STRAIT to the future

8th Asia-Pacific Specials, Health and Law Librarians Conference

The community, the law and the net

Elizabeth McKibbin and Sue Scott

Keywords: plain English legal guides, internet, community access to the law

Introduction

The promise of creating an informed community through providing online access to information about the law, rights and responsibilities is a tantalising one. What is the reality?

In this paper we will look at what is involved in providing community access to legal information and the role of the Internet in this process.

Why provide access to legal information for the community?

Only recently I was asked ... Why does the community need access to legal information? Wouldn't you just go to a lawyer?

The short answer is that if people are to make good decisions about the legal issues in their lives and participate in public debates about the law, they must be informed.

It was this commitment to informing the community that led to the establishment of the Legal Information Access Centre (LIAC) in Sydney in 1990. LIAC is a partnership between the State Library and the Law Foundation of NSW. (http://www.slnsw.gov.au/liac)

My comments in this paper derive from nine years experience with this service, so I'll begin with a brief outline of who we are and what we do.

What is LIAC?
LIAC is a network, a network of public libraries with about 400 service points throughout the state. The central service in Sydney answers about 19 000 legal inquiries each year and supports public libraries so that they can provide access at the local level.

This support has three essentials: resources, training and promotion. We provide resources that public librarians have confidence in, training to develop staff knowledge and expertise and promotional materials to raise public awareness of services. A visit to our web site will provide you with more detail about free pamphlet information, sources of free legal advice, Hot Topics and the resources LIAC supplies and recommends for public libraries.

Who uses legal information and what do they ask?
Our survey work in LIAC tells us that people want legal information for many different reasons: personal legal problems, study, work, law reform, to understand a current legal issue. Sometimes it's a simple matter: an issue about a fence or noise, a request for a specific Act or case. Sometimes people are informing themselves before approaching a solicitor; sometimes they are already working with one. An interesting example of this was one client who was researching family law in the centre. He said that his solicitor was working on his other legal problem, which was criminal and had referred him to LIAC to find out more about his family law issue. We know in some country towns the LIAC poster is in the local solicitor's office.

There's little doubt that members of the community want to understand the legal issues that affect their lives, and members of the legal profession are recognising the value of informed clients.

What are some of the questions, and who asks them?

• A young mother wants to appeal against a decision of a government department
• A student is arguing with their landlord about repairs
• A woman wants the procedure for getting a divorce - and a lot of detail about property settlements
• An elderly man wants to know if burial at sea is still legal

We also have questions about unfair dismissal, planning decisions, neighbours and trees, buying and selling houses, debt, children at risk, wills, criminal law, immigration and the rest!

Obstacles to the law

Finding the answers to these questions presents particular obstacles for a non-lawyer. It is useful to be explicit about what some of these are.

• The volume and scope of the law. Put simply, the law pronounces on most aspects of life and there's a lot of it
• The levels of law making, with both state and federal jurisdictions
• The procedural aspects of the law. There are many courts and many pages of procedural rules
• The way the law is organised. The law may be in one statute or several or it may not be in a statute at all
• The way the law is changed. The NSW Crimes Act was enacted in 1900 and it is still the law, with of course its 200 amendments
• The way the law is published, for example the separation of Acts and regulations

For members of the community without legal training these obstacles present significant barriers to access. Providing access to legal information for the non-lawyer is about overcoming these barriers.

Creating pathways
We do this by creating pathways.

Pathfinder model

As with any unfamiliar subject, start simple. This is particularly important in law, which for many people is a total mystery and often believed to be "too hard".

At its simplest, legal information comes in the form of a fact sheet or pamphlet which:

• summarises and explains the law avoiding legal jargon; or
• provides an overview or broad introduction to a legal subject area; and
• names Acts and tells you if they are state or federal

This helps people to chart the territory. Answering particular legal questions involves answering other questions first. Introductory material often helps to identify those questions. To take a tenancy example, if you want to know whether you can organise repairs yourself, you'll find that the first question to answer is whether the repair is urgent or not.

For some clients a brief summary may be all they need. This can be found in a resources such as The Renting Guide: Your Rights and Responsibilities as a Tenant or Landlord. (Department Fair Trading 1999). Armed with this information they talk to the landlord and the matter is quickly resolved. But what if they need to take further action? That's where plain language books come in.

