We will explore how civil legal aid and law students can collaborate with Tribes to enhance access to justice within tribal court systems. Tribal courts face unique hurdles, including jurisdictional complexities, resource limitations, and cultural barriers. This session will delve into these challenges, highlighting how Skagit Legal Aid, the Swinomish Indian Tribal Community, and the Native American Law Student Association at Seattle University Law School created educational pathways, mentorship programs, and collaborative initiatives designed to prepare and support new attorneys dedicated to practice in tribal communities.

Program participants will be able to identify ethical and security risks concerning use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their law practice. The session will explore the fundamentals of GPT technology and demonstrate step-by-step how easy it is for attorneys to build and customize their own GPTs tailored to their specific legal needs.

Topics to be addressed in this presentation include: --How legal services providers can effectively build capacity in rural communities; --How the unique needs of rural communities can shape and direct legal advocacy and education efforts; --How to engage in cross-collaborative community education; and --How to scaffold translating legal advocacy into community self-advocacy.

This session calls upon the legal aid community to shift language justice from the margins of our work to the center, inspired by a line from Black feminist author bell hooks. We will explore how to prioritize the experiences of people who are directly impacted by oppression based on language by weaving language justice principles into our organizations, including updating our language justice plans with an equity lens, supporting our multilingual staff, collaborating with skilled interpreters and translators, facilitating inclusive multilingual spaces, community education, and making language rights a priority in our systemic advocacy. We will touch on how a language justice approach intersects with trauma-informed lawyering and collaborations with a wide range of multilingual partners, through which we work together across language barriers toward a shared vision of justice.

OAA Title III funds for providing legal services to seniors come with unique programmatic requirements. Every grantee must conduct community education sessions, and structured outreach activities in addition to the direct representation they provide clients. When COVID struck, we struggled not only with how to represent seniors in isolation, but with how to satisfy our education and outreach obligations. We developed a weekly Zoom meeting protocol, in which we discussed legal developments and our service provision innovations. We updated our legal workers on COVID related employment issues, the housing moratorium, as well as newly relevant technical issues, such as virtual notarization of documents, and then presented on these issues at the weekly meetings. As COVID progressed and then waned, the meetings became a forum for encouraging inter-office cooperation and collaboration, promoting the diverse expertise of our members. We changed our meeting schedule to every two weeks, and then to the current schedule of once a month. The federal Administration for Community Living (ACL) encouraged grantees to center its senior outreach around equitable principles, and we began discussing those as a team, and then implementing them as we progressed. This commitment and conversation was further developed when we sponsored the first firmwide in-person training meeting after COVID, featuring an interactive race equity exercise throughout extensive substantive and practical trainings. Our alignment-by-necessity of these deliverables, along with development our top/down effort to streamline these commitments has created a legal practice team which delivers impact work, strong support for individual representation, as well as critical policy work. Our mission and firm values are reflected in our progress toward equity-centered work. Our firm principles have become action points, and this has resulted in a rich work product created from existing firm resources.

The United States Justice Gap has reached an unprecedented 92%, steadily increasing over the past decade. With this alarming trend in the US, the urgency for innovative solutions has never been more critical. When legal aid organizations band together as a cohort to pilot a new project, the impact reaches even further. Alaska Legal Services successfully applied for LSC's Disaster Relief funding on behalf of five tribally serving legal aids to support 12 new Community Justice Worker (CJW) paid positions. Join our workshop to learn directly from our cohort leadership team about the transformative impact as well as some challenges of expanding the 'Alaska Model'. Hear firsthand accounts from CJWs on the front lines, sharing their experiences and successes in delivering vital legal services in underserved communities. Discover how this collaborative effort is reshaping access to justice nationwide.

In this interactive session, Kaitlin Kall of Activating Change will provide context to the mass incarceration of Deaf people and people with disabilities, highlighting key societal and system-based drivers of these disparities. With attendees, she will unpack some of the logistical and attitudinal barriers these communities face when they interact with the criminal legal system; challenges attorneys face in identifying and securing accommodations; and adjustments attorneys can make to better support and communicate with Deaf clients and those with disabilities. This session will conclude with some practical tools and strategies for enhancing the representation of clients who have disabilities and those who are Deaf.

We will discuss the importance of the client's voice and why Clients should be at the table when decisions are made about them.

Our panel will highlight our successful pro bono clinics we have built over the past year to enhance outcomes for immigrants with cancer. Specifically, 96 immigrants with cancer and their families have received comprehensive pro bono assistance to legally extend the period of their authorized stay of their tourist visas due to medical necessity and were able to retain control of their decision making, should their illness progress, by assisting in the completion of advance directives. The need is significant and by collaborating with the private bar we have served more immigrant clients and removed social and economic barriers that traditionally have made it challenging for immigrant patients to receive these essential services. Finally, we will share qualitative data from recent years, client narratives and case examples to illustrate how our medical-legal partnership model has positively impacted the legal and health outcomes for immigrant patients. We hope LegalHealth's models for a medical-legal partnership and pro-bono firm collaboration can inspire public health and legal programming for people in different states with similar needs, heighten interest in multidisciplinary information exchange between healthcare and legal systems, and renew commitment to health and racial justice and a healthier society for all.

