Legal Defence Services is committed to providing outstanding representation and advocacy to those who cannot afford private legal counsel. We work in court and beyond to change laws, policies and systems that perpetuate injustice.

We represent current and former members of the military who are financially unable to retain private legal assistance in criminal cases at all levels, from arraignment through parole revocation hearings. Additionally, our Criminal Practice represents current and former service members in civil matters including child support, custody, domestic violence and other civil rights violations.

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Each defender office or program should establish, on a daily basis, an alphabetical card index system to allow easy retrieval of case status and disposition data. This system should be linked to a computer-based tracking and reporting system so that individual attorney workloads can be monitored, evaluated and predicted.

Staff attorneys should be adequately trained. A national organization should conduct seminars for continuing education on criminal law topics and other areas of specialized expertise. The organization should also make available, as a service to defender offices and programs, copies of all audio or video tapes of the training sessions.

Defender offices and assigned counsel programs should be permitted to contract with preexisting qualified entities to provide defense services, provided that the State Defender Director is responsible for ensuring that contracted programs comply with national standards. Appropriate financial arrangements must be made to ensure the financial viability of those arrangements. The cost of delivering services through contracting should be determined on the basis of a formula designed to compensate defender attorneys for skill, effort and time actually, properly and necessarily expended on assignments.