Plain language books summarise and explain the law but they also include:

• strategies to solve problems;
• sample letters;
• sample filled out forms;
• procedural information;
• practical tips and warnings about hidden traps;
• references to specific sections of relevant Acts;
• references to cases;
• case studies to help people understand legal issues by relating them to everyday situations;

Again, using the tenancy example, in a plain language book there are useful strategies, tips, letters, case studies and specific section references. A resources such as The tenants rights manual, (Bellemore 1997), provides an overview of the area of tenancy law, practical legal information and specific references to the primary law. This means that people have a context to enable them to better understand what they are reading and they know which sections are relevant to their particular issue.

The tenancy pamphlet and the plain language book are the first two steps in a pathway for non-lawyers as they seek to become informed about their legal problems. These steps provide a framework, which enables people to move from resources intended for the non-lawyer to those written for lawyers.

Family law is an area where clients frequently progress from plain language through to primary legal material. A divorced parent wants to relocate with the children - the plain language book Women and Family Law, 6th ed. (Women's Legal Resource Centre 1999) will provide an overview of how the Family Court decides matters in cases involving children, and for specific information about relocation the most helpful explanation will be in a text or lawyers' practice book such as Australian Family Law and Practice (CCH).

In contrast, a search of AustLII (http://www.austlii.edu.au) using the search term "relocation" would bring up several cases. Which one is the leading case? What are the legal issues? The major case is there, all 91 pages, but there is no headnote.

This result would only serve to confirm a non-lawyer's view that the law is far too hard to understand.

Referral

The pathway model shows referral at all stages. An essential aspect of providing access to legal information is to inform the public about sources of advice and assistance. Many of the practical guides provide this information. In LIAC we maintain a referral guide which focuses on sources of free advice, and if clients want to find a private practitioner we inform them about the Law Society's accreditation scheme.

It is also important to help people prepare for an interview with a solicitor. We provide information about the lawyer/client relationship - costs, questions to ask such as provided in Questions You Should Ask Your Lawyer (Legal Aid New South Wales, 1998)

If there is one lesson from LIAC's experience it is - do not underestimate the public. With the assistance of a structured pathway, many people gain a better understanding of their legal problems. Many also consult a lawyer and know how to manage that relationship more effectively. As one client said to me recently - I now know the questions to ask!

Using the pathway I've described, people progress as far as they wish. They have the means to develop understanding. There are no barriers, no assumptions that because they are members of the public, they will not understand anything but the simplest legal information.

So what is available on the Internet in terms of these pathways?

Internet resources

Step 1: Simple summary
These resources are relatively common on the Internet. To test coverage of these, I looked at 12 questions commonly asked of the NSW Legal Aid Commission Hotline, and checked to see what could be found on the Internet (Appendix 1). The coverage for these questions is reasonably high. I found resources for 7 of the questions. There were 2 questions I could only find partial answers to and 3 questions that I couldn't find an answer to.

Who is publishing this material?
Looking at these sites gives a good indication of who is publishing this material:

This raises questions of quality and accuracy. I made no attempt to assess the quality of these sites. It is essential that legal information is both up to date and accurate. The web allows anyone to be a publisher so users of this information need to exercise particular caution.

The Legal Information Standards Council (LISC) (http://www.lawfoundation.net.au/lisc) is a coalition of providers and users of online legal information who are interested in promoting quality and increased access to online legal information. LISC has published a set of best practice guidelines which can also be used as an evaluation tool. These are as follows:

Draft best practice guidelines for Australian legal web sites
http://www.lawfoundation.net.au/lisc/recommend/bpguide.html

So how does legal material on the Internet rate using these guidelines? Three common areas for legal help are tenancy, family law and unfair dismissal. A random check of twenty Australian sites in these areas found that 30% didn't clearly indicate who was responsible for the site, 70% didn't make a distinction between legal information and legal advice, 80% didn't indicate the currency of the information, and 70% didn't make it clear which state the legal information was relevant to.

I would also point you to two excellent papers given at the AustLII Law via the Internet 99 conference (http://www.austlii.edu.au/austlii/conference/programme.html ) on evaluating legal web sites: 'Evaluating Australian legal research guides on the Net' (Fong and Hutchinson 1999) and 'Creating a safety net - a proposed rating form for assessing the quality of legal information in websites' (Robinson, T. 1999). (These are currently available as part of the printed conference proceedings and should be available on the Internet by October 1999).

