New Jersey Legal Services Vision and Mission

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Vision & Mission

Legal Services in New Jersey embraces the vision
of full access to essential civil legal aid for all economically disadvantaged people who cannot secure a lawyer on their own, and through that legal aid equal justice, both substantive and procedural. It is clear that the core, root political consensus which supports funding of civil legal assistance to indigents comes from an underlying concern for fairness, and a conviction that important legal needs of individuals are addressed. Opinion polls reveal a strong public consensus around this conviction. Legal Services' core vision and mission cannot deviate significantly from this anchor, and the program must maintain a principal focus on meeting these basic needs. Any other course will weaken majoritarian public support.

At the same time, providing this representation in the most effective and efficient way inevitably compels Legal Services to pursue actions which have import and sweep well beyond the individual parties in specific legal cases. For example, it may prioritize legal representation which tends to help rebuild impoverished, deteriorated communities, or which addresses in a single forum or legal action recurrent problems which otherwise would repeat themselves hundreds and thousands of times in cases involving low-income people. Moreover, Legal Services must continually monitor its own effectiveness, and place special emphasis on representation which actually secures fair outcomes for clients, and protects and enforces their legal rights. All of these activities - and emphases - are essential if disadvantaged individuals are to have reason to believe and participate in our ordered legal processes for resolving disputes.

From this vision, New Jersey Legal Services' core mission statement is

"Just Justice"

Legal Services seeks to secure equal substantive and procedural justice for all economically disadvantaged people.

To achieve this core mission, there are three distinct goals which round out Legal Services' statewide mission statement:

To achieve this mission:

Legal Services must function as a concerted, coherent, closely coordinated legal assistance delivery system, the hub of a broader legal assistance delivery network and partnership, to achieve full access to equal justice for all economically disadvantaged people.
Legal Services must develop the resources necessary to achieve this vision, and must target those resources, and use them as efficiently and effectively as possible, to achieve the greatest measure of equal justice.
Legal Services must incorporate the views of its service consumers and key partners, as appropriate to their experience, stake and role, in making major decisions about how to design and implement its system of services.

Legal Services must function as a closely integrated, coordinated, non-duplicative and effective core statewide delivery system, at the hub of
a broader, coordinated delivery network, a web of civil legal assistance providers. The efforts of Legal Services and this wider web must be dedicated to affording economically disadvantaged people 100% access to essential civil legal aid, provided in whatever form is most appropriate for their particular legal problem and situation, for all significant civil legal problems (meaning all problems which are not trivial or frivolous). Economically disadvantaged clients must be able to receive services from somewhere within the Legal Services statewide system, without regard to the type of case, the type of service needed, or the particular characteristics or status of the client. Restrictions based upon negative views toward certain categories of clients, or certain types of legal problems or situations, must not be imposed on Legal Services work.

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