November 2015

City Solicitors Horizons

Grant: £150,000
November 25, 2015

City Solicitors Horizons is a pilot social mobility initiative to improve access to the legal profession for young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. It has been initiated by the City of London Solicitors' Company, City Solicitors' Educational Trust (CSET) and The Legal Education Foundation (TLEF), with the support of the City of London Law Society (CLLS) and leading law firms.

Over the next three years, 50 undergraduates annually will be selected to take part in a three year programme alongside their undergraduate degrees. Each intake will benefit from comprehensive classroom and one-to-one training sessions, mentoring from lawyers, and work experience from sponsoring firms.

Research has shown that bright and hard-working students from disadvantaged backgrounds still find it difficult to obtain training contracts compared with their contemporaries from more privileged backgrounds.

This problem was highlighted earlier in 2015 by the Social Mobility and Child Poverty Commission in its report into non-educational barriers to the elite professions. It reported that working class applicants struggle to get access to top jobs because elite firms systematically exclude working class applicants by applying a “poshness test” to gain entry. Applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds are seen as being less likely to have the soft skills and experiences required for entry into top firms.

City Solicitors Horizons will address the barriers to young people from disadvantaged backgrounds joining the legal profession by introducing a programme which will run for the duration of undergraduates' courses and will include comprehensive classroom and one-to-one training sessions, mentoring from experienced lawyers, and work experience.

Development of standardised inventories of Legal Capability (field work)

Grant: £64,505
November 10, 2015

The project aims to arrive at a standardized tool for evaluating legal confidence which can be used to measure the legal confidence of individuals. To arrive at this standardized tool, a technique called factor analysis is used. Factor analysis allows researchers to investigate concepts that are not easily measured directly by collapsing a large number of variables into a few interpretable underlying factors. Factor analysis has been used to arrive at a standardised test for complex concepts such as “socio-economic status” or differential diagnosis of psychological conditions.

Using Technology to Transform Support to Litigants in Person

Grant: £50,000
November 10, 2015

The aim is to better serve LIPs by further investing in PSU's legal education support and knowledge management systems, while fully establishing dynamic IT systems to support its rapidly expanding service.

Project plans to,

1. Equip volunteers to provide the best possible help to LIPs, improving each LIPs' understanding of the law and the capability to use it, by increasing volunteers':
• understanding of legal process
• knowledge of online information resources and how to access them when working with LIPs
• time available to support LIPs, due to streamlined administrative processes
2. Prepare to respond to changes in LIP need resulting from online reform of the courts

The project will achieve these aims by:

1. Maximising the value of TLEF 2014 grant and the PSU's Office365 intranet by implementing online, automated statistical and volunteer rota systems, and increasing use of LIP online resources through new hardware
2. Providing additional staffing needed to implement new technology
3. Developing online training for PSU volunteers and LIPs
4. Responding to legal and technological changes by
• improving PSU online accessibility for LIPs
• commissioning research into implications of digital reform for LIPs and the PSU

Immigration & Asylum Partnership Project

Grant: £7,363
November 10, 2015

The aim of project is to provide individuals across North Wales, access to independent legal advice on all categories of law relating to immigration & asylum seekers. It is intended that such advice will be delivered through the medium of video conferencing at CAB Cylch Conwy & Wrexham District Citizens Advice offices. The video conference legal advice partnership will be delivered by Jackson Canter through their offices in Liverpool and Manchester.

The grant is to provide the video conferencing equipment required within two Citizens Advice Bureau offices in North Wales, Llandudno & Wrexham, and is required to deliver a pilot face to face advice service via video conferencing.

The Asylum Guides Project

Grant: £148,638
November 10, 2015

The Project will empower people claiming asylum in North West England to engage meaningfully with the asylum process by providing them with legal literacy on the UK asylum system.

