This blog reflects on some of the conversations Sistren had at the Access to Justice Organising Summit hosted by Migrants Organise in London in 2025. One of the widely discussed themes at the summit was around the question: how do build a legal system that delivers justice for all?
One of the ways we do this is to lawyer differently. This blog situates the conversations at the Summit within broader approaches to community lawyering both in the UK and beyond. We also share our reflections on what a community lawyering model might look like here in the UK, and what it means to us to use law as a tool for social change.
What does community lawyering mean?
The addition of the word ‘community’ before lawyering changes everything.
Community lawyering doesn’t have a single, fixed definition. It is a fluid, organic, dynamic, living, evolving practice that is shaped by the people, communities and movements it serves.
Community lawyering sits at the intersection of law, community organising, and social justice work. The term community lawyering is often used alongside ‘movement lawyering’, which sees lawyers as part of broader movements for justice. This could be for example, through supporting campaigns, amplifying collective voices, and strengthening grassroots infrastructure. Both approaches reject the notion of lawyers as experts acting in isolation transacting with individuals or organisations at arm’s length.
At Sistren, the varied identities of people in our collective, which are often context dependent – including ‘Black British’, ‘Indian’, ‘migrant’,‘ mixed heritage’, ‘women’, ‘people of colour’ – inform our work. In our practice, community lawyering has been about centring community needs and lived experience while tapping into other values such as healing, care, justice, interconnectedness, creativity, imagination, joy, excellence, service and humility through our legal practice.
We have developed eight principles of community lawyering to help guide our work:
1. We share lived experiences with, or will developa deep shared understanding of, our collaborators' community contexts.
2. We stand in solidarity with our collaborators' work.
3. We understand the systemic barriers that communities face in accessing legal support.
4. We try to proactively dismantle barriers to legal support by adopting an ‘access to justice’ approach in our legal practice.
5. We embrace collaborative and reciprocal approaches to exchanging knowledge.
6. We actively democratise and distribute access to legal knowledge.
7. We advise on intersecting community and individual needs.
8. We situate our work within wider movements for social justice.
How does community lawyering differ from traditional models of legal service delivery in the UK?
Most private legal service delivery approaches are built as businesses based on individual (one-to-one) legal representation, often with profit as a core or primary purpose. Legal knowledge is a commodity held by lawyers and is monetised through the delivery of paid-for legal services. Expertise and authority are often concentrated within legal institutions, reinforcing narrow ideas about whose knowledge is recognised as credible or valuable.
Community lawyering is a movement-driven approach that reimagines lawyers as co-strategists working in solidarity with communities and social movements to dismantle systems of oppression and build collective power. It sees legal knowledge as a community resource and recognises access to legal knowledge as integral to accessing justice. It challenges the idea that lawyers are the sole experts on justice or social change. Instead, it values the lived experience, political analysis and collective knowledge held within communities directly impacted by injustice.
Community lawyering is premised on the idea that legal problems are collective as much as they are individual, particularly where communities face systemic barriers to accessing legal support or are organising for widespread societal change. Collective mobilisation and movements to propel systemic change have always been rooted in this reality. Community lawyering is about the pivot of lawyers and legal professionals in how they use their skills in solidarity to drive systemic change. It understands law as both a site of struggle and a tool of resistance, that law can reproduce inequality, while simultaneously creating opportunities to challenge power.
Community lawyering requires lawyers to continually interrogate their own positionality within legal systems and institutions, including how professionalism, neutrality and expertise can reinforce existing hierarchies and exclusions. Community lawyering is therefore not simply about providing different legal services, but about transforming how legal knowledge, power and strategy are shared in solidarity with communities and movements.
Collective voices: What were some of the themes which emerged in framing of community lawyering in the context of the UK?
At the Access to Justice Summit, Sistren had co-hosted two sessions on community lawyering including facilitating group discussions on building solidarity and community-based models of legal support in collaboration with Public Interest Law Centre (PILC). We began by asking what community lawyering meant or what it evoked to those in the room.
Unsurprisingly, there was a strong sense of urgency and need for imagination in rethinking what access to justice should look like in the UK today. Of the many barriers cited, language (particularly for those who comefrom migrant backgrounds), costs, lack of appropriate legal guidance that is rooted in lived experience, and fragmented support or social service delivery models (for example, childcare support separate to housing support) came up frequently.
Other themes which emerged as particularly relevant for migrant and refugee communities were:
- “Advice deserts” - a person's location in the UK is a deciding factor in being able to access legal support, including support for asylum claims and other legal needs.
