CCJ Publishes Public Comment Supporting California's Community Justice Worker (CJW) Program
Monday, August 24
A growing number of states are experimenting with ways to expand the availability of trained legal problem-solvers to help address the justice gap. In some places, these roles are called Community Justice Workers (CJWs); elsewhere, they go by titles like legal advocates or other designations. Broadly, these programs train and authorize non-lawyers to provide certain forms of legal help, under the supervision of legal services organizations, to people who would otherwise go without any assistance at all.
In California, the push for a CJW program originated with a coalition of legal aid organizations — including the Legal Aid Association of California, One Justice, and Legal Link — who published a proposal in December 2024 to create a statewide framework allowing trained non-lawyers to deliver limited, supervised legal assistance to low-income residents. The State Bar's Legal Services Trust Fund Commission endorsed the effort in late 2025, and the coalition then petitioned the California Supreme Court that December to adopt a formal Rule of Court establishing the program. In June 2026, the Court issued its own version of the proposed rule and directed the State Bar to solicit 45 days of public comment before deciding whether to recommend its adoption.
As drafted, the rule would designate an "Authorizing Body" to review and approve applications from legal services organizations (LSOs) wanting to run CJW programs. Approved LSOs would be responsible for training and supervising their CJWs, certifying each worker's name, training, and scope of practice to the State Bar, taking on professional responsibility for their work, and reporting twice a year on how many clients they served, hours worked, cases resolved, and any complaints. CJWs themselves would need to be adults with at least a high school-level education, could not be licensed attorneys, and could only practice within the specific scope defined and supervised by their sponsoring LSO. The State Bar would maintain a public roster of authorized organizations and their certified CJWs, and the Authorizing Body would formally evaluate the program within two years of the first LSO's approval. The State Bar also estimated the program would require roughly two full-time staff to administer, at an annual cost in the $650,000–$750,000 range, funded initially through IOLTA administrative funds during a pilot period.
Consistent with our long-standing advocacy around expanding legal roles for non-lawyers, we've been closely reviewing and engaging with these innovative programs as they take shape across the country — including through public comments on proposed rules. Most recently, we submitted comments on California's proposed CJW program, which we think reflects a thoughtful, well-designed approach. In our comment, we highlighted that the rule doesn't lock every program into a single fixed model — instead, it lets legal services organizations who already work directly with low-income communities design the training, scope-of-practice, and supervision details that make sense for the populations they serve. We argued that this kind of built-in flexibility, rather than a rigid one-size-fits-all standard, will be essential if these programs are going to scale and make a real dent in unmet legal need.