Step 2: Practical guides
Practical guides are still not common on the Net.

LIAC has placed a collection of practical guides in all large NSW public libraries (100 locations). This collection is called the Legal Tool Kit. A check of the Legal Tool Kit found only one of the titles available on the Net, the A-Z of home purchase (http://www.hpaa.nsw.gov.au/a-zocont.htm) (See Appendix 2).

While these resources don't necessarily exist in their entirety as a whole, components of them may be available if you know where to look. Forms are increasingly becoming available and a number of sites will link from the plain English guide to the relevant form. (http://www.familycourt.gov.au/forms/index.html). These don't, however, usually provide the additional assistance found in plain English guides such as sample filled out forms, or an explanation of which form should be used in a particular situation.

An exciting development in this area is online legal guidance. Online legal guidance has great possibilities as a way of providing assistance to users in an interactive way. These tools are built around rulebase systems in which the software makes decisions based on a series of rules. They are particularly appropriate for assessing eligibility or filling out forms.

There are not many examples of online legal guidance but some work has been done in this area. The leading developers in Australia are Softlaw, a Canberra based company.

Here are some examples of these tools:

ELMNet eligibility claims assistance module
http://expert.softlaw.com.au/elmnet/home/
This facility enables you to investigate a person's eligibility for DVA pensions and benefits, and can assist you in lodging a claim for a pension or benefit. Softlaw (http://www.softlaw.com.au) has developed the product for the Department of Veteran's Affairs. At the moment the assessment module can only be accessed using a password.

Fund for the City of New York, legal services online domestic violence protection project
http://www.fcny.org/dv/
Software to help prepare documents for court in domestic violence situations. The user is guided through a series of questions. The system produces the petition, temporary and permanent orders, an income deduction order, and printed instructions on going to court. So far, the forms themselves can only be assembled on a pre-initialized computer in an approved location that provides counseling and support.

Fund for the City of New York, New York City housing "cope" system
http://www.fcny.org/housing
COPE is an Internet based system that walks litigants and their advocates through a series of very basic multiple choice questions and simultaneously provides information about the law. Shortly to be available in Spanish. The computer drafts and prints the document that a tenant needs to bring to the court to defend against an eviction. As well, it prints out a list of instructions that will give the user the important facts to tell the court, as well as recommendations for what would be useful to bring with them when they go to court. The system will also provide an option that will direct the user to the legal services office serving their area and other resources that are available for advice and referral.

Steps 3 and 4: Legal text and Lawyer's tools
In terms of free access to legal resources on the web, these two levels of resource are key missing links. This type of resource is usually produced commercially and is the bread and butter of the commercial law publishers. While they will probably be made available in ever increasing quantities on the web the chances are low that they will be a free resource.

Some government sites are attempting to provide greater guidance to their legal resources by bringing a range of relevant materials together.

The ATO legal database (http://www.ato.gov.au/atolaw/browse.htm) is searchable or browsable and contains guides to legislation, case law, public rulings, practice statements and public determinations for taxation in Australia.

The disabilities pages of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/buildings/access_to_premises.html) bring together a wealth of useful information including standards, speeches, discussion papers, guidelines, legislation and cases. The Decline decisions: Access to Premises (http://www.hreoc.gov.au/disability_rights/decisions/Decline_premises/decline_premises.html) site gives summaries of decisions by the Disability Discrimination Commissioner to decline complaints, and of the President of HREOC or delegate reviewing such decisions.

It is, however, the commentary on the law which is lacking on the web. So while it may be possible to find family law cases with summaries, there is no commentary explaining the significance of particular pieces of legislation, such as can be found in looseleaf services e.g. Australian Family Law and Practice, CCH.

One area which has seen a marked improvement in the past year is the provision of online court resources such as court lists and court rules. The NSW Supreme Court http://www.lawlink.nsw.gov.au/sc/sc.nsf/pages/scpractice, for example, has links to:

Step 5: Primary sources
Primary legal resources are well catered for on the web. What is significantly lacking, however, is the provision of headnotes for cases. The public needs headnotes to help them understand the significance of a case. This greatly reduces the usefulness of the online cases as a tool for legal research. There is also no consistent subject access for legislation or case law.

