Mr. Tim Watson, Executive Director
Tennessee Association of Legal Services
211 Union Street
Nashville, Tennessee 37201

Dear Tim:

           This letter supplements our May 6, 1999 correspondence to you regarding the Tennessee State Plan, "Access to Civil Justice: Meeting the Need in Tennessee." The staff of the Legal Services Corporation Office of Program Performance has thoroughly reviewed and discussed Tennessee's October 1998 State Planning Report and the supplemental information you gave us prior to and at our April meeting in Nashville. Staff have also reviewed and concur with the substantive suggestions and observations set forth in the May 6^th correspondence. Some of the concerns we will discuss in this letter have also been raised with LSC program directors in meetings with LSC at conferences in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Florida.

           Before turning to the issues set out in our May correspondence, we want to note the collaborative relationship between Tennessee’s LSC programs, TALS and the Tennessee Justice Center (TJC). It is clear that a substantial portion of your success in increasing state support for civil legal services results from your coordinated approach to issues such as resource development. We are also aware of your recent state planning efforts, including but not limited to prioritizing the action steps outlined in the October report and establishing a broader-based state planning oversight entity. We hope that these reflect a commitment by the Tennessee planners to a process in which a broad group of stakeholders work together over time to achieve goals and reformulate strategies, when appropriate. In that spirit, our suggestions and comments are designed to help you realize your current objectives with greater speed and chance of success. We are available to answer any questions or concerns about our response to your plan and to help you in your planning work.

           Our May 6th letter encouraged the Tennessee state planners to establish a governance entity to oversee activities generated by the state plan’s goals. At that time we also noted that the "planning report does not effectively evaluate the potential role of integrated regional or statewide centralized intake, advice and referral systems," and urged planners to seriously consider the benefits of such a system in Tennessee. We suggested that planners expand their technology planning far beyond "the process of identifying and acquiring technological tools" to include a vision of "the role of technology in relationship to the delivery of civil legal services."

           We outlined our concerns about the degree to which some of the smaller programs found themselves nursing multiple grants and contracts, as well as the fact that some programs -- as opposed to a statewide entity -- had applied for and were in the process of operating statewide civil equal justice projects (the statewide seniors hotline is an example). We proposed that planners might want to address these dynamics through the creation of a centralized, statewide resource development and grant administration function. We suggested that planners study how local fundraising activities might be directed to the service of clients in severely impoverished areas of the state. Our letter asked planners how private bar efforts could improve legal representation for poor clients throughout Tennessee -- especially disproportionately underserved rural areas -- rather than only in jurisdictions with a high PAI volume. Finally, we wrote that the plan did not really address the merits and weaknesses of the current configuration system.

           Between the time the Tennessee plan was submitted and now, LSC programs have created an Implementation Committee (IC) to work on several of the plan’s goals. This committee, composed primarily of LSC program directors, has recommended that a broader committee focused on equal justice issues be established to carry out specific projects.

           We have some suggestions with regard to each of these entities – the IC and the larger committee – that we hope you will seriously consider. We believe that the IC would benefit from additional structure and greater definition of responsibility, and encourage you to weigh the advantages of appointing a chair who is not an LSC, TJC or TALS project director or board member. We also hope that the IC will establish a formal process by which decisions are made, implemented and reviewed to ensure accountability with the original goals. Without specific tasks, assignments and outcomes, it is difficult to measure achievements and enjoy the satisfaction of accomplishment.

           It appears that the broader committee, suggested by the IC and which we are calling the Equal Justice Committee (EJC) for the purposes of this letter, will be composed primarily of individuals committed to access to justice but not necessarily staff, program directors or board members. Its membership will include representatives from the judiciary, bar association, legislature, and law schools. Client involvement and representation from other non-legal community based partners might also be helpful. As we understand it, legal services programs and TALS will participate as adjunct staff to this committee. Through various subcommittees and members, EJC efforts will focus on expanding and improving statewide resource development strategies, technology capabilities, pro bono involvement and community education.

           Creation of a broad-based committee will help institutionalize efforts to expand and strengthen services to low-income clients in Tennessee. It will quite appropriately spread responsibility for improving the delivery of civil legal services beyond the LSC programs by assigning tasks and ownership to other important players in the civil justice system. We hope that one of this committee’s first jobs will be to articulate the values that will guide their work. We encourage the committee to also set specific tasks for itself, with quantifiable outcomes and firm deadlines.

           We believe that the work of the EJC will be more fruitful if it is institutionalized outside of the legal services community. Some states have persuaded their Supreme Courts to charter such a planning entity and direct it to produce statewide strategies before embarking on specific projects. LSC encourages the Tennessee planners and the soon-to-be-formed EJC to consider a variety of options when determining the best approach, consistent with the objectives outlined in the LSC Program Letters 98-1 and 98-6, and in our May 26^th follow-up.

