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Legal Hotline Connection
June 2010
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Nebraska Elder AccessLine
Legal Aid of Nebraska (LAN) instituted a telephone "AccessLineŽ" in 1999 to provide centralized intake screening and advice for its seven offices. LAN currently operates three separate legal hotlines from its Omaha office: the AccessLineŽ for intake/advice for LSC eligible clients, the ElderAccessLineŽ for Nebraskans over 60 years of age and the Native American AccessLineŽ. Legal Aid also operates a Rural Response Hotline out of their Bancroft office. This hotline primarily handles agriculture issues. The ElderAccessLineŽ was added as a separate service because the staff and leadership realized that many seniors were having trouble connecting through the regular AccessLineŽ. Long hold times, telephone system navigation, and the subject matter of the calls made it somewhat difficult for seniors to get through to the specialized services they needed. In 2005, LAN took advantage of the opportunity presented by an Administration on Aging (AoA) competitive grant to develop low cost legal delivery innovations to launch its ElderAccessLineŽ. The line began operating in 2006 and in 2009, LAN, in partnership with the Nebraska Department of Health and Human Services, received an AoA "Model Approaches to Statewide Legal Assistance Systems" award to increase access to legal assistance for seniors through the ElderAccessLineŽ, among other aspects of the MA project.
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National Aging and Law Conference: Changing the Face of Aging
National Aging and Law Conference December 9-11, 2010Westin HotelAlexandria, Virginia Come join us at NALC for the Annual Meeting of the National Association of Senior Legal Hotlines
Friday, December 10th
5:00PM - 6:00 PM in Banneker Room |
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From Full Service to Hotline Only: Thoughts and Reflections
By Weston J. MacIntosh, Attorney/CERA
 I've been fortunate enough that before working with CERA, I had the opportunity to see how two very different legal hotline models function: a full-service model and a hotline-only model. Both do a wonderful job of providing much needed legal advice to underserved clients. However, there is definitely a wide range of differences, as well as advantages and disadvantages, between the two models. This article explores some of the brief observations that I have made, transitioning between the two.
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2009 CERA Statistics
CERA is currently working with AoA and TCSG to develop more precise data collection standards for the senior legal helplines. We are hoping to start using the new standards in 2011 to collect data for calendar year 2010. For calendar year 2010 we asked the senior legal hotlines to report only the number of cases opened and unduplicated clients served by the hotline. Twenty-two hotlines reported their statistics.
- Number of Cases opened by the 22 reporting helplines: 68,706
- Number of Unduplicated clients served by the 22 reporting helplines: 57,613
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2010 Model Approaches Projects
In the July 2010 LHC we listed the 2010 Model Approaches awardees. In this issue, we will summarize each of the project plans. The overall Project goal is to increase the availability of high-quality, high-impact, low-cost legal services for the most vulnerable seniors. As the request for proposals required, each of the states will target vulnerable populations and seek to expand access to legal services to seniors most in need. Each of the states will be embarking on a legal needs study of some type, a legal system capacity study, the creation or expansion of coalitions and workgroups for planning and maintaining the statewide delivery system, and the integration of low cost delivery mechanisms, including a senior legal helpline. Below we describe some additional specific attributes of each project.
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This newsletter is produced by the Center for Elder Rights Advocacy, a partner in the National Legal Resource Center. Other partners in this effort to provide support to senior legal programs throughout the nation are National Senior Citizens Law Center, National Consumer Law Center, The Center for Social Gerontology, and American Bar Association-Commission on Law and Aging.
For questions, email CERA.
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