Eve Biskind Klothen
Chair, Pennsylvania State Planning Steering Committee
Pennsylvania Legal Services
118 Locust Street
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania 17101-1414

Re:         Pennsylvania Agenda For Legal Services 1998-2001: The Action Plan For a
              Statewide Integrated Legal Services Delivery System

Dear Eve:

Although the Legal Services Corporation has provided extensive oral and written feedback to Pennsylvania legal services programs and state planners about various pieces of your state plan, we want to take this opportunity to memorialize our overall views. As you know, we are very impressed and pleased with the Pennsylvania planning process and plan. We congratulate and thank you, the State Planning Steering Committee, and all of the participants in the planning process on the significant changes realized so far and the obvious commitment to success in achieving a comprehensive delivery system to better serve clients. Your leadership in this process has been especially important.

As we have noted before, the Pennsylvania planning process was, and is, among the most comprehensive we have seen, involving an extensive array of stakeholders, including representatives from client organizations, Project Directors (LSC and non-LSC), funders, law schools, unions, and the state bar association. You have made extensive use of consultants and organized eleven task forces to address the seven areas set out in LSC’s Program Letters and four additional areas: the Role of Law Schools, Restricted/Unrestricted work, Special Populations, and the State Bar’s Role. As indicated in more detail below, we believe the task forces developed some excellent and very creative ideas and we look forward to their implementation.

Our observations on specific sections of the plan follow:

The Task Force on Intake and Delivery produced a thoughtful report on current delivery approaches and steps that can be taken to create a delivery network that improves client access. The current delivery system is fragmented and does not maximize client access. Each of Pennsylvania’s seventeen LSC recipients has a separate intake system. Each intake system varies significantly in staffing, technology, telephony, and quality of service to and access for clients. A few programs have integrated extensive technology into their intake systems and have established telephone intake advice, brief service, and referral as a priority for client services.

The plan has developed eleven touchstones as essential elements that all intake systems should embrace. Implementation of these touchstones will help assure consistently high quality in intake, advice and referral services. The Corporation encourages implementation of these touchstones as soon as possible.

The Task Force on Intake and Delivery found strength in the locally based intake systems’ ability to incorporate local differences in practices into the advice given to callers, and recommends preservation of this capacity in future systems. We are confident regional planners will assure emerging regional intake, advice and referral systems incorporate necessary communication with individual program offices.

Overall, the plan has set realistic short term and long term goals, including among others, hiring a statewide consultant to coordinate and provide technical support, holding a statewide conference and having the Task Force develop minimum standards, which should be achievable in the time frames set in the plan. The planners may want to consider establishing benchmarks such as requiring all programs to meet the minimum standards within one year after they are established and no later than October 2000.

The plan describes an imaginative vision of a delivery system that will use technology to support advocates statewide, provide a statewide communication system linking all providers in the state and provide educational materials for clients. The current level of technology in the state is in transition. The plan describes a need for improvement in technology. While a few of the providers have expanded their technological capacity with Internet access, web sites, e-mail and upgraded computers and telephones, most programs have not done so and also lack connectivity.

The plan contains an ambitious strategy to achieve the needed improvements. The strategy includes both short and long term goals and a realistic timetable to achieve the goals. A Technology Coordinator is to be hired and housed at Pennsylvania Legal Services. Minimum standards for technology have been articulated and a date of October 31, 1999 has been set for all programs to achieve those standards. However, this blueprint for improvement does not articulate a clear vision of the sources of revenue that will be leveraged to pay for the technology changes.

The Corporation finds the technology plan promising and encourages the planners to hire the Technology Coordinator and continue to support the Technology Task Force’s efforts. Achievement of the same level of use of the Internet, e-mail, and technology for legal research by all providers by October 31, 1999 will certainly move the state forward towards its vision.

This section of the plan and the attached task force report are not as well developed as other portions of the plan. The plan calls for a survey of the current mechanisms available for clients to access the legal system to be completed by July 1999. The plan does not indicate who will conduct the survey, how it will be conducted, the funding for the survey or what will be done with the survey results when completed. The plan anticipates that self-help and alternative access systems will be completed by December 31, 1999. The plan does not describe how the planners will use the results of the survey to proceed to improve the self-help and alternative access system.

The planners should review this part of the plan and renew their efforts in this area.

