The clinic–intermediary partnerships/legal health check-up is an approach to service delivery that recognizes the need to create a strong mechanism to achieve outreach and to provide holistic and integrated services to disadvantaged people. This is a response to a solid body of research, consistent with much clinical experience by practitioners that shows there is a high prevalence of unmet legal need among the population and that people often do not recognize the legal issues embedded in the everyday problems they experience. These problems are a part of the complex matrix of poverty; providing legal services in a way that responds to these aspects of legal problems can play a role in alleviating the conditions of disadvantaged people.
This report examines the experience of 12 community legal clinics adapting an approach to service delivery, the legal health check-up (LHC), that was pioneered at Halton Community Legal Services (HCLS). HCLS and the 12 clinics are all part of the province-wide Legal Aid Ontario community legal clinic system.
A summary of the Legal Health Check-Up Project can be found here.