Family Legal Care Inc

Legal consultations: unrepresented litigants meet with a staff attorney for about an hour to receive vital support in preparing a case. Consultations take place over the phone or via microsoft teams. Clients receive in-depth advice and counsel, and many return for follow-up advice and support. In fy24 we completed 2,896 consultations, including 1,733 initial consultations and 1,163 follow up consultations.

Pro bono program: family legal care's pro bono program allows clients to receive legal advice from volunteer attorneys on their mobile devices or computers from wherever they are. This unique program alleviates barriers to service for people without legal representation, eliminating the need for long-distance trips to the courthouse, increasing accessibility for disabled or homebound clients and mitigating expensive burdens like taking time away from work and securing childcare services. We facilitated 530 consultations with pro bono attorneys, slightly exceeding what we accomplished last year even after pausing consultations for six weeks to overhaul the technology used in the program. This new system is streamlined, more reliable, and user-friendly

Legal education and community outreach: family legal care works with community partners and service providers to offer in-person and virtual workshops and legal clinics in both english and spanish. We prioritize outreach to key constituent groups with specific needs, including: 1) veterans and active military service-members; 2) spanish-speaking and immigrant families; 3) previously incarcerated and incarcerated parents; and 4) survivors of domestic violence. In fy24, 331 pro se litigants and service providers participated in an outreach event, resulting in 3,698 participants referred to family legal care. Our webinars received 2,271 views in fy24, the equivalent of 369 hours of watch time.

Legal resource guides (lrgs): our library of original, multilingual lrgs contains more than 60 unique guides available in 9 languages, cover a range of family law issues. They are available at various courthouses, through community partners, and on our website, where they can be easily filtered by topic, language, and region. In fy24, our lrgs have been viewed over 172,000 times. We recently worked with one of our partners, jbi, to make our most popular lrgs available in braille, large-print, and audio formats, increasing the accessibility of this vital resource.

Legal information and tech hubs: we provide legal information to walk-in visitors to nyc's busiest courthouses at our legal information hubs. In addition to legal information, litigants affected by the digital divide can visit our brooklyn, queens, and bronx tech hubs for technical assistance accessing the hybrid court system. Litigants who may not have access to technology, a stable internet connection, or a private space can conduct their virtual hearings and upload documents related to their case. We served 5,027 individuals at nyc's borough family courts in fy24.

Advocacy: we uplift pro se litigants' voices and push for commonsense reforms that will have a real impact on families and make the family court more equitable for everyone. Family legal care is increasingly sought out by court administration decisionmakers for our expertise and unique viewpoint about the needs of pro se litigants in family court. A recent advocacy and policy win: we surveyed our clients about how the onerous document notarization requirements impacted their cases, and shared their responses with legislators. A law easing these restrictions was passed and became effective january 1, 2024. In fy24 we had many productive meetings with court officials, legislators, and policymakers. We also created our first-ever position dedicated to advocacy and policy associate director of advocacy, policy, and community engagement to continue to grow our advocacy and policy efforts.

Legal research - streamlines the legal sources available to staff and provided to litigants. Through this work, flc stays current with any and all changes in the law and research nuances topics that impact flc's work.

Digital justice initiative: family legal care is at the forefront of developing tools that leverage the power of technology to increase access to justice. Our family law navigator tool delivers family law information customized to each person's legal case and situation quickly, anonymously, and for free. In just 2-3 minutes, family law navigator provides legal information that can be a helpful starting point for people who are beginning to address their family law issue. Our guided court forms make it easy for litigants to understand, complete, and upload essential court documents from any web-connected device without a computer or extra pdf-editing software. 2,404 people used family law navigator in fy24, and our 12 guided court forms have been completed 1,593 times.