Key Points:

• Arizona faces attorney shortages across the board 

• A gap in access led to a new legal profession classification

• Community-based justice workers to offer limited legal help

For every 10,000 people living below the poverty line in Arizona, there is a single civil legal aid attorney. For every 1,000 Arizona residents, there are two attorneys, according to the American Bar Association.

With per capita figures placing the state in the bottom five nationally for meeting the legal needs of people living in poverty and the bottom two for attorneys generally, the Arizona Supreme Court and its partners have needed to find creative ways to address limited access to justice. 

Though the state falls behind in legal access, the court continues to be a leader in introducing and growing the number of community-based justice workers, or individuals already living, working and volunteering in a community who then receive training to provide free, albeit limited, legal help and advocacy.

In March, the court approved a new rule expanding the areas in which community-based organizations and civil legal services can deploy trained community justice workers and legal advocates. 

Under the change, community justice workers can handle domestic violence, including orders of protection and family law matters, evictions and housing stability, public benefits, debt and debt relief, unemployment law and consumer issues. 

The goal is to expand the state’s legal ecosystem, particularly the vast expanse available to people living under the poverty line, as well as for those who are income ineligible for civil legal aid but still unable to afford an attorney. 

“We’re trying to do what we can,” Chief Justice Ann Timmer said. 

Arizona first piloted community-based justice work in 2020 with Innovation for Justice, a virtual lab of the University of Arizona and the University of Utah that aims to address the civil justice crisis through legal empowerment. 

“If we keep thinking about justice problem solving as lawyers jobs or the legal professions job, we’re not going to be able to fix it,” Stacy Rupprecht Jane, director of Innovation for Justice. “It’s just too deep and wide of a crisis to solve with lawyers alone.” 

In 2020, Innovation for Justice partnered with the Arizona Supreme Court and Emerge! Center Against Domestic Abuse to create a program allowing licensed legal advocates, who had a background in social service and working with trauma victims, to provide legal advice on domestic violence related legal issues. 

Jane said the effort helped about 294 people a year and yielded positive outcomes, leading the court to then consider additional areas of law. 

In 2023, the court approved the Housing Stability Legal Advocate Program, another Innovation for Justice initiative that trains and licenses advocates to provide legal advice and services to individuals experiencing housing instability. 

In December 2024, the court announced the creation of the Legal Services Authorized Community Justice Worker Program, which focuses on bringing additional legal assistance to rural areas via training and supervision from the state’s three legal services organizations — Community Legal Services, DNA-People’s Legal Services and Southern Arizona Legal Aid. 

The court expanded the scope to include consumer issues, housing, debt relief, public benefits and unemployment law. 

In March, the court expanded the program further and solidified the framework for allowing legal services organizations and community-based organizations to use community-based justice workers. 

The rule outlines eligibility and training requirements for advocates working in both settings, with those working in civil legal services requiring attorney supervision, and those working in community-based organizations required to be mentored by an attorney and pass a substantive law exam administered by the Administrative Office of the Courts. 

Aaron Nash, director of the Certification and Licensing Division at the Arizona Supreme Court, said that in both the licensed advocate program and in similar initiatives creating more legal career pathways, the court worked to ensure there were guardrails in the program to ensure participants are tested and held to a high standard. 

“These are well thought out approaches,” Nash said. “I think people … think oh, somebody just had an idea one day, and the next day it’s a licensed profession. That’s not the case at all. And we have the history of that, the task forces that led up to it, the application requirements, the ongoing demands. That’s what I see from the regulation side.” 

Jane said the expansion of the community-based justice worker program stands to extend access beyond the population qualifying for civil legal services under eligibility requirements.

The three civil legal service organizations operating in the state do so with funding from the Legal Services Corporation (LSC). 

And under that funding, a person must be at or below 125% of the federal poverty line to qualify for legal aid, equating to about an eligible population of about 15%, or 1 million people, in Arizona, according to estimates provided to LSC by the U.S. Census Bureau. 

“It’s empowering the community-based organizations to decide, ‘We want the legal knowledge, and we want to decide where we use it. We want our clients to go up to 200% of federal poverty guidelines, or we don’t even (want to) do economic eligibility screening,’” Jane said. “It allows for more community based legal empowerment.”