How Spatial Solutions Enhance Access to Legal Aid in Pueblo

As a legal professional, you naturally have an understanding of how often legal needs overlap with spatial data usage, but there’s a certain bit of overlap between that and a public legal aid pueblo campaign like this one. There’s a high likelihood you operate with some level of pro bono services in your practice. But you may not understand the full extent to which innovation varies the game in terms of enabling more pro bono services. In this post, we’ll look at how your practice can benefit in terms of the bigger picture. One way to think about legal aid is as a means of opening up the law so that even citizens who cannot afford representation are able to access justice.

CivicTech is one example – a group of individuals organized around increasing access to legal resources for those who lack sufficient representation while navigating the legal system. Often, this is a matter of ensuring adequate legal aid within a local jurisdiction. In Colorado (where I am located), the problem is pretty specific – many rural and underserved communities like Pueblo lack adequate legal aid resources. Understanding this, you can probably see how spatial solutions often underpin the lifeblood of organizations like CivicTech – namely, the locations and access points of local legal aid organizations. This is where our organization, Spatial Collect, plays an important role. To put this another way, those who require legal aid are most likely unable to travel long distance to seek legal counsel and representation. Geographic barriers are one of many obstacles in accessing justice, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics regarding American access to justice.

Without getting too deep into the statistics part of this, the main point is that where you are heavily reliant on community legal aid organizations to both serve as community safety nets and inform citizens of their rights under the law, location accessibility is one of the primary challenges. And for local governments and nonprofit legal organizations, doing more with less is essential in maintaining a healthy legal aid offering. So, where does Spatial Collect come into all this? With extensive experience in many areas related to geospatial technology, we specialize in cutting edge sound, mapping, and surveying solutions. LiDAR mapping in particular is one of the most valuable educational tools for local governments and nonprofit legal aid organizations. And our aid of the latter in using the tool has increased their commitment to better serving citizens in need of legal advice by increasing the areas they can reasonably cover.

Watching this case study in action highlighted two major benefits of spatial technology: first, the sheer amplification of legal aid provided to those who need it, and second, how much easier it was for citizens exposed to legal aid pros to connect with legal professionals than it was before. Today, Pueblo law practitioners have a great deal of material assets to work with, but logic suggests it’s spatial technology that allowed them to work more effectively, thereby enabling more legal aid to be offered in Pueblo – something that’s sorely needed. To put things simply, when a rural county like Pueblo is only able to offer legal aid through one or two channels, or doesn’t have adequate awareness campaigns in place to inform citizens of legal aid availability, you’re facing a perfect storm of obstacles to effective justice. By leveraging spatial solutions, even in rural terms, a county can open up new opportunities for citizen access to the law and legal answer.

The considerations, of course, are adequate funding, and this is where nonprofits and civic organizations come into play – funding such efforts, and ensuring that spatial technology is used for good within the legal space in order to better serve citizens in these communities, even where legal representation is often provided pro bono. To be clear, you aren’t saying the legal aid process is simple. Rather, a collection of ad hoc solutions to a existing problem can bring about solutions that were previously not possible, or which simply would not have existed without the technology and strategy to expand into underserved communities. It’s certainly true of spatial technology when it comes to the legal aid effort and serving the public good. But amidst a broadening array of new tools and approaches in the legal technology toolbox, this one stands out as one of the most effective in broadening citizen access to justice.

For more information on access to justice, you can visit the American Bar Association’s page on access to justice.