Why can paralegals not serve legal aid clients? The question that has been asked for many years is if paralegals can take legal aid. The point of legal aid is to make justice more accessible to lower economic classes. If anything paralegals would make more sense than high priced lawyers. Further by not allowing everybody to serve legal aid clients, the ones we are hurting are the clients.
Back in 2008 Paralegals became licensed and regulated by the Law Society of Upper Canada, which today is called the Law Society of Ontario. Since becoming a licensed profession paralegals have been trying to gain more privileges that should come hand in hand with that. Over the past fifteen years many paralegal organizations have advocated for this cause. However lawyers as a general group have been against it, simply because of the business side. In some ways we have been successful. We have benchers and a board in the Law Society, the Lawyer Referral Service is now referred to as the Law Society Referral Service and most recently we have been informed that paralegals will be allowed to provide family law service, after being taking a separate course of study to obtain the license.
If the point is to make access to justice easier, shouldn’t paralegals be allowed to service Legal Aid clients? Within the past twelve years positions for paralegals have opened in legal aid centres. While the positions are few and far between they are a large step in the right direction for our profession. We hope more opportunities will open in the near future so that more people can have better access to better justice.