Newsletter ::.
Managing in Difficult Times (2010-06-29)
Managing in Difficult Times
Mark Benton, CEO, Legal Services Society, British Columbia, Canada
The Legal Services Society (LSS) is the legal aid plan and public legal information provider in British Columbia, Canada. One of thirteen provincial and territorial legal aid plans in Canada, it serves a population of about 4.4 million in an area about the size of Germany, Switzerland, and France combined. Like all legal aid plans, the society’s significant challenges are typically driven by external factors such as the economy, the number of people charged with criminal offences, family break up, immigration policies, the number of children placed in government care, as well as the revenues provided by the society’s funders (90 per cent of our funding is from the provincial government, 10 per cent is from non-government, interest-based sources). Roger asked that I write a few words about protecting critical legal aid services at a time when demand increased and revenue dropped; circumstances that most of us are increasingly familiar with.
This short report for the ILAG readers recounts one legal aid plan’s strategic response to two funding crises – one in 2002 and the other in 2008. It is largely about the importance of legal aid leadership establishing a clear direction to guide legal aid organizations through difficult times and, I hope, illustrates the importance of adapting strategies and goals as the environment changes. The evolution of this last aspect of the society’s work can be reviewed through the annual reports on our website at http://www.lss.bc.ca/about/annualReports.asp.
Until 2002, the Legal Services Society was a full service legal aid plan that integrated public legal education services with the more traditional legal representation model. The system used paralegals and community based clinics in a mixed service delivery model that included a full range of poverty law services. In 2002 the provincial government announced that legal aid funding would be reduced by about 40 per cent and that the bulk of the remaining funding would be restricted to providing the minimal levels of services that the courts would order government to provide. The government also dismissed the board of directors and appointed a trustee. LSS laid off two-thirds of its staff and closed three-quarters of its locations around the province. Family law services were significantly reduced and poverty law services were largely eliminated as funding for those services disappeared.
In response to these circumstances, the society adopted a strategy that gave priority to getting early and stable resolutions to legal problems rather than focusing only on ensuring fairness in justice system institutions. The society’s longer term objective was to return to the full service organization that existed prior to 2002. Key elements to this strategy were securing the ongoing support of influential stakeholders, rigorous program evaluation to better demonstrate value, and using non-government revenue to develop service projects. The strategy was a significant success. From 2003 through 2008, government funding increased. Rising interest rates resulted in significant growth in the revenue from private foundations, which in turn allowed the development of more substantial projects.
In late 2008, as the global economy deteriorated, LSS was deficit financing about $3 million of projects and related costs. The deteriorating economic conditions brought a significant increase in demand for legal aid. In November 2008, referrals for emergency family services were 21% over budget and refugee (asylum) applications were 76% higher than the previous year. Increased demand, however, was combined with static government revenues and declining revenues from interest-based sources.
The pressing short-term need was to stabilize LSS spending in the face of increased demand. To accomplish this LSS cut its infrastructure and services, allocating funding to the most critical legal aid services. Examples of those changes include eliminating coverage for some minor criminal offences (such as failure to appear and breach of probation), reducing some family dispute resolution services, and substantially eliminating our staff lawyer program.
Our long-term strategic approach assumed that the economic downturn was going to last for several years. LSS adopted an approach to protect core services and advance the society’s longer term strategies of focusing on client outcomes and integrating legal aid services with other social services. The society continues to believe an integrated approach to legal aid (i.e., addressing a client’s legal problems along with any contributing non-legal problems such as a homelessness, poverty, or addiction) better serves low-income people, the justice system and the population as a whole, for example, including assistance with a foreclosure matter that is integral to family dispute.
The longer term approach has three elements. First, we reduced the scope of the society’s work to those areas with secure funding. This meant eliminating a number of important civil services, including our telephone advice service, and limiting legal aid services to family, criminal, child protection and immigration law that receive government funding. Second, we developed a new service delivery model, involving the 40 per cent workforce reduction and the replacement of five of seven offices with a contracted services model. While these changes have had a significant impact on the society and its staff, they have maximized the funding available for core services. The third long-term project was to simplify the LSS system for paying lawyers by consolidating almost 200 tariff items into a smaller number of billing categories. This will provide greater cost certainty for the society, easily understood retainer parameters for clients and a streamlined billing process for lawyers.
We began these initiatives late in 2009/2010 and our primary focus in 2010/2011 will be their implementation and assessment. To date, as a result of the saving realized from the infrastructure changes, LSS has been able to reintroduce some, but not all, of the services that were reduced or eliminated in early 2009.
To date, LSS has not received any additional funding from government, but neither has it faced further reductions at a time when virtually every government-funded social service agency suffered significant funding cuts. We believe this is due largely to our ability to demonstrate sound fiscal management and long-term planning that focuses on cost-effective legal aid for low-income people.
The public response to these unwelcomed developments has been consistently critical of the lack of needed funding to sustain services in the recession. In one community, lawyers engaged in a partial service withdrawal for four months and an initiative is underway by the provincial chapter of the Canadian Bar Association to organize a private commission that will examine the type of legal aid services that should be available.
2009 was among the most difficult of years for legal aid in BC. While the choices made in reducing expenditures put services to clients ahead of the interests of lawyers, courts and employees, it has not made the loss of services and the firing of seasoned employees any more palatable. The real issue is that revenues did not rise to meet the increased demand that can reasonably be anticipated in difficult economic times. Absent government policy and funding commitments or substantial reserves, the outcome is that low income people are doubly affected by the economic downturn – at the time when they become most vulnerable and are in greatest need, services are reduced and access is more limited.
Although LSS has adopted a set of narrower service goals for the next several years, the longer term strategy is to position the society to benefit from government funding increases as the economy recovers. Elements of this plan include demonstrating that legal aid services make a material difference to avoiding and reducing health and social services costs and that the legal aid program is well positioned to facilitate the delivery of multi-disciplinary services. The first stage of the strategy, engaging key stakeholders in the conversations that support that outcome, has begun.