Data is often weaponized against our clients to promote dangerous stereotypes and fear-mongering, resulting in harmful outcomes for the communities we serve. In this presentation, representatives from New York County Defender Services' Racial Justice Working Group will present ways in which PD offices can use internal and external data to reshape narratives around individuals accused of crimes and strengthen advocacy in litigation, mitigation, legislation, and public education in a race-conscious way.

This panel will leverage the experience of advocates around the country to address the thorny challenges that arise in systemic advocacy. The experienced panelists will share challenges and strategies and will facilitate break out discussions on various systemic advocacy topics including strategic use of communications, co-counseling with pro bono partners, and incorporating systemic advocacy into the legal aid model. There will also be an opportunity for attendees to sign up for a systemic advocacy listserv to continue sharing knowledge after the conference.

This session will focus on how re-aligning our work through a client-led lens can open up new, adaptable, and innovative ways of fighting for our clients' needs both inside and outside the courtroom. We will outline a theory of collaborative defense, illustrating what successful interdisciplinary practice can look like, and showcasing some immediate things offices can do to strengthen their ability to operate as a client-led collaborative defender. We will conclude with a vision of what this new framework can do to expand how public defenders are valued and defined by both their governments and communities.

In this workshop, participants will explore the innovative adaptations and transformative impacts of the Holistic Defense Model at the City of Atlanta Public Defenders Office in response to the challenges posed by the pandemic. The workshop will highlight how the office has united its legal and social services teams, ignited new strategies for client support, and fought against systemic barriers to achieve significant outcomes. Through case studies and real-world examples, attendees will gain insights into pioneering approaches that have reshaped the delivery of holistic services and enhanced client outcomes in Atlanta.

This session will address how to identify and avoid or at least mitigate legal problems in employment practices. The discussion will emphasize the importance of developing and communicating clear disciplinary policies and grievance procedures and how procedural adherence, clear documentation, and what constitutes fair treatment in employment practices can prevent disputes from escalating, enhancing operational effectiveness and legal compliance.

Using examples of litigation filed in Connecticut and Iowa, the panelists will discuss the litigation strategies that have been used to challenge the collection of fees. As pay-to-stay is often imposed as part of a criminal sentence, the panelists will also discuss potential defenses to its imposition, most notably the Excessive Fines Clause of the Eighth Amendment, which is an under-utilized tool for combatting such fines. There will also be a discussion on the real harms caused by pay-to-stay, which will approach the topic from a litigation standpoint and may also discuss academic perspectives, depending on the availability of panelists.

In 2020, the ABA adopted a new model rule 1.8(e), also known as "the humanitarian exception," allowing public interest lawyers to provide such assistance in certain circumstances and a few states have followed suit. This session will discuss Rule 1.8(e), its application in the context of legal aid and public defender work, and the benefits and challenges related to implementing the humanitarian exception.

This presentation is focused on our Kinship Care Project to provide kinship care legal services for DV and other families in crisis. By keeping children of DV survivors out of the state foster care system, we ensure lessened trauma and more stabilities for families affected by family violence and other critical situations that lower-income families face. We represent grandparents, relatives, and fictive kin to care for children during a family crisis.

This interactive session will include reports on developments related to state/territorial legislative funding initiatives aimed at increasing resources for civil legal aid. Updates will be provided on the ABA's data collection process to support funding efforts and on potential federal funding that might be available at the state/territorial or local advocacy levels. Participants will be able to share developments in their states/territories in a roundtable format and learn from others about what has worked, and what has not worked, in raising state/territorial legislative funding and accessing potential federal funding.

Staff working in public interest settings, including civil legal service and public defender organizations, are significantly impacted by the tolls of this work. Burnout and vicarious trauma impact their ability to zealously represent the clients they serve. Typically, conversations revolve around the concept of "self-care," which often does not provide individuals with enough support to navigate these challenges. This presentation will not only explore the unique challenges that the staff of these organizations face but also provide skills and strategies to sustain public interest legal staff while doing this critical work.

Addressing the effects of SB63 on Public Safety and how this is a step backwards towards the overcrowding issues of our jails.

Drawing on our experience from the Science and Surveillance Project and the Civil Justice Practice, we will share effective tactics and collaborative approaches to fortify protections for our clients' digital privacy. Our goal is to illuminate these risks for fellow public defenders and demonstrate that there are numerous avenues to challenge the seizure and retention of clients' data.