Currently, the training/coordination of legal work landscape consists of duplication of efforts by most individual programs. Little coordinated training has occurred other than in a few areas. There seems to be little or no coordination of legal work. The plan aspires to rectify the current condition and achieve an integrated network of coordinated legal work and training using technology, reinvigorating the existing substantive task force system, and staffing key positions for training and legal work coordination. For example, the plan calls for hiring a Training and Legal Information Coordinator and requiring each program to designate both a Training Responsible Person and Senior Attorneys for each of five substantive law areas. The Training Task Force Report contains a detailed description of the duties of the Training Coordinator. These are all good steps and the Corporation encourages their implementation.

We also hope state planners will give additional consideration to some important issues not addressed in the plan including: what the ultimate training and legal work coordination system will look like, how this new configuration will be financed, how technology will be woven into it, and how PAI attorneys will be brought into this new environment. Hopefully, the hiring of the Training Coordinator and revitalization of the task forces will help the state address these issues.

The plan melds the work of two separate planning groups, the Planning Committee’s Statewide Task Force on Private Attorney Involvement (Task Force) and PBA’s Recruitment Committee of its Task Force on Civil Legal Needs of the Poor (Recruitment Committee). The Plan sets out five goals for improving pro bono services which were recommended by the Task Force and major "steps" for achieving these goals as recommended by the Recruitment Committee. However, this part of the Plan is not as well developed as most of the other sections. The extent of participation by private attorneys in PAI activities varies by program and geographic area. There is very strong support for PAI in the major urban efforts as well as a few suburban and rural areas while other areas have little participation. Currently, there is no common organized effort to enhance participation throughout the state. The plan declares that a goal of state planning is to strengthen and expand services to eligible clients by providing access to pro bono assistance with one hundred percent participation of all county bar associations in pro bono programs but it is unclear as to who has responsibility for implementing this part of the plan. There are no timelines for any of the proposed actions and neither the goals nor "steps" have a strategy for when they will be achieved and who will take responsibility to achieve them. Additionally, the plan does not clarify the role of the Pennsylvania Bar Association or the other stakeholders.

The state planners should consider asking the Recruitment Committee and the Task Force to set time lines for achieving the goals and "steps" and designate how they will be achieved.

Pennsylvania legal services programs receive significant state and local funding. The planning report shows that the planners recognize the vital resource contribution made by pro bono services and the possibilities made available with technological advancements. The Task Force on Resource Development produced an excellent and detailed strategy to expand financial resources using fifteen initiatives. The strategy includes specific goals, responsible parties, steps and time lines. A Pennsylvania Resource Development Committee will be established to develop a resource development plan by April 1999 and a Resource Development Coordinator will be hired at PLS.

LSC applauds the careful reasoning and preparation contained in this section of the plan.

The state has organized into six regions for planning purposes. The plan contemplates integration on two levels. First, the programs in each region will create regional planning councils and collaborate to create a comprehensive delivery system for their regions. Second, the Statewide Legal Services Steering Committee will oversee a variety of activities designed to integrate the regions into a statewide system. We are pleased to see that three of the six regions (Northwest, Northeast and Southeast) have submitted regional plans that provide for a new configuration of programs in those regions with one LSC recipient for each region by January 2001. We believe that the original formula articulated in the October Plan permitting multiple programs per region presented severe challenges to creating an integrated delivery system within each region and the state as a whole. We believe that the regional plans which recognize the benefits of merger are the optimal way to achieve the state’s goal of a state civil legal services system that will assure that low-income persons in every community have equal access to justice. While we can support the consortium of programs in the Southwest Region based upon their unique history of collaboration and the strength of the state system you are creating, we remain very concerned about integration in the Southcentral region-- where merger is not proposed. We look forward to, and expect, a more fully developed plan for the Southcentral region which, like the Northwest, Northeast and Southeast regions, proposes consolidation of service areas by January 2001.

We also note our concern that the Southeast regional plan appears to contemplate the possibility of a single LSC recipient, with little or no other funds, providing a limited range of client services. We have previously expressed our view that a proposal to isolate LSC funding in one entity in this manner will cause us to question the state’s designation of separate Philadelphia and Southeast regions. The articulated reasons for separating these two regions are not persuasive if the major purpose of the LSC program in the Southeast is to provide a reduced range of services.

To mesh the Corporation’s views with the state and regional plans, LSC will redraw some service areas and compete them as follows:

Northwest Region. We will combine and compete the two present service areas (PA-15 & PA-10) as one for the FY 2000 competition. This region has indicated its desire to proceed with one service area this coming year.

