“Nobody ever comes to court because they're having a good day,” says JusticeNet CEO and Principal Solicitor, Rebecca Plummer.
“In South Australia and across Australia more broadly, there is a huge and growing unmet need for legal services. At JusticeNet we see how many people are unable to access the legal support they need, and we work to fill that gap with pro bono resources.”
JusticeNet is an independent not-for-profit charityfor South Australians who cannot afford a lawyer or get the legal help they need elsewhere. The organisation currently offers three services: Pro Bono Connect, Federal Court Self-Representation and Homeless Legal.
Since 2008, JusticeNet has facilitated millions worth of pro bono legal work each year for hundreds of help seekers, with an average of 42 hours and $12,460 in legal fees per person assisted.
With support from The Wyatt Trust and other funders, JusticeNet has been working to unlock more pro bono legal support in South Australia.
After almost three years of advocacy and groundwork to reform practicing certificate requirements, in-house counsel and government lawyers will soon have greater capability to provide pro bono help to South Australians who otherwise could not access legal services.
Rebecca Plummer spoke about the process and the potential the change it unlocks in this recent conversation with The Wyatt Trust.
Can you explain the need and the challenges to increasing pro bono capacity in South Australia?
RP - In SA, we currently have ways for firms and barristers to participate in pro bono work, however, the position on the practicing certificates of in-house lawyers and government lawyers has not been equal to the rest of the country in terms of their ability to access and undertake pro bono work.
The need for pro bono legal support is huge and the need continues to grow. For the first time ever at JusticeNet, we have waitlists for our Homeless Legal service and with Pro Bono Connect, our clearing house service, we have more referrals than we can currently place.
We knew there was an opportunity to tap into unmet potential by seeing if we could address the practice certificate changes in order for us to have greater pro bono supply.
Originally this was brought to our attention by government lawyers and in-house lawyers who wanted to do pro bono work, so we also knew there was demand to participate in meaningful pro bono opportunities from people in these roles.
It's been a long advocacy path and a two-stage process with two rounds of amendments but we now have a more standardised approach that's more in line with the rest of the country. It’s taken almost three years and many contributors who’ve helped make it happen.
Was there anything about the project that was unexpected?
The level of collaboration required on this project was much higher than anticipated. There were a lot of stakeholders we needed with us on this journey including regulatory bodies, authorities and politicians. There was drafting and redrafting, and then all the considerations about what it means for insurance, and now the practical role out. It has been an involved process.
When we started out, I thought it would be reasonably straightforward, but it's been a bespoke advocacy project that’s taken almost three years. There are rarely fast wins in changing legislation.
Even now, I would say what I haven't anticipated is that, potentially, even though the grant has ended now, the real work is starting,
because we've got to train the profession on what it means. We've got to do the rollout of the education and awareness pieces.
What kind of impact do you hope this change unlocks?
It would be great to see South Australia have a greater share of the national pro bono work, and at JusticeNet we are a service to the profession as much as we're a service to the community, so this was something that we saw could really help both the profession and help the community.
In terms of impact, not only will it help address some of the unmet legal need, but it will also have many flow-on effects. Pro bono work comes with great social factors and it puts lawyers in touch with the fundamental grassroots issues that are affecting people in society, and it can get us all more on the same page and that can have great policy effects too.
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It also gives lawyers greater career satisfaction through a broader variety of work and this can help keep people in the profession longer.
The statistics show that people drop out of the legal profession around the time of mid-career burnout. That’s when they start asking, ‘Do I need a change? Am I getting the satisfaction or the purpose that I wanted from being a lawyer?’
Pro bono work can help keep that knowledge and those skill sets in the industry.
It also helps with the public's trust in lawyers, if people see lawyers doing good work, we know it feeds into things like the UN Sustainable Development Goal 16, towards public trust in institutions.
If people trust in the rule of law, it has flow-on effects on whether people engage in civil society. So, there's a whole lot of things that make pro bono law a deeply meaningful contribution to society.
It’s difficult to calculate the impact in terms of the amount of pro bono support it will unlock but we know that every donation to JusticeNet is multiplied hugely.
Our small team of eight part-time staff can access hundreds lawyers to do millions of dollars’ worth of pro bono work each year. The most recent dollar equation is that each dollar that comes to JusticeNet equals $10 of legal work to the community.
How important is the role of philanthropy in helping you create impact?
Philanthropy for us is crucial. What I think philanthropy does is give us the chance to grow long-term relationships with intelligent and engaged funders who understand the complexity of what we're trying to address and the uniqueness of our model.
I find that philanthropy is interested in those deeper root causes of why things in society aren't working, and they're interested in funding those organisations thinking about those bigger problems, and are more willing to take the risk so that we can try new things. This means we can be innovative and agile in a way that other funding streams might not allow us to.
We're so grateful to The Wyatt Trust, not only for the funding of this project, but for the role that they play in the South Australian philanthropy ecosystem. This was not a particularly straightforward thing to fund. But they understood that and could see that this needed to happen, and all the flow-on effects that it could have, and they trusted us to get it done.
When an organisation like Wyatt is funding operations and advocacy in a way that doesn't require us to change everything to fit inside a grant, it is just so much more helpful. This is what really makes philanthropy so great for work like ours.
Learn more about the work of JusticeNet here.