III.  A Delivery Network that Maximizes Client Access, Efficient Delivery, and High Quality Legal Assistance

           This topic was discussed in our earlier letter and when we met with LSC program directors at the Southeast Project Directors Association conference in Florida. In addition to serious consideration by the program directors, we hope that, at some point, a subcommittee of the EJC will review from the statewide perspective how technology and access to justice intersect. The Tennessee plan did not address in any depth the ways in which technology could ease access to legal services for clients in rural areas and for individuals with other access barriers. It did not look at how statewide or regional advice, counsel and intake systems might both improve client access and permit individual programs to concentrate more fully on extended legal services activities. We understand that a team of LSC program staff from Tennessee will visit sites where technology has been strategically employed to expand client access and support systems, and are encouraged by this.

           Tennessee’s plan acknowledges that the state’s LSC programs have not approached technology in a coordinated way. Thus we hope that the EJC will be asked to study the integration of technology into the civil equal justice delivery system. It might want to learn how individual program capabilities link (or fail to link) clients, community services providers, judges, pro bono lawyers, public schools, and other significant resources used by low-income Tennesseans. The review of how technology can expand intake systems might include its affect on PAI, community education, staff and volunteer training, and communication with other service providers and advocates. There are a number of thoughtful planning initiatives underway in other states that look broadly at the present and future role of technology in promoting a full-range of legal services. We will be happy to share that information with you, if it would be useful to your work.

           TALS has been charged with building a website for the state. One component of the site will be open to the public and dedicated to providing information on the legal services programs as well as contain community education material. Another component will include a brief bank and program resources that are accessible only to LSC and TJC staff. Assigning TALS this responsibility is appropriate given its position as a center for information, training and resources, and we encourage TALS to study effective statewide legal services websites elsewhere before designing Tennessee’s.

           The TBA has created an Access to Justice Committee (ATJ) to perform and expand on the functions of its Pro Bono Committee. Here is another area in which the breadth of the EJC proposed membership will be beneficial, and merging the two might be worth considering. In any event, we hope that the two committees will collaborate on PAI activation, first examining how PAI can address existing inequalities in access to legal services, including areas of representation as well as rural and other client communities where private bar engagement is minimal. Here, as in other aspects of state planning, improving opportunities to meet the civil legal needs of poor people is the primary objective.

           LSC programs in Tennessee have obtained funding from a variety of state, federal and private sources to improve and sustain their work in the state. This is commendable and has allowed programs to engage in impressive and important activities. Tennessee has been a leader in pursuing legislatively mandated filing fee funds and other state-legislated fees. We applaud your recent success in securing an increase on parking and traffic offenses, and are excited about the expanded services these additional revenues will provide for clients in need. We also note your efforts to obtain cy pres awards and to secure targeted special purpose grants, such as the grant to establish a statewide hotline for elderly clients (though we have continuing concerns about the lack of centralized resource development and administrative coordinating capacity).

           On the other hand, these successes have not necessarily given clients in rural communities and those experiencing language barriers or extreme poverty an acceptable level of access to justice systems. In 1998, for example, funding per poor person in the state ranged between $12.75 in one program to $23.03 in another. While funding does not have to be uniform across the state, LSC has been clear that an important objective in state planning is to ensure relative equality of access for low-income clients, regardless of where they reside. Thus, we hope you will weigh the merits of a staff position devoted to both statewide and regional resource development. This function might also include cultivation of funds to support statewide legal work focused on issues that LSC programs currently cannot address and that the TJC has not assumed. Planners might want to think about housing management of the grants and contracts, now the responsibility of individual programs and staff attorneys, in this function. A statewide resource developer could oversee the many separate grants, relieving staff attorneys and program managers of a portion of that burden.

           We believe that the Tennessee planners must squarely address the configuration issues identified in our May 6^th letter. A thoughtful exploration must include the relationship between LSC and non-LSC funded programs, the needs of clients for all types of representation and current gaps in the delivery system. While some issues are unique to Tennessee, many others are common to a number of states, and we encourage you to talk them over with planners elsewhere. You might also try designing the most appropriate civil legal services delivery system for Tennessee, assuming none existed prior to this point and assuming FY 2000 funding levels. This exercise might help focus configuration discussions more on the current and future needs of low-income clients than on historical boundaries. We would also be interested in your thoughts on whether the existing program configuration has affected Tennessee’s ability to create and implement a viable state plan.

           We hope that you will consider our suggestions and would like you to give us, by December 1, 1999, a response to this letter and to our May 6, 1999 letter. Include an update on any committee work and attach any agendas developed. Describe your efforts to institutionalize state planning, expand and coordinate technology resources, and any activities you will be pursuing to expand statewide resource development and technology capacities. We would also like to hear your thoughts about LSC’s pro bono and configuration concerns.