Racial equity work requires our organizations to look inward at our own culture, policies and practices while at the same time looking outward, recognizing the racism our clients and communities experience and advocating with them against systemic oppression. This simultaneous need to work internally and externally is challenging. In this session, leaders from the civil legal aid community will share their experience navigating these issues, and engage with the audience to hear examples from the field, so that we can learn from each other how to keep moving our work for racial justice forward.

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.

• understand the legal framework for language access at the federal and state levels for the provision of language services to individuals with limited English proficiency and those who are Deaf.
• Explore emerging issues and advancements in language access, including technological innovations and evolving practices in language justice advocacy.

Neighborhood Legal Services of Los Angeles County ("NLSLA") proposes a presentation on supporting rural communities in developing self-advocacy skills to defend student rights in schools. The presentation will educate participants on an innovative workshop model and support them in applying the strategy in their practices and service areas. The Antelope Valley and its school districts are and historically have been racially segregated and home to multiple, national news-worthy incidents of prejudice and racial violence. Located in a desert region of North Los Angeles County, about 70 miles north of the city of Los Angeles, the Antelope Valley's public schools serve a racially and socioeconomically diverse student population, numbering more than 75,000. Its students have been forced for years to contend with Antelope Valley school districts' ableist, racist, and highly punitive discipline and law enforcement policies, causing overwhelming and lasting harm to Antelope Valley's most vulnerable youth. Until NLSLA's Education Rights Practice started taking cases in the region, there were no permanent or comprehensive education legal services in the area, leaving countless students and families with little to no recourse in addressing the pervasive race- and disability-based discrimination, abuse, and educational neglect by the school system and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department with which it contracts. Even with NLSLA's dedicated team of education attorneys working tirelessly to advocate on behalf of students, the region's vastness, remoteness, and population size makes it impossible for our team to provide desperately needed legal services to all students who need it. In order to increase our team's capacity to advocate for students, come alongside communities and families, and creatively adapt to the challenges that come with legal representation in rural areas, NLSLA has, for the past year, developed and implemented a curriculum of skills-based advocacy workshops to parents, students, and community members in the Antelope Valley. Through partnerships with California Rural Legal Assistance, Cancel the Contract-Antelope Valley, and the Dolores Huerta Foundation, we have translated these workshops into Spanish and expanded their delivery in-person and virtually in other rural school districts across California. NLSLA attorneys have developed workshops in advocacy areas where families are most often left in the dark or deliberately misled as to their rights. Topics include defending students in expulsions, appealing suspensions, representing students in IEP meetings, challenging deficient facilities and school materials, and submitting discrimination complaints. The model of these 75-minute workshops is simple, and we will replicate it in our presentation (see question on format of the presentation for more information): --20 minutes of direct instruction, provided by PowerPoint; --5 minutes for facilitators (attorneys or community advocates trained by NLSLA attorneys) to explain the small group skills-based activity; --20-30 minutes of practicing the skill whole group or in small groups; and --10-15 minutes for questions. Families who attend the workshops, offered once a month in English and Spanish, also receive copies of the legal instructional materials used in the workshop, know your rights pamphlets, and template and sample letters or documents aligned with the skill in question so that the advocacy strategy can be carried out by families whenever needed in the future. Families also get digital copies of all materials to access at any time. The workshops have reached hundreds of new families in the first year alone. NLSLA and its partners believe that these workshops have innovated the way in which our education practice serves rural areas, and they hope to continue to expand capacity to share information that will empower families in remote regions to advocate for students and hold school districts accountable for their legal violations. We believe this is a model that is replicable and can help practices across the country effectively reach new service areas. 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.

• Review workshop curricular materials NLSLA created to adapt and use in their own practices or to use as a model in developing workshops in other substantive legal areas.
• Think critically about how to creatively adapt legal service models to the needs of rural communities.
• Consider the role of legal services attorneys in building capacity in communities to self-advocate and develop sustainable accountability structures by involving clients in strategy and advocacy decisions.
• Be introduced to a framework that encourages participants to consider innovative community partnerships to enhance the impact of legal interventions.

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.

