Legal Navigators
Everyone – and everyone means everyone, no exceptions – deserves access to justice. But with dwindling or nonexistent government resources dedicated to civil legal aid, and exponentially rising needs, low-income individuals (especially those in rural areas) are becoming further entrenched in legal deserts. This is both an access to justice issue and a civic issue: when people cannot access their own law, democracy fails.
With the Legal Navigators program, we will close the justice gap in Wisconsin and ensure every Wisconsinite can access justice, no matter what’s in their wallet.
Needed & Effective
With as many as 120 million legal problems going unresolved in America each year, traditional lawyer-centered approaches to access to justice have consistently failed to meet the scale of need.
Less than 10% of low-income people get access to meaningful legal assistance. Specifically, low-income Americans do not get any or enough civil legal help for 92% of the substantial civil legal issues. Despite this, Wisconsin is one of the few states that allocates ZERO dollars in the state budget general purpose revenue to support civil legal aid organizations and programs.
Our legal system must evolve to meet rising needs. In this climate where fewer resources are helping fewer people, and legal deserts are expanding, we must look at new models to close the access to justice gap. Community Justice Workers (non-attorneys trained in many areas of the law and under the supervision of an attorney) are one such model, and the success of this model has been proven in states like Alaska, Utah, and Arizona. In the summer of 2025, the American Bar Association adopted a resolution at its annual meeting urging other courts and states to look at Alaska for the adoption of similar models.
Legal Navigators are different than Community Justice Workers in that they will be trained only on the modules in the Legal Tune Up Tool.
Wisconsin is ripe for a similar model because 75% of attorneys in Wisconsin live in three main metropolitan counties (Milwaukee, Dane, and Waukesha). According to the 2023 study “Demystifying Law Practice in Greater Wisconsin,” of the over 16,000 active, licensed attorneys, only 4,110 live outside of the top three most populated counties (Milwaukee, Dane, and Waukesha), and only 14% of rural residents were able to receive help for their civil legal issues. This rate is half of the national average, and the problem is getting worse: in June of 2024, Wisconsin Supreme Court Chief Justice pointed to a 7% decrease in active attorneys in rural parts of Wisconsin.
With the vast majority of attorneys concentrated in southern Wisconsin, most of Wisconsin is in a legal desert, necessitating programs where non-attorneys can provide legal assistance.
Certified & Competent
Our Legal Navigator program will require individuals to participate in one of three annual cohorts. Each cohort will consist of 4 training sessions, once a month, for 1.5 hours (a cohort participant is committing to a total of 6 hours of training). At the conclusion of the cohort, LIFT will conduct a survey determining participant knowledge and understanding the “unauthorized practice of law” rules. Cohort participants who pass this survey will be provided a digital certificate noting they are a certified LIFT Legal Navigator.
Agents of Democracy
Our legal system is built for lawyers by lawyers, but if an individual can’t afford a lawyer, they are at a significant disadvantage and thus less confident in how they engage with the system. They are more likely to distrust the outcomes. By empowering individuals in the justice system to represent themselves, and Legal Navigators to help those individuals represent themselves, we are strengthening community, civic engagement, and helping to restore trust in our government via the legal system.
Community justice workers, along with our Legal Navigators program, are the democratization of law. They not only help individuals access the law, they also make current legal aid resources more effective and increase who can meaningfully participate in democracy.
Thanks to supporters like you, we are making significant advancements closing the justice gap for thousands of Wisconsinites who live in legal deserts and/or cannot afford an attorney.
Partner Program
So far in 2025, thirteen Legal Navigators have been trained through our partner program, with another seven currently undergoing training. These Legal Navigators are librarians, social workers, peer counselors, and law students who represent staff at EXPO, the Racine Public Library, Meadowood Health Partnership and the Employment & Training Association. In their roles at these organizations, these Legal Navigators often are directly interacting with the individuals Legal Tune Up Tool seeks to serve: folks who need to clear an eviction or criminal record, restore their driver’s license, answer a debt claim in small claims court, or change a child support order.