During COVID-19, Springvale Monash Legal Service (SMLS) has continued providing legal services to clients, who due to restrictions cannot attend a community legal service in person. Additionally, SMLS provides opportunities for Monash University law students within the Monash University Clinical program to undertake their SMLS placement remotely and learn the skills needed to make the law available to people who would otherwise have no affordable sources of legal help.
SMLS, like other community legal centres, have identified that the COVID-19 pandemic has created a need for community legal services to move online at a pace. SMLS has implemented a remote legal service, which operates similarly to onsite legal services utilising collaborative technology platforms such as Sharepoint, to establish centralised online filing systems, which facilitate legal service in a remote setting. Via telephone or zoom, SMLS provides remote legal services to clients, who are disadvantaged either through financial hardship or other circumstances, including disability, language barriers, family violence or other circumstances that have arisen through COVID-19. Lawyers and students, under supervision, provide legal assistance to clients via technological means on a variety of legal matters, including employment, criminal law, tenancy, credit and debt, social security, family law and family violence. Students, participating remotely in an SMLS placement, learn that barriers to access to justice are experienced by almost every client, enabling them to reflect on why the legal needs of clients and communities are not being met, or how they can be better met.
SMLS utilises a remote legal service with an adaptable framework for client service delivery as well as for educating students about technological advances in legal practice, equipping them with frameworks for the knowledge, skills and attributes for being technologically proficient for their roles as legal practitioners into the future. Students, placed at SMLS, are provided with an innovative opportunity to learn how technology intersects with the law to provide accessible legal service and how to practice law in ways that assist clients to access justice, including developing communication skills for interaction with clients via technology, and building trust with clients. These issues are explored further in the chapter: Weinberg, J. & and Giddings, J. (in press). ‘Innovative opportunities in technology and the law: The virtual legal clinic’ in A. Thanaraj & K. Gledhill (Eds), Teaching legal education in the digital age. Routledge.
During the pandemic, a remote legal service has become an essential way for legal practitioners to utilise technology to provide clients with enhanced access to legal processes. The remote legal service aligns with the notion that professionals need to become more versatile users of technology by building new forms of relationships with technologies that ‘demand fresh skills and an open mind’. Legal practitioners have had to utilise technology in different ways, including through artificially intelligent chatbots to provide services that enhance their clients’ access to justice and provides innovative opportunities for harnessing technology to deliver efficient, affordable and widely available legal services. At the same time, educating students as to how legal practitioners can provide clients with legal service remotely, enhancing their ability to access justice. SMLS has developed a technologically advanced legal service that has enabled clients to continue to access the services they need at a time when this is urgently required. Additionally, SMLS’s innovative service adds value to educating students about the technological advances occurring in legal practice, which will become even more important in the future.
– Dr Jacqueline Weinberg is the Academic Director of the Springvale Monash Legal Clinic, Director of Clinical Units and an academic in the Law Faculty at Monash University. Jacqueline’s areas of research include dispute resolution, student wellbeing and the links between technology and the law in enhancing access to justice.
