The American Bar Association, in cooperation with ARAG Legal Insurance, legal tech company CuroLegal, and volunteer experts, has created a free online tool to help veterans identify legal needs and get resources to help them.
CuroLegal developed Legal Checkup for Veterans, a mobile-first web app that is aimed at helping vets identify if a situation in their lives is a legal issue with a legal remedy, and points them in the direction of easy and actionable steps to get that remedy.
At this time, the website focuses on family law, housing, and employment, since veterans’ community identified those as the top legal issues facing veterans.
In a process that takes an average of four minutes, veterans are asked to provide their ZIP code and then asks a series of questions including whether the user has stable housing, needs shelter, is having disputes of child custody and property, is getting divorced, has a job, and is being discriminated against in terms of pay.
At the end of the survey, veterans are told about areas of the law where they might have claims and how they can take action on those claims. They can also click a button that provides them with resources to help with legal actions, including contact information for free legal services providers or lawyer referral services. If a vet has a potential employment claim, they are given contact information for the local office of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
They may also get contact information for local veterans’ service organizations, depending on what issues are identified in the questionnaire.
Why this service, and why now?
The Legal Services Corporation recently released a report entitled The Justice Gap: Measuring the Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans. While conducting their research, LSC found that veterans only seek help for 21 percent of their legal problems. The top reasons vets cited for not seeking legal help were: didn’t know where to look (29 percent), decided to deal with the problem on their own (25 percent), and not sure if it was a legal problem (18 percent).
In 2016, the American Bar Association Commission on the Future of Legal Services released its Report on the Future of Legal Services in the United States, in which they recommended the use of checkups in order to close the gap in access to justice.
“There’s a misconception that the reason there is an access to justice gap in the U.S. is because people can’t afford lawyers,” said Nicole Bradick, Chief Strategy Office for CuroLegal. “One of the biggest components is that people don’t understand that a life problem they are having is a legal problem.”
The next version of the website will also contain consumer protection questions, but the site developers didn’t want to add too many questions at once because they feared that users wouldn’t want to complete a questionnaire that was too long.
Volunteers at Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County; Allen Norton & Blue; Sullivan & Tanner, P.A.; Pine Tree Legal Services of Maine; and Baker Donelson donated their time and subject matter expertise to Legal Checkup for Veterans.
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