Highly skilled volunteer Asylum Guides, located in organisations trusted by the client group, will provide people seeking asylum with a legal literacy programme. They will meet their clients in person at key stages in their journey through the asylum process to understand and prepare for their interactions with the Home Office - from arrival until their case is concluded.

Exhausted by the asylum seeking experience, and ill-prepared to navigate the process alone, this staged, relational legal literacy approach will engage this population to feel more engaged with their claim and have a better understanding of what is happening at each stage of the process. Moreover, the Solihull Early Advice Pilot showed, they are more likely to accept the outcome of their asylum claim if they have had the process explained to them and are able to participate in the decision making with the support of a trained advisor.

Asylum Guides will be trained using digital educational tools thus ensuring that this is an accessible, scalable public law educational model.

Building Legal Capability Of Pregnant Women At Work

Grant: £57,300
November 10, 2015

The project will produce four short videos guiding pregnant women and new mothers through the processes they need to follow to resolve disputes about management of sickness at work and will also scope use of apps to deliver maternity rights information.

Pregnancy discrimination, including poor management of sickness, is widespread. Government research found that 11% of pregnant women lose their jobs because of discrimination. Only 8% of these women take formal action (pursue a grievance, seek advice, employment tribunal claim).

The videos will guide low income women through informal meetings with their employers and the formal grievance process, complementing Maternity Action's widely used online information. The videos will be informed by focus groups with low income women and input from unions, and will be piloted with women prior to release to test efficacy. The videos will be fully evaluated and the learning will inform future projects to build legal capability.

Discussions have been held with the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) about joint work to deliver maternity rights information through apps and the project will also scope this work, producing a detailed proposal.

Get Legal Small Charity Overlay

Grant: £71,500
November 10, 2015

BWB has just soft launched a new On-Line service “BWB Get Legal” (getlegal.bwbllp.com) aimed at the charity sector, which produces bespoke legal and policy documents in response to the user answering document specific questions.

This project is to fund an overlay on BWB Get Legal to meet the specific needs of the smaller charities – where they do not even know what they need - and provide a seamless and very low cost method of meeting those small charity legal needs.

Community Portal – Serving and Connecting Small Charity’s Legal Information and Service Needs

Grant: £50,460
November 10, 2015

This project will provide a scalable and sustainable digital solution to the problem of small charities finding and getting access to legal support, services and people. It will also provide a way for the legal support sector to better connect with small charities and the people running them in a cost-effective and collaborative way. It will take existing online resources from a static to interactive digital solution and create the efficiencies in order for us to deliver relevant legal information to more small charities.

The new solution will be built on the cloud-based Salesforce CRM, software.

Free Online Legal Health Check Self-Assessment For NGOs

Grant: £19,600
November 10, 2015

This project gives NGOs a free, easy-to-use online tool to assess their legal needs, resulting in a report that they can work through with lawyers over time, whether on a fee-paying or pro bono basis. This will help NGOs to use lawyers more effectively and efficiently, being clear about exactly what they need to address and preventing costly disputes from arising by identifying the gaps in their standard operations and programmes.

It will also generate a body of knowledge about the needs and challenges of NGOs, creating the evidence required to generate policy and legislative reform.

Voluntary Sector Legal Information Audit

Grant: £12,950
November 10, 2015

The overall aim of this project is to create a record of the areas and topics where voluntary sector organisations require legal information and to audit where such information currently exists and where the gaps fall. We will cover the full lifecycle of a voluntary organisation from set up, to running the organisation, to winding up.

There is a current lack of coordination of up to date and reliable content in some topic areas as well as a complete absence of material in others. The focus will be on the availability of free legal information.

The long term intention is to use the Voluntary Sector Legal Information Audit to inform the creation of a coordinated online information resource for the sector and our members, in collaboration with other providers. The online resource will provide or signpost voluntary sector organisations to the up to date legal information they need. It will also draw on any partner resources and initiatives, where appropriate. At this stage anticipated partners for the next stage of this project will include BWB LLP, Small Charities Coalition and LawWorks.