice workers and be open to exploring those different possibilities.
But I really think the impetus is to start now. I would say also that it’s really important to include outside voices other than those in the legal system. Well, as we were moving forward in Alaska, the thing that really strengthened my resolve was when I was in community and hearing from our client community and our community partners, how much they believed in the ability of community justice workers to help people resolve their legal problems, and they want to have that. And so I think that sometimes we as lawyers get sort of locked into a little bit of groupthink, and it’s really important for us to understand that we need to be including other people in that conversation, and that by doing so, our systems might be reshaped so that they’re more people centered versus lawyer centric. And so I would say too, make sure that you’re including people who aren’t lawyers in your conversations, because the law impacts it overlays everything in life.
And that’s a second piece of it. The other thing I would say too is making sure that you, and this is I think particularly relevant for the community that we’re talking to here, make sure that you identify access to justice as the North star, why you want the changes happening, because that’s why I’m in it. And I think, I imagine everyone who’s listening to a legal services podcast is really in this to address the access to justice challenge. And if you sort of keep those three things as your guidepost and being flexible, considering what’s available within your community, what assets you have and where you can get some short-term wins by identifying low hanging legal fruit that’s having, if you addressed it, would have a big impact on those who are going without
Ron Flagg:
That sounds like a great game plan. Nikole, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing your experience and your wisdom. And more importantly, thank you for your leadership over two decades in Alaska and now in this effort to spread the word and share the data about community justice workers. Thank you to our listeners for tuning into this episode of Talk Justice. Please subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. And everybody out there stay well
Speaker 2:
Podcast guest speakers views, thoughts and opinions are solely their own and do not necessarily represent the legal services corporation’s views, thoughts, or opinions. The information and guidance discussed in this podcast are provided for informational purposes on only, and should not be construed as legal advice. You should not make decisions based on this podcast content without seeking legal or other professional advice.