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Legal aid services have traditionally been delivered by legal aid staff lawyers, community legal aid clinic lawyers and private practice lawyers paid through the legal aid plan. Governments in Canada and in other countries are looking for other ways to improve access to legal services for low-income people through different service-delivery and funding models.

Here are some other service-delivery models:

Expanded Duty Counsel Services
Duty counsel are typically available to an unrepresented person the day he or she appears in court to help the person understand the legal process and their choices. However, duty counsel often work with 30-40 people in a day. This model expands duty counsel services by making them available to eligible people early in the justice process to settle and divert cases from court, if appropriate.

Early Intervention Strategies
This model provides legal assistance to an eligible client very early in the justice process, reducing complications arising from delays in getting legal advice and facilitating early solutions to legal problems.

Assisted Self-Representation
This model combines public legal information services with summary legal advice. For instance, an eligible client might be loaned a videotape to screen and given print materials to read and then could see a lawyer for a limited time to get advice. For example, to review a child support and custody agreement.

Client-Centered Approach to Legal Services Delivery
Not all clients need a lawyer to represent them in court or advocate for them in the adversarial process. Sometimes their needs can be met by other professionals, such as mediators, who can assist with conflict resolution, and public legal educators and paralegals, who can decode a legal document so that a client can understand it or who can explain the legal process, with a lawyer providing necessary legal advice.

Service Links
This model addresses the lack of access to justice that some citizens face because of a lack of access to services to meet their basic needs. For example, a legal assistance program links clients to other services such as free childcare services near the court house; a public transit day-pass so that the person can get to court; mental health and counselling services to assist with underlying personal issues; and, employment counselling.

Here are some other funding models:

Litigation Lending Schemes
These funds assist eligible clients with a civil law case. The up-front costs of the litigation are paid through a loan from the fund. The loan with interest must be repaid at the conclusion of the litigation. In some schemes, the repayment is geared to the litigant’s ability to pay.

Block Contracting of Legal Aid Cases
Rather than funding legal aid work on a case-by-case basis, a legal aid plan could block fund, through a bidding process, a lawyer or a law firm to taken on a fixed number of cases for a fixed fee. This reduces administrative expenses and brings some predictability to a lawyer’s legal aid practice.

Funds to Cover Disbursements When Lawyers Do Pro Bono Work
Lawyers assist clients, who otherwise would not have access to legal advice and services, by taking on cases on a pro bono basis. However, someone has to pay for disbursements — court filing fees, expert witness expenses, etc. A pro bono disbursements fund pays these expenses when a lawyer is doing pro bono work for eligible clients, decreasing the costs of pro bono work for lawyers and increasing the amount of pro bono work they can take on.