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1. Community Oriented Lawyering is an "organizational strategy" of law offices that makes problem solving for individual and community clients' part of the core mission of the office and the daily work of line attorneys. It's characteristics, by contrast to a case-centered strategy, are as follows:

    

   	Case Centered	Community Oriented
   Unit of work	Crimes Cases Complaints	People Problems Relationships
   Definition of success	Win cases Uphold rule of law Be fair and impartial	Reduce the severity of the problem Improve quality of life Restore relationships
   Community role	Witnesses Clients	Influences priorities Necessary partner
   Interagency collaboration	Limited to high-visibility cases, "issues du jour"	FREQUENT, INTENSIVE
   Tools	Investigation Negotiation Criminal Prosecution Plea Bargaining CIVIL LAWSUITS	Also includes: Community mobilization Training Alternative remedies Negotiated voluntary compliance Motivating agency cooperation
   Favorite question	What happened?	What's happening?

   1. The basic mission is enlarged: Community Oriented Lawyering concerns people and places, in addition to crimes and cases. In addition to winning cases, Community Oriented Lawyering seeks to directly generate outcomes that clients and community stakeholders value, such as increasing public safety, preventing crime, solving neighborhood problems, helping individuals find the help they need to improve their lives, or facilitating economic development.

   2. The basic unit of work for line attorneys is a problem rather than a case.In this new strategy, prosecutors think of drug markets instead of drug cases; legal services lawyers focus on the health of neighborhoods not only the list of addresses on their case-files.

   3. The tool kit is larger. To these offices, conventional case processing is simply a tool, not an end in itself. The new prosecutors use civil instead of criminal suits, legal aid lawyers invent new forms of action to get vacant properties quickly into the hands of non-profit developers, and defenders may collaborate in creation of new drug courts and mental health courts. All of them mobilize neighborhood residents, educate potential victims, use non-adversarial remedies; in other words, whatever it takes. They are much more likely than their peers to rely on negotiated, voluntary compliance.

   4. The relationship to the community is different. In the new approach, the community is seen as a potential partner, not merely a passive client. The community helps define what is important and also what constitutes success. Line prosecutors meet with neighbors and business owners to identify urgent priorities, sometimes moving their offices the neighborhoods to learn, first hand, why car theft is a priority of local residents. Defenders listen actively to victims and support new laws to prevent crime and improve programs to prevent crime. Law schools establish new clinics based on a canvass of the needs of neighborhood organizations rather than the existing law school curriculum.

   5. Collaboration with other groups is frequent and intense. In more conventional practice, lawyers work alone or in small groups. Once an office or division shifts to solving problems and generating outcomes, it discovers that success depends on educating, persuading, cajoling, meeting, sharing information, and (even) sharing power with other agencies and organizations, public and private. U.S. Attorneys discover that they need street gang workers from non-profit organizations to stop gun violence. Public interest lawyers discover they must work with police when they represent neighborhood groups. Defense attorneys need the help of prosecutors and judges to clear outstanding warrants so their clients can get employment. Pro bono attorneys need volunteer psychiatrists to help mentally ill clients apply for disability benefits.

   6. The key question is different. The conventional practice is revolves around the question, "What happened?" The newer offices ask, in addition, "What's happening?" The angle of vision is profoundly different: One is trying to assign responsibility for what has happened; the other, in addition, seeks to reshape what will happen.

2. Community Oriented Lawyering can be found in many different law offices and legal programs

   1. Law School Clinics: Many law schools now have clinics where clients are community organizations or small businesses operating in distressed communities. Others have pioneered a holistic approach to individual client representation in areas such as family law, loss of public benefits, and criminal defense.

   2. Pro Bono: In many communities, pro bono attorneys are helping local non-profit organizations, representing start-up small businesses in distressed communities, and playing a part-with other professionals-in holistic responses to complex human problems such as homelessness, addiction, untreated mental illness, and child abandonment and abuse.

   3. Legal aid and legal services: Some offices have shifted to "holistic" representation, treating the legal issue that the client brings in-such as eviction or loss of public support-as the "presenting problem" only. Others have set up separate divisions to represent community groups rather than individuals, which often involve an extensive transactional law practice.

   4. Community Prosecution: District Attorneys, U.S. Attorneys, and City Prosecutors in many jurisdictions have reassigned line attorneys to specific, high-crime neighborhoods where they generate new, collaborative strategies to address chronic problems, often using their knowledge and status as leverage to cause public agencies to address underlying causes. Others create divisions or sections that take a problem-solving approach to a class of cases.

   5. Community Oriented Defenders: Some defender agencies are shifting to holistic representation, employing social workers and former prisoners, for example, to persuade judges to forego incarceration by assembling a meaningful plan for addressing the life issues that are giving rise to crimes. Others are creating offices or divisions to represent clients from specific neighborhoods, so they can work with community groups to create networks and services of support for persons under community supervision, and better support community groups seeking system change.

   6. Private practitioners: Some attorneys whose practice is protecting against violations of civil rights or environmental laws routinely use litigation or the threat of litigation as leverage to bring traditionally excluded groups to the table for formal collaborative problem-solving processes.

   7. Municipal attorneys: City/county attorneys as well as in-house lawyers in local agencies are well positioned to take a pro-active, problem-solving approach to chronic problems rather than limiting themselves to serial, unsatisfying court battles.

3. Estimating the Extent of Community Oriented Lawyering: As part of a project at the National Institute of Justice of the U.S. Justice Department, several surveys were conducted of police chiefs and line officers, prosecutors and line attorneys, and law school clinic directors. The empirical findings can be summarized as follows

   1. Lawyers outside of government:

      1. 27 per cent of all law schools reporting have clinics that focus on community economic development; 19 per cent have clinics to assist non-profit organizations; 5 per cent have clinics that address neighborhood safety. The survey did not allow an estimate of the number of clinics taking a more holistic approach to the representation of individual clients.

      2. While there is no estimate of the number of pro bono and civil legal services programs that take a community oriented approach, 23 per cent of all police executives in the survey reported that non-governmental lawyers "sometimes" assist community groups on issues related to neighborhood safety in their jurisdictions.

   2. Prosecutors and Municipal Attorneys: The police perspective

      1. One-fourth to one-third of all police agencies report that either prosecutors, city/county attorneys, or police legal advisors are "frequently" involved with them in problem solving;

      2. Both chiefs and line officers report that lawyer involvement significantly increases the effectiveness of their problem-solving work, and half of all chiefs have recently made specific efforts to secure more;

      3. The demand for community oriented lawyering from police far exceeds the supply. Most experienced officers report that they "frequently" (50%) or "sometimes" (18%) deal with complex problems where needed legal assistance is not available. 13% report that they routinely get such support.

   3. In Prosecutors' offices

      1. Half of all prosecutors report that community prosecution in some form is present in their offices, at least in an experimental location;

      2. Community Prosecutors are much more likely to be engaged directly with community groups and agencies other than police as compared to their peers;

      3. Community Prosecution tends to be implemented with full-time prosecutors specifically assigned to this task in larger cities; in jurisdictions of less than 250,000, it tends to involve adding new tasks involving direct contact with the community to the work of existing line attorneys.

      4. Line attorneys who are assigned to work directly with community members on problem solving make significant changes in priorities and operational tactics, and also report very high levels of personal job satisfaction.

4. Questions to be answered in the future include:

   1. Where does Community Lawyering add the most value?

   2. It takes more time per client served. How can we measure the work and evaluate the benefits and costs?

   3. What are the risks and dangers of this new approach?