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 we fill legal gaps and lawyer better to serve migrant and underserved communities in the UK?
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 usto 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 afluid, organic, dynamic, living, evolving practice that is shaped by thepeople, 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 ‘movementlawyering’, which sees lawyers as part of broader movements for justice. Thiscould be for example, through supporting campaigns, amplifying collectivevoices, and strengthening grassroots infrastructure. Both approaches reject thenotion of lawyers as experts acting in isolation transacting with individualsor organisations at arm’s length.
At Sistren, the varied identities of people in our collective, whichare often context dependent – including ‘Black British’, ‘Indian’, ‘migrant’,‘mixed heritage’, ‘women’, ‘people of colour’ – inform our work. In ourpractice, community lawyering has been about centring community needs and livedexperience while tapping into deeper values such as healing, care, justice,interconnectedness, creativity, imagination, joy, excellence, service andhumility 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 collaborator’s community contexts.
2. We stand in solidarity with our collaborator’swork.
3. We understand the systemic barriers thatcommunities face in accessing legal support.
4. We try to proactively dismantle barriers to legalsupport by adopting an ‘access to justice’ approach in our legal practice.
5. We embrace collaborative and reciprocalapproaches to exchanging knowledge.
6. We actively democratise and distribute access tolegal knowledge.
7. We advise on intersecting community andindividual needs.
8. We situate our work within wider movements forsocial justice.
How does community lawyering differ from traditional models of legal service delivery in the UK?
Most traditional legal service delivery approaches are built asbusinesses based on individual (one-to-one) legal representation, often with profitas a core or primary purpose. Legal knowledge is a commodity held by lawyersand is monetised through the delivery of paid-for legal services. Expertise andauthority are often concentrated within legal institutions, reinforcing narrowideas about whose knowledge is recognised as credible or valuable.
Community lawyering is a movement-driven approach that reimagineslawyers as co-strategists working in solidarity with communities and socialmovements to dismantle systems of oppression and build collective power. Itsees legal knowledge as a community resource and recognises access to legalknowledge as integral to accessing justice. It challenges the idea that lawyersare the sole experts on justice or social change. Instead, it values the livedexperience, political analysis and collective knowledge held within communitiesdirectly impacted by injustice.
Community lawyering is premised on the idea that legal problems arecollective as much as they are individual, particularly where communities facesystemic barriers to accessing legal support or are organising for widespreadsocietal change. Collective mobilisation and movements to propel systemic changehave always been rooted in this reality. Community lawyering is about the pivotof lawyers and legal professionals in how they use their skills in solidarityto 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 tochallenge power.
Community lawyering requires lawyers to continually interrogate theirown positionality within legal systems and institutions, including howprofessionalism, neutrality and expertise can reinforce existing hierarchiesand exclusions. Community lawyering is therefore not simply about providingdifferent legal services, but about transforming how legal knowledge, power andstrategy are shared in solidarity with communities and movements.
Collective voices: What were some of the themes which emerged inframing of community lawyering in the context of the UK at the summit?
At the Summit, Sistren hosted two sessions on community lawyeringincluding facilitating group discussions on building solidarity andcommunity-based models of legal support in collaboration with Public Interest Law Centre (PILC). We began by asking what community lawyering meant or what itevoked to those in the room.
Unsurprisingly, there was a strong sense of urgency and need forimagination in rethinking what access to justice should look like in the UKtoday. Of the many barriers cited, language (particularly for those who comefrom migrant backgrounds), costs, lack of appropriate legal guidance that isrooted in lived experience, and fragmented support or social service deliverymodels (for example, childcare support separate to housing support) came upfrequently.
Other themes which emerged as particularly relevant for migrant communities are:
- “Advice deserts” - 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 - Toolkits and open-source legal resources were highlighted as critical resources, 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 are difficult to navigate for those with limited literacy or English skills. 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 lived experience of community lawyering inother 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, Harvard Law School defines community lawyering as: “an umbrella term for collaborative,community-based approaches to legal services. While there are differentvariations on ‘community lawyering,’ the core elements are the integration ofthe lawyer into the community the lawyer serves, the use of multifacetedapproaches to problem solving, and the investment and empowerment of communitymembers in the lawyering process”.
A conference report on alternative lawyering in India noted the “importanceof rooting [lawyering] in a political economy approach, in practising insurgentlawyering 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 wasfundamentally 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 toattempt to pursue meaningful social change while at the same time employingcommunity activism to empower the subordinated who can serve as their own advocates in future struggles when the lawyers are long gone.”
The work 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 is home to several rural legal access initiatives including mobile legal clinics and legal theatres. Lok Adalats (people’s courts) provide accessible dispute resolution through negotiation and mutual consent, offering quicker, more community-driven outcomes.
- In Jamaica, Justices of the Peace (JPs) (non-lawyersperforming quasi-judicial functions) play an important role in bridging formaland community justice systems.
- In the United States, a wide variety of independent organisations and NGOs across the country embody rights-based approaches that use and critiquethe law simultaneously, combining strategic litigation, legislative advocacy, and public education.
In many of these jurisdictions, legal support is separate and independent from state systems. In many countries, civil society groups maintain independence from state-based sources of fundingto preserve autonomy and maintain a critical stance toward law and government policy. 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 just as serviceproviders 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 inits nascency. We know that many other individuals and organisations are takingto community-centred legal models in the UK.
If you are part of or know of individualsor organisations doing community lawyering work then please do connect with usor let us know. We are keen to convene conversations and to collaborate withaligned partners.
At Sistren, we are thinking about how to convene conversations around communitylawyering, creating a shared space for learning, reflection, and collaboration.We are also exploring how community lawyering can integrate more explicitlywith movements for social change, and how we can build an ecosystem thatconnects 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 exchangeknowledge, 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.