Referral
There are a number of referral directories on the web and some of these are listed on Foundation Law at http://www.fl.asn.au/organisations/#advi (See Appendix 4)

Another way to provide links to referral is to provide references to appropriate sources of advice from factsheet pages e.g. the Victorian Legal Aid site on tenancy (http://home.vicnet.net.au/~viclegal/leginfo/tenancy/index.htm) which provides links to the Department of Fair Trading and the Tenants Union.

The Internet is particularly well suited to providing referral pathways. Context sensitive referral can be made as in the above example. Maintaining a single referral database could reduce duplication of effort and individual agencies could be given the responsibility to keep information about their own organisation up to date.

Internet legal information pathways
So how well does the Internet cover legal information in terms of the pathways model?

There's a lot of information at 1, and some is appearing at 2. The Internet provides excellent factsheet style information, available to the community when they need it. This is important and much harder to achieve with the distribution of print resources. Material can be more easily kept up to date.

You are all familiar with the other end of the path, there's a huge amount of information. What is missing is the material in the middle - the legal texts and lawyers tools. For the public, the absence of a "middle" is a serious issue. The obstacles outlined earlier in the paper are still barriers on the Internet. There's good material, but how do people know they've found it? They find information for the wrong jurisdiction and lots of cases but no way of identifying the important ones. There are few summaries or headnotes to help explain individual cases and they may miss information because it's in a regulation not an Act, or another relevant Act or a case. And , above all, there is no context for understanding what they find.

What we need are more links from the secondary to the primary, better indexes and more consistent terminology. Non lawyers need context and structures, and electronic pathways.

A guide to key Internet legal resources is provided in Appendix 3

Future directions

Online legal guidance
Using the technology to guide users has the potential to provide more effective access to the law. These systems, are not, however, cheap to develop and will require substantial investment by governments.

Online information and advice - e-mail
e-mail will play an increasing role in the provision of information. If your organisation provides a web site with an e-mail feedback form the chances are high that people will e-mail asking for information and advice. The Environmental Protection Agency (http://www.epa.gov) has two dozen librarians answering as many as 1 500 e-mail questions each month (Beamish 1999). Lawstuff (http://www.lawstuff.org.au/) has an e-mail advice line for young people.

There are a lot of issues to think about here, including the difficulty in clarifying what the client wants, legal liability, resourcing such a service and training staff appropriately to answer inquiries.

Conclusion

The Internet will increase expectations of access to information. If law follows the trend in health we may find that people are accessing information themselves and demanding a greater role in dealing with their problems. People expect it all to be there, to be accurate, and to be up-to date but it isn't.

People will go looking for material to help them with their legal problems but will instead become frustrated. The danger I see is that the confusion and distrust of the law will continue, and the community will be confirmed in its view that the law is all "too hard". There is some urgency to fill the gaps; to provide the links from the secondary to the primary material, to set up structured pathways, to provide context, to ensure quality.

Part of the role of the Law Foundation of NSW is to look at ways in which we can work together to fill these gaps. The Online Legal Access Project is currently undertaking a number of initiatives in this area. While there is a focus on New South Wales, the issues are of both national and international relevance.

Briefly, these initiatives are:

1. Researching how community agencies access and use legal information for their clients.
2. Promoting quality through the development of Best Practice Guidelines for Legal Web sites
3. Bringing together key players in New South Wales to develop a collaborative legal search engine based on metadata
4. Working with university law librarians around Australia to develop a legal subject guide web ring
5. Production of an online newsletter. Legalinfo-online, to announce significant developments in online legal information

More information on these initiatives can be found at http://www.lawfoundation.net.au/olap/

No matter how many electronic guides are set up the reality is that the nature of the law and the nature of information mean that the general public will always need assistance with finding information. Research shows that most people will ask someone else if they have a problem. At the same time, people value being given written information in addition to verbal advice (http://www.lawfoundation.net.au/olap/austlii.html).

In the LIAC network in NSW, public librarians are the guides through the maze. There is a role for a variety of intermediaries, such as community workers, lawyers and government departments to link their clients with relevant, up-to-date resources in addition to providing advice. It is only through working together that the potential of the technology to increase access to the law can be realised.

Appendix 1

Appendix 2

Appendix 3

Appendix 4

References