Legal Advocacy Support Project

Grant: £50,000
August 8, 2014

Providing legal advice and representation to vulnerable people to ensure all people have access to justice and legal redress. The project will provide volunteer law students with valuable client facing experience, including drafting, collation of evidence, hearing preparation and advocacy.

A unique feature of the Project is that law students are trained to work on a single type of legal matter so that training need only cover a narrowly defined area of law in case preparation saving caseworker time and improving the client’s chance of a fair outcome. Tasks include:

• Preparing appellant’s statement;
• obtaining medical, witness and other evidence;
• Preparation of legal submission;
• Pre-hearing advice to client on the hearing procedure, the key issues in that case and the evidence they need to provide at the hearing; and representation at the appeal hearing.