It was a perfect Catch-22: to demonstrate the injustice suffered by people who can’t afford a lawyer, you’d need to give them a lawyer — at which point the injustice would disappear. With this in mind, Buckley, Camp, and their colleagues filed their arguments with the Supreme Court of Canada on May 1; they expect a decision this fall. But even they admit the odds aren’t good. If universal legal care is ever going to get on the agenda, it seems increasingly clear that it won’t be thanks to abstract appeals to our sense of justice.

A few blocks away from the Camp Fiorante Matthews offices, it’s business as usual at the BC Supreme Court Self-Help Information Centre. This bright, glass-walled room in one of the Law Courts buildings is where you come if you have a legal issue but no lawyer — or if you had a lawyer but ran out of money, or if you’re trying to figure whether you really need a lawyer, or whether you might qualify for help from legal aid or a pro bono service. In the three years since it opened, the centre has served close to 15,000 people. While a couple of clients browse through the pamphlets on the wall and use the computer terminals to search for information, the woman behind the reception desk helps an elderly man with a thick accent figure out which form he needs to file to reschedule an upcoming court date. On the other side of the room, another employee looks over an affidavit with a Filipino woman who is trying to get a divorce. “You need to send it back to the Philippines,” the staffer says apologetically, “and get him to redo everything.”

The centre is one of a number of programs launched in BC since 2002, when harsh cuts all but wiped out what had been one of the most comprehensive civil legal aid programs in the country. That scorched-earth policy, for all the havoc it wreaked, seems also to have cleared the ground for some of the most innovative approaches to broadening access to justice. Unlike the mostly minor tinkering proposed last year in the eighty-one recommendations of a Coulter Osborne report on civil justice in Ontario, a major review in BC in 2006 came up with three recommendations that could fundamentally reshape how a case moves through the system. One was the creation of “justice hubs,” access points that build on the triage model demonstrated at the self-help centre. “You don’t want your surgeons to be doing blisters,” explains Rick Craig, executive director of the Law Courts Education Society of BC, one of the groups behind the centre.

The other two recommendations are more radical. The first focuses on proportionality: the resources devoted by the courts and the parties in a case should be proportional to the value of the case (measured in dollars, complexity, and human rights). From the beginning of every case, a judge will exert control over how long a trial will last, how many expert witnesses will be permitted, and so on. Second, these and other changes will be enshrined in new “rules of court” that will be completely rewritten to simplify and accelerate the progress of cases through the court. The new rules would even eliminate the statement of claim and statement of defence that have signalled the start of legal proceedings for centuries. The amendments have been under discussion for a year now and are scheduled to take effect in January 2010. Other provinces are watching very closely to see the results — though, as Diana Lowe of the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice notes, “it’s impossible to say what impact these changes will have, because they haven’t been tried anywhere, really, in the world.”

These initiatives may seem like a bit of a diversion, but they are in fact a crucial step on the road to ulc. Part of the reason lawyers are too expensive is that court proceedings are too complex and take too long, so any attempt to expand legal aid coverage will have to be accompanied by measures to make the entire legal machinery more efficient. The system simply can’t afford to waste time dealing with cases like that of the divorced St. Catharines couple who were barred from returning to court earlier this year after a gratuitous seven-year custody battle that reportedly chewed through a dozen judges, a dozen lawyers, twenty-five court orders, and 2,000 pages of court filings, and cost the father alone more than $200,000 in legal fees.

Perhaps even more significant, hubs that provide self-help resources and easy entry into the system are one way of casting a wider net over legal issues that might otherwise go unaddressed. And as recent research conducted by the federal Department of Justice suggests, some of the greatest failings of our existing system — and the most compelling arguments for ulc — can be found outside the courtroom. In a pair of studies whose results are being released this year, principal researcher Ab Currie found that nearly half of all Canadians had experienced at least one “serious and difficult to resolve problem with legal aspects” in the previous three years, in fifteen categories ranging from employment, debt, and housing to personal injury and police action. Of those people, just under 12 percent sought legal assistance, which wouldn’t be a concern if other ways of solving these issues (through community organizations or unions, for example) were working. But only about half of the problems were resolved during the study period, and that has serious implications.

Currie traced a series of trigger effects that create clusters of problems: for instance, a relationship breakdown with legal complications tends to be followed by further legal problems relating to debt and employment. The consequences can also extend beyond legal issues: Currie found that after experiencing a legal problem, 37 percent of people reported associated emotional or mental health complaints, and 24 percent reported associated physical health complaints, leading to increased doctor visits. The implication, of course, is that failing to resolve people’s legal problems efficiently results in higher health care costs.

“We can’t say, okay, if you spend this much on legal aid, you’ll save this much later,” Melina Buckley admits. But an early effort to remedy that can be found in a paper by British researcher Pascoe Pleasence, in the June issue of the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies. He and co-authors Nigel J. Balmer and Alexy Buck calculated that each legal problem reported to cause physical illness costs Britain’s National Health Service about £650, while stress-related effects cost about £30 each. That money doesn’t show up in the ledgers of the legal aid service, but it certainly has a place in discussions about how to fix a broken system.

When we talk about ulc, what we’re really talking about is coverage for a wider array of problems, made available to more people. This could look something like the popular reforms enacted in Finland in 2002, which raised the proportion of households eligible for assistance with their legal costs to 75 percent, with cost sharing on a sliding scale. (The figure is below 30 percent in most English-speaking common-law countries.) This coverage encompasses criminal and civil matters ranging from simple estate inventories to complex litigation. The main criteria are the seriousness of the matter and how well the applicant can handle it on his or her own, rather than the branch of law the problem falls under. All of this has been made possible by what could be, proportionally, the largest salaried legal aid staff in the world.

Most proponents of universality, however, are quick to point out that access to legal representation is only part of the equation. “What happens when people get lawyers,” Rick Craig observes, “is that they tend to fight.” In some types of disputes — family law is an obvious example — clients are often poorly served by an adversarial approach, and may benefit from such options as mediation. Integrating legal services more closely with other social services, including health clinics, is another way of trying to address the issues underlying a legal problem. These sorts of innovations, along with court reforms like those in BC, are already being considered across the country.