- Importance of open-source legal toolkits - legal guides, toolkits and open-source resources were highlighted as critical needs, especially when available in different languages. The Right to Remain Toolkit was referenced as a good example. Sistren also shared our Just Words Toolkit as another effort to make the law accessible and understandable through defining common legal terms in the UK non-profit sector in English, Tigrinya, Spanish and Arabic.
- Accessibility and plain language - even the most well-intentioned resources can be difficult to navigate for those with English as a second or third language. Simplifying legal communication and combining it with practical guidance (such as knowing when travel to see a solicitor could be reimbursed) was seen as essential.
- Power of collective spaces - Community-based, in-person activities were described as vital for migrant communities to counter isolation, and the feeling of being “on hold” while the system “processed” your application.
- Collaboration between support organisations - There was a strong call to move beyond fragmented service delivery models and towards collective infrastructure, shared resources, and collaboration across support organisations.
Learning from community lawyering models different countries
On the opening panel of the Summit, Keya Advani, Co-founder of Sistren, shared some insights from her own experience of community lawyering in other parts of the world.
The idea of community lawyering is not new and is well-established inother country contexts, including in the United States, India and Latin America, for instance. The notion of community lawyering (or ‘revolutionary lawyering’, ‘rebellious lawyering’, ‘alternative lawyering’ ‘social justice lawyering’ or ‘movement lawyering’) has been effectively deployed in a variety of legal contexts, including housing law, land law, immigration law and criminal law, to name a few. However, community lawyering approaches are much less common in the UK context and have not generally been applied to the building of organisational and infrastructural capacity for community organisations.
To provide a very high-level overview of some of the existing extensive research and writing on community lawyering in other jurisdictions, a conference report on alternative lawyering in India noted the “importance of rooting [lawyering] in a political economy approach, in practising insurgent lawyering in every forum and in paying a close heed to the subaltern voice andhow it resists law.” It defines a ‘movement lawyer’ as “a lawyer who was fundamentally accountable to the movement and not to the legal profession”.
Gerald P. López’s Rebellious Lawyering: One Chicano’s Vision of Progressive Law Practice notes that “the fundamental idea is for lawyers to attempt to pursue meaningful social change while at the same time employing community activism to empower the subordinated who can serve as their own advocates in future struggles when the lawyers are long gone.”
Harvard Law School defines community lawyering as: “an umbrella term for collaborative,community-based approaches to legal services. While there are different variations on ‘community lawyering,’ the core elements are the integration of the lawyer into the community the lawyer serves, the use of multifaceted approaches to problem solving, and the investment and empowerment of community members in the lawyering process”.
The practice and differing models of community lawyering in other jurisdictions helps to provide a framework for the development of models of community lawyering that could develop in the UK context.
- India has been home to several legal access initiatives including mobile legal clinics and legal theatres. Lok Adalats (people’s courts) have provided accessible dispute resolution through negotiation and mutual consent, offering quicker, more community-driven outcomes.
- In Jamaica, the blending of traditional legal aid delivery and grassroots advocacy along with rights-based education and restorative justice practices have provided another possible model.
- In the United States, a wide variety of independent organisations and NGOs across the country embody rights-based approaches that use and critique the law simultaneously, combining strategic litigation, legislative advocacy, and public education.
In many of these jurisdictions, while legal aid plays a critical role, other forms of community legal support also exist that are independent from state systems. In many countries, civil society groups have maintained deliberate independence from state-based sources of funding, to preserve autonomy and to be able to maintain a critical stance toward law and hold the government to account. This contrasts with the UK context, where historically the state had funded legal aid and Charity regulation of NGOs can constrain challenges to law and policy.
These models of community lawyering crucially create space for lawyers as agents for change, not simply as service providers or translators of the law. They highlight that the law, when [re]claimedby or for communities, can accelerate social transformation.
What’s next?
In the UK, community lawyering is still in its nascency. We know that many other individuals and organisations are taking to community-centred legal models in the UK.
If you are part of or know of individuals or organisations doing community lawyering work then please do connect with us or let us know. We are keen to convene conversations and to collaborate with aligned partners.
At Sistren, we are thinking about how to convene conversations around community lawyering, creating a shared space for learning, reflection, and collaboration. We are also exploring how community lawyering can integrate more explicitly with movements for social change, and how we can build an ecosystem that connects different areas of law to the lived realities of communities.
We’re working with others, including Public Interest Law Centre, Migrants Organise and Citizens UK, towards convening community lawyers, bringing together practitioners, organisers, and community members to exchange knowledge, share challenges and address barriers to our work. If you are interested, please reach out to us using the Contact Us form on our website.