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Supporting non-legal workers to assist homeless clients in legal processes

As indicated above, some caseworkers report feeling overstretched, vulnerable and poorly informed when supporting clients to address their legal needs. In consultations we asked caseworkers what would help them to support their homeless clients to address their legal issues. The following suggestions were offered.

Priority access to legal support

Some workers consulted for this study said that a legal advice ‘hotline’ would assist them in promptly assisting clients with urgent legal needs.¹¹⁸ As indicated below, there are some legal advice services available to caseworkers and other community workers. However, in this study we have not examined what proportion of community workers are aware of these services or how useful they find these services.

While CLCs often support non-legal agencies, the NSW Consumer Credit Legal Centre (CCLC) operates a dedicated telephone legal advice line for community workers, financial counsellors and government and community lawyers. Through this service community workers may obtain legal advice on behalf of their clients or guidance so that they can handle a client’s matter through their own service. The centre will also discuss referral options with workers.¹¹⁹

The Consumer Credit Legal Centre also provides a fairly formal process of ‘cooperative legal assistance to caseworkers’. CCLC:

will accept the referral of a client and handle their case exclusively. Often it will be appropriate for a [referring] worker to remain involved. The extent of this involvement may vary from a solicitor in a regional community legal centre who represents a client and obtains some guidance from our centre solicitors, to the situation where we handle the matter but ask the worker to obtain documents and statements from the client according to our instructions.

Most commonly, a financial counsellor or community worker may assist a client to self-represent by drafting letters, explaining legal processes and other essential tasks with assistance from Consumer Credit Legal Centre. This assistance may take the form of obtaining telephone advice at appropriate points in the process, and/or using the information and sample forms and letters provided by Consumer Credit Legal Centre.¹²⁰

For general legal issues caseworkers can also call LawAccess, the statewide telephone legal advice and referral service described in Chapter 6. LawAccess can advise caseworkers on legal issues they face in dealing with their clients and, in certain circumstances, the actual legal issues of their clients. While the LawAccess policy is to speak directly to the client with the legal problem, in situations where the client lacks the capacity to speak directly or understand the advice, LawAccess will, with the permission of the client, talk to their caseworker. A limitation for caseworkers using LawAccess for urgent legal advice is that it operates in business hours only.

One caseworker was not in favour of telephone helplines, as he found the people giving advice over the telephone tended to be non-committal, providing only qualified advice.¹²¹ Workers in a regional area were also not in favour of central advice lines, as they felt that these services could not substitute local networking, and that the complexity of issues facing homeless clients means that issues are better addressed by information sharing though interagency forums.¹²²

Other workers interviewed for this project preferred to rely on written legal resources such as The Law Handbook to guide the information and ‘advice’ they give. Citing the example of a kit produced by the Protective Commissioner’s Office, one worker suggested:

… it would be good if somebody could produce very simple, basic information kits, that would be of use to people working in our agencies, that would cover the basic areas of law that we are likely to encounter you know. Clients who are seeking an AVO or who have breached an AVO, what’s the procedure, what are their rights.¹²³

‘Law for non-lawyers’: Training for caseworkers

Noting a lack of familiarity among caseworkers about legal processes and avenues of legal support, several agencies suggested that education and training seminars may be very beneficial.¹²⁴ At one of the roundtable discussions, workers stated what they wanted.

… education … to gain the knowledge to support our clients and advocate for them, you know, at a stronger level in legal aspects, really because we’re just, you know, in the dark.

I agree with what somebody said about if you had a workshop, if somebody would give us a workshop for court procedures for welfare workers and social workers, I’d attend that. And I’d encourage every person that I work with to attend that. I really would.¹²⁵

Workers also wanted more information about the bureaucratic processes they support clients through (e.g. dealing with Housing, Centrelink and DoCS), finding previous training very useful.

To the great credit of the Department of Housing and Homelessness Action Team, a few years ago they did run some seminars for the NGOs and they did give us some information about their policy criteria which I have found has been immensely helpful in dealing with the Department of Housing, because now when I’m dealing on behalf of a client with that department, I know what their criteria are and I can specifically address that with the department.¹²⁶

An example of the type of training that non-legal workers appear to be requesting is that provided by Shopfront to youth workers in their area. The Principal Solicitor at Shopfront stated:

We can’t be everywhere at once, so part of ensuring that homeless young people get good legal support is to train the people who work with them. We are not trying to turn youth workers into lawyers, but aim to give them the ability to recognise a legal problem, make appropriate referrals and support their clients throughout the legal process (e.g. by writing court reports or giving evidence). We also teach youth workers about their obligations in terms of confidentiality, duty of care, reporting child abuse, dealing with the police, etc.¹²⁷

Most CLCs, ALSs and Legal Aid NSW also undertake community legal education, with some providing specialised training for community workers and agencies working with disadvantaged people.¹²⁸ Government agencies such as Centrelink also provide information to community groups and workers.¹²⁹ However, the level of awareness among workers about the availability of different training and community legal education programs and the accessibility and utility of these education programs to community workers were not specifically examined this study.

Conclusion

Non-legal workers can significantly enhance the capacity of homeless clients to identify and address their legal issues. However, workers indicated in this study that they require support in the form of legal information, access to legal advice and further training to perform this role. Legal issues of particular interest to their roles as caseworkers/community workers include various statutory reporting requirements, the impact of privacy legislation on communication about clients with other agencies, and the limitations and responsibilities on advice given by non-legal practitioners on legal issues. It appears that there are some legal advice services available to caseworkers. However, it also seems, on the basis of our consultations, that the level of awareness of these services among workers is variable.

Another strategy that workers report as highly beneficial to legal and non-legal agencies, staff and homeless clients is increased communication and coordination between legal and non-legal service providers, particularly at the local level. The need to include homeless people and local communities in these networks to ensure that services devised actually respond to the clients needs was also stressed.¹³⁰ This involves including homeless people in the planning and ongoing review of services. Coordinating legal and non-legal services is discussed in detail below.