Program to train advocates to provide domestic abuse survivors with legal advice

The Innovation for Justice Program at the James E. Rogers College of Law and Emerge Center Against Domestic Abuse will provide advocates with the tools needed to give legal advice to survivors dealing with court matters like protective orders, divorce and child custody, under a program greenlighted by the Arizona Supreme Court.

It’s the first in the U.S. to permit paraprofessionals, with legal training but no law degree, to provide advice in a nonprofit setting, according to the UA.

“Ideally everyone would get a lawyer, everyone could afford to pay for a lawyer and then we could ensure that they can go through the system and process in a way that’s fair and that accounts for the dynamics of abuse,” said Anna Harper Guerrero, vice president at the Emerge Center. “The ways that that can play out once folks become engaged in the court system often becomes a tool to further harass a victim and impact them.”

Three lay legal advocates from Emerge who have worked for a year in the role and obtained at least 2,000 hours of experience as advocates will go through a yearlong course set to start in the fall. They’ll then be deemed “licensed legal advocates.”

The Arizona Supreme Court authorized the pilot program with an administrative order, said Stacy Butler, director of the Innovation for Justice Program at UA.

“What licensed legal advocates will do includes giving legal advice and under the current regulatory framework in this state, only lawyers can give legal advice because we have what’s called the unauthorized practice of law,” Butler said.

The project will be under evaluation and consultation of local attorneys to ensure the advocates stay within their legal boundaries.

Groups of UA law students helped highlight key aspects of the pilot program, using what they learned to construct the guidelines, including an ethical code to help the advocates navigate their new role.

Victoria A. D’Amato, who set set to graduate from the UA law school in May, said her group was allowed to take different routes when creating the ethical code and arrived at revising the professional standard of conduct for attorneys to fit to the new tier of paraprofessionals.

“When we met with stakeholders from the ethical field, we found that the issues they have with paraprofessionals was the fact that they didn’t have the code and it creates a lot of issues. So, we wanted to make sure that the survivors would not be exposed to more trauma,” D’Amato said.

The guidance for the program also included survivors willing to share their stories with the groups, D’Amato said.

“They had real stories, they had real struggles and it helped us to understand the place they found themselves in and it was driving us through that entire process.”

“I think Emerge has about 6,000 domestic abuse survivors a year that they take care of and they had only six lay legal advocates that could assist them,” said D’Amato. “I think this is essential to have paraprofessionals like licensed legal advocates because it gives the opportunity for low-income people to have an opportunity to be heard.”

Butler said they mapped out how they thought the legal system was supposed to work for survivors and then brought survivors and service providers to explain where the system fails and the various barriers they’ve met.

“What emerged was this discovery that the lay legal advocates at this domestic-violence service provider, they’re already able to give legal information, they’re trauma-informed, they’re already helping survivors try and navigate the system,” Butler said. If they had this additional training to fill these knowledge gaps and allow them to all be legal advisers then they could accomplish a lot more.”

Both partners believe the program will do well in Tucson and potentially expand statewide and around the nation to put domestic-violence survivors on a path towards healing.

“For me it’s about expanding what we can do and how our partnerships look so that victims have a much more meaningful experience and feel like some level of justice happened for them in that process,” Harper-Guerrero said.

“Even if it wasn’t the total outcome they wanted, at least they’re able to participate in that process differently and that matters to people.”