A Bus Load of Legal Help for Rural Californians

There are 188,147 practicing lawyers in California. The trouble is, they’re not distributed evenly across the state’s 163,696 square miles, leaving residents of rural communities hours away from professionals who can help with their legal concerns.

“There are these big, deep pockets of poverty in California that are overwhelming,” says Julia Wilson, chief executive of OneJustice, a legal-assistance charity. “There aren’t law schools, there aren’t big law firms, there are fewer legal-aid nonprofits.”

That’s where the Justice Bus comes in. Forty-nine times in 2016, lawyers from San Francisco and Los Angeles piled into tour buses early in the morning and rode out past the suburbs to meet with veterans, immigrants, and anyone else who might benefit from their free counsel.

The lawyers receive OneJustice training online in advance of the journey and in person during it. Once they arrive, they meet for four to six hours with locals who have signed up ahead of time for one-on-one sessions. Clients who are most comfortable speaking a language other than English are paired with lawyers who speak their native tongue or are provided with interpreters.

The buses have been rolling for a decade, bringing 3,653 volunteers to help 6,820 clients, more than three-quarters of whom report an improvement in their legal situations.

Ms. Wilson recently received a 2017 leadership award from the James Irvine Foundation and plans to use the $200,000 prize to expand the Justice Bus program and help replicate the idea in other parts of the country.

In addition to helping individual clients, Ms. Wilson says the Justice Bus teaches lawyers about how their profession affects people who live outside of cities: “There’s this whole new level of awareness in the California legal community about the legal needs in rural areas.”