Southeast Region. We will combine and compete the four present service areas (PA-3, 4, 12, & 18) as one for the FY 2001 competition. This time frame acknowledges the time the planners have requested to accomplish the proposed consolidation.

Northeast Region. We will combine and compete the four present service areas (PA-9, 13, 14, & 17) as one for the FY 2001 competition. We believe this time frame provides sufficient time for the proposed consolidation.

Southcentral Region. We will compete one service area in this region combining the present PA-2 and PA-21 for the FY 2001 competition. PA- 20’s placement will be reconsidered following additional planning by the state.

Southwest Region. PA-5, 8, & 11 will remain unchanged for the FY 2000 competition as the Consortium works towards providing a fully integrated and coordinated delivery system in that region which fits into the statewide civil legal services delivery system. The Southwest Region’s progress will be reviewed when we make funding decisions later this Fall.

Philadelphia Region. There will be no changes in the LSC service area for the FY 2000 competition.

We congratulate Pennsylvania on its hard work to plan for reconfiguration. LSC recognizes that this issue has been carefully considered by the state and that the participants have traveled a long and at times difficult road in a short period of time to get to the current position on configuration. We encourage the state and regional planners to continue their work and look forward to the completion of the regional consolidation plans by January 2001.

VIII.            Specialty Programs

Pennsylvania is fortunate to have a significant number of non-LSC funded specialty programs, six of which are funded by PLS -- Pennsylvania Health Law Project, Regional Housing Legal Services, Pennsylvania Utility Law Project, Farmworker Project, Pennsylvania Institutional Law Project and Community Justice Project--and non-PLS funded programs --Education Law Center, Disabilities Law Center and Women’s Law Center. Unfortunately these specialty programs do not coordinate well with each other or with the LSC-funded geographic programs. This lack of coordination weakens the possibility of a comprehensive integrated statewide delivery system. The current configuration exhibits duplication of efforts among specialist among themselves as well as the geographic based programs, duplication of administration, gaps in coverage and failure to share expertise with each other.

The Corporation recognizes the planner's positive effort to strengthen and expand services to eligible clients by enabling the delivery network to take fuller advantage of the specialty programs. The plan enumerates realistic goals to be achieved, i.e., improving referral networks, reducing duplication, improving administrative efficiency and making specialty resources better known and easier to find. The plan outlines major steps for achieving the goals, including exploring new relationships and structures and collaborative efforts among all providers in the state. While the report of the Task Force on Specialty Programs suggests specific action to be taken and time lines for these steps, the plan does not. It is unclear if the absence of the steps and time lines in the plan means that the planners are not committed to pursue these steps to improve the delivery system.

The Corporation encourages the planners to consider adopting specific steps to be followed, setting specific time lines and designating leadership to better integrate the specialty programs into the statewide delivery network. The Corporation also encourages the planners to integrate the specialty program as fully as possible into the positive changes that are planned in the seven areas set out in 98-6 Program Letter.

IX.           Restricted and Unrestricted Services.

The plan recognizes that all low-income persons in the state should have access to a full range of legal services. To make this possible, the planners suggest improving the capacity of intake and referral systems to ensure clients find the appropriate service provider, extending service of unrestricted programs to specific special populations and considering reallocation of funding to unrestricted services. The plan gives three major steps for achieving those goals: development of an intake manual; consideration of funding reallocation in upcoming regional planning discussions; and identifying attorneys and organizations which will handle restricted cases.

The Corporation praises the planners desire to assure that all citizens in Pennsylvania have access to appropriate services. Appropriate referrals from and to programs are a good start to a more integrated delivery network. The Corporation encourages the planers to continue working in this area and suggests that the planers consider developing more concrete time lines to take the steps for achieving its stated goals.

X.            The Role of Pennsylvania’s Seven Law Schools.

The plan recognizes the important role of law schools in the delivery network and gives five good goals for strengthening the role of law schools in the statewide delivery system and five major steps for achieving the goals. This part of the plan would benefit from specific time lines and designation of leadership to assure that the steps are taken.

XI.            Conclusion

In many ways, this plan effectively lays the groundwork for a comprehensive and integrated delivery system throughout the state of Pennsylvania. It is clear that Pennsylvania has invested significant resources in determining what can be done to create a better legal services delivery system and the plan takes many significant and measurable steps to make high quality legal services available to all low-income people in Pennsylvania. We encourage you to continue your fine work and ask that you report to the Corporation on October 1, 1999 on the Support Team hiring and task force activities, including the results of the technology conference. We would also appreciate receiving copies of the regional reports when submitted to PLS.