Pro Bono Week profiles frequently highlight traditional client work done by lawyers, but law firms and their professional staff can also be a resource for advancing access to justice in systemic ways. For over a decade, DLA Piper has provided a range of support to the D.C. Access to Justice Commission to further its efforts to examine and address the access to justice crisis in the District.

Currently, the firm’s Knowledge Management team, led by Elisabeth Cappuyns, is providing essential support to a Commission project aimed at strengthening and transforming the District’s approach to developing and maintaining legal ‘self-help’ information. Marjorie Schaffner, a Senior Project Manager in the firm’s Knowledge Management team, has played a particularly critical role in providing day-to-day support on the project.

With Marjorie’s invaluable support, the Commission created an inventory of over 1,200 self-help material currently available in the District related to civil legal needs and is assessing the quality of these materials with standardized metrics and guidelines. Having all of this information stored in a comprehensive database is a crucial element of the Commission’s ultimate goals to recommend improvements for materials, conduct user-testing with District residents to ensure materials meets their needs, and ultimately, make recommendations to ensure there is adequate infrastructure to maintain and continue to strengthen the content of self-help into the future.

With the Commission’s small staff and reliance on volunteers from the legal services community to form its self-help work group, there was no way that the Commission would have been able to launch this project without DLA Piper’s help.  Commission staff member Diana Sisson shared, “Marjorie provided not just information management, but was an invaluable problem-solving member of the team. The Commission staff and volunteers working on the project simply did not have the type of technological expertise and skills needed to pull this off alone, and she made countless adjustments to respond to our needs and to make the database as nimble and easy to move the project forward.”

The firm’s communications and marketing team also played a critical role, helping to produce and design a forthcoming report that contains the Commission’s recommendations for the future of self-help in the District. DLA Piper is committed to providing the legal and non-legal professional support the project needs to move to its conclusion.

This is just one project in which DLA Piper has supported the Commission’s work under the leadership of its Pro Bono Partner, Lisa Dewey. Efforts to develop the Commission’s 2008 and 2019 legal needs reports – comprehensive assessments of the state of civil needs in the District – were heavily supported by teams at DLA Piper who contributed to their research, drafting, and design. These efforts involved not just the firm’s legal team, but firm paralegals, administrative staff, marketing and communications, and more. On the horizon is an effort to assess how community navigation might expand access to legal help for District residents led by Lisa and retired DLA Piper partner Sheldon Krantz, and another effort to leverage the firm’s expertise to examine how District stakeholders might use artificial intelligence to advance access to justice, a growing area of firm expertise.

In each of these efforts, the firm has looked ‘outside the box’ to identify innovative and unique ways it can make a difference while maintaining its historically strong profile of traditional pro bono work, like volunteering at area legal clinics, taking on individual representation cases, and more. This builds on the financial support the DLA Piper Foundation provides to the Commission and other legal services stakeholders to ensure their core staff have the capacity to do the important work they do every day.

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