Victoria-area residents who need help with everything from marriage issues to employment disputes now have one-stop shop for legal expertise.
Victoria’s new Justice Access Centre, which opened Thursday in a section of the Victoria courthouse, is meant to connect people with the justice system and help them solve their problems as quickly and economically as possible.
“We know that the system needs to change,” Anton said. “And we can continue to find better ways to deliver service and create a modern, responsive and fair system — a system that responds directly to people’s needs,” Attorney General Suzanne Anton said at a brief ceremony.
The facility is also home to the University of Victoria Law Centre, where law students provide free legal services to low-income clients, and is supported by the Legal Services Society, the Law Foundation and the Access Pro Bono Society.
The centre will help people with family and civil-justice problems, such as separation, divorce, parenting responsibilities, support, housing, money woes, “all those things that confront families when there are family breakdowns,” Anton said.
There are already two such centres in B.C. — in Nanaimo and Vancouver. Victoria’s facility is in the former Vancouver Island Land Titles Office, which underwent a $1-million renovation.
Anton said people want options for dealing with legal issues, and the Justice Access Centre seeks to offer them,
“Courts are one way of resolving family disputes, but there are other ways,” she said. “If you can get a quicker resolution through mediation, that helps families.”
A survey indicated that only one-third of clients at the Vancouver centre end up proceeding to court.
Having the UVic Law Centre located at the Victoria facility will be a big benefit for the students and the people they help, said Jeremy Webber, dean of UVic’s school of law.
“For well over 30 years, [the Law Centre] has been delivering services to people who could otherwise not afford them. Well over one-third of our students work a complete semester in the Law Centre. Each of those students handles something like 35 files.”
The students are supervised by lawyers, Webber said, and work with a combined total of about 1,800 clients in any given year.
Working at the Law Centre is a practical way to learn and has almost become a “rite of passage” for aspiring lawyers, said third-year UVic law student Steve Parr. He was one of several students who chatted with Anton as she took a tour of the site.
“You actually learn what it’s like to be a lawyer here,” Parr said. “You’re representing clients, you’re meeting clients, you’re appearing before the court, helping people with real problems.”
The justice-centre model has already proved to be an excellent way of providing the public with legal assistance, said Jamie Maclaren, executive director of the Access Pro Bono Society. He said the society draws from 800 volunteer lawyers and 500 volunteers who are non-lawyers to provide free services, and will be offering legal clinics at the Victoria centre.