• Describe the "Alaska Model", and how this approach enables lawyers to operate at the top of their license, while CJWs ensure that legal services are accessible and culturally appropriate.
• Understand from cohort legal aids how a collaborative training approach has worked in their program, and where they deviate to individualized local training.
• Describe how the CJW model is changing the landscape of legal aid in different regions by embedding CJWs into legal deserts, and learn to leverage community partnership to replicate.
• Understand the importance of community connection, and evaluate how recruiting CJWs locally builds trust and cultural understanding.

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.

• Upon completion, participants will be able to list five ways in which research can be used to promote racial justice in the criminal legal system/
• Upon completion, participants will be able to describe the attributes that make a strong research question.
• Upon completion, participants will be able to identify possible sources of data for research.
• Upon completion, participants will be able to list several resources they can use to collaborate with other organizations on data research projects related to the criminal legal system.

 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.

• Identify and implement a broader, achievable vision of meaningful "impact work" for firm constituencies which buttresses their firm's mission and satisfies the demands of grantors and funders.
• Present practical suggestions for implementing multi-level demands in their firm's work in an integrative way which develops cooperative work within the firm, positively shaping firm culture.
• Devise a practical plan for the development of firm structure and work from the principles--such as connectedness, equity and accountability--which underlie the demands which can stymie our nonprofit work.
• Present to their firm leadership and legal workers a holistic action plan that helps resolve the tension between impact work, individual representation, and important policy work without requiring additional resources.

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.

• describe the unique jurisdictional and cultural challenges faced by tribal court systems and how these impact access to justice for tribal communities.
• identify and outline successful educational pathways, mentorship programs, and collaborative initiatives that prepare and support new attorneys in tribal courts
• demonstrate essential skills and strategies for providing culturally sensitive and effective legal advocacy in tribal court systems

Our presentation will discuss how NYLAG's LegalHealth medical-legal partnership (MLP) improves the legal and health outcomes for NYC's immigrant communities, including many recent arrivals. As the nation's largest and one of the longest-standing medical-legal partnerships, we have historically rallied around immigrants who are forced to deal with complex legal and health issues. Through our extensive partnerships with various public safety net hospitals, private hospitals and outpatient community clinics, we unite legal care and health care, so the patient relies on one interdisciplinary team to collectively address their legal and health needs. Through LegalHealth's MLP model, our attorneys and paralegals provide culturally competent and trauma-informed wrap around legal services for patients across a wide range of civil legal issues. We fight for health equity and equality for New York's immigrant patient communities by leveraging our expertise in various areas of law, particularly in immigration law, to help patients obtain life-saving transplants, much-needed comprehensive health insurance coverage, and safe hospital discharges. Likewise, we help immigrant families access healthier homes and protect their futures by securing reasonable housing accommodations, obtaining disability waivers for their naturalization applications and representing them in guardianship matters for adults and children. Throughout these various legal processes, our staff regularly collaborates with patients' social workers, community health workers and doctors to obtain important medical evidence, support letters, affidavits and required information. We also provide regular trainings to healthcare professionals on social determinants of health to further build capacity for individual and systemic change, raise consciousness about important public health and legal issues, particularly recent immigration changes, and ignite greater solidarity with impacted immigrant communities. 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.

• Upon completion, participants will be able to understand the structure and benefits of the LegalHealth medical-legal partnership (MLP) model in improving legal and health outcomes for immigrant communities.
• Upon completion, participants will be able to identify effective strategies for integrating legal services into other practices to address complex legal and health issues faced by immigrant populations.
• Upon completion, participants will be able to apply best practices from LegalHealth's culturally competent and trauma-informed legal services to their own legal practices to enhance support for vulnerable clients.
• Upon completion, participants will be able to develop collaborative initiatives and foster partnerships to create interdisciplinary teams that collectively address the legal and health needs of their clients.

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

• To empower the voice of the client.
• To see the client as a part of the puzzle and not an extra piece.
• To make sure clients are at the table from the beginning to the end.
• The importance of uplifting clients and the work their doing in the community/legal aid space

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.

• Upon completion, program participants will be able to identify ethical and security risks concerning use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their law practice.
• Attendees will gain hands-on experience in setting up, and deploying GPTs, ensuring they leave with practical skills to enhance their practice
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