Bar in Brief > Navigate Law Group: A Model for Serving Community

What we can learn about creating a service culture from this 2024 APEX Honoree

COLUMN > A Note From the WSBA Executive Director

BY TERRA NEVITT

I recently traveled to Vancouver for our APEX in the Community celebration of Navigate Law Group, the winner of the 2024 Pro Bono and Public Service Award (Group). Over local pizza and a Costco cake, I listened to members of the firm chat with each other, friends and family, and those of us representing the WSBA, and I was truly warmed by what I heard and saw. A place where legal professionals have fun and integrate life with work, and where a joyful expectation of pro bono is woven into the fabric of the law firm.

According to the Clark County Volunteer Lawyers Program, “The attorneys from Navigate Law Group have, by far, contributed the most pro bono hours to our organization, out of any other law firm.” In addition to volunteering with CCVLP, they also provide free legal help to victims of domestic violence through the YWCA and volunteer regularly with the Veterans Legal Institute providing free legal help to homeless, at risk, disabled, and low-income service members. During the start of the pandemic, Navigate Law jumped into action when almost all the local in-person free legal clinics had to shut down. They founded the weekly Clark County Virtual Legal Clinic to ensure the community could still have access to speak to an attorney for free if needed. Navigate attorneys volunteer their time every Thursday evening at this clinic to advise people in 20-minute, one-on-one phone calls and discuss a variety of legal issues—regardless of income levels. Hundreds (300+) of people are served through this clinic every year. Navigate also partners with the Clark County Superior Courthouse to create the Pro Se Docket Legal Clinic each week: Attorneys help the commissioners and unrepresented litigants with procedural questions and paperwork during their hearings.

My background is in legal aid. Before I worked at the WSBA, I was the executive director of LAW Advocates, which is the pro bono program in Whatcom County. I share this so that you will know how sincere I am in telling you that I have been thinking about access to justice and pro bono work, in particular, for about 20 years. The access-to-justice gap is a complex problem that defies easy solutions. Brilliant people have worked on this problem for much longer than me. Billions of dollars have been invested. And while the return on that investment is utterly sound,¹ the problem persists. The 2022 Justice Gap Report published by the Legal Services Corporation reports that “low-income Americans did not receive any or enough legal help for 92% of their civil legal problems.”² Our state is no exception; according to 2015 numbers, 76 percent of low-income people do not get the help they need for a legal problem.³ And it’s not just low-income families that go without legal services. According to the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, “while low-income Americans are a particularly vulnerable population, … the need for fair resolution of legal problems is experienced universally across different groups of the population.”⁴ According to their 2021 report, Justice Needs and Satisfaction in the United States of America, 66 percent of the U.S. population had at least one legal need in the prior four years and only 49 percent of those problems were completely resolved. According to IAALS, that’s 120 million legal problems annually that don’t reach a fair resolution.

As the WSBA is working to tackle the lack of legal professionals in small towns and rural areas, reforming bar admissions to remove unnecessary barriers, evaluating our work to serve the moderate income population, and thinking about how to regulate innovative models of delivering legal services, I often find myself wondering why we have what seems to me to be a market problem. Why hasn’t the legal market adapted on its own to meet the needs of these consumers? I ask this question earnestly and humbly. I have a few notions about student loan burdens, the impact of regulation, and capitalism, but the truth is, I don’t know. These are the things on my mind always, including when I walked into Navigate Law and observed a law firm that has really found a way to serve their community and enjoy their work.

So, I asked co-owner Amber Rushbanks, “How do you create and maintain this culture of service, and can it be replicated?” What I heard from Amber and her colleagues is that it was part of the mission and vision from the get-go with the founders and that they make this a big point when hiring new staff to ensure they bring folks on with a like-minded service ethos. They set expectations from the initial interview, and they support the work from top to bottom, for all staff, with flexibility and encouragement. They strive to, and do in fact, attract people that want to be successful, enjoy practice, and give back to the community.

As Governor Jordan Couch highlighted in his April/May Bar News column, “Access to Justice: From Crisis to Change,” we aren’t going to solve the access to justice crisis in our state through pro bono work. In fact, no single solution or initiative will solve the problem. It is too vast, too complex, too pernicious. If I sound hopeless, then I apologize, because I am actually hopeful. No one effort or person can solve the problem, but I fervently believe that our collective efforts can. So, while we at the WSBA are working on regulatory reform and other systemic solutions, and the folks in legal aid are lobbying to protect funding and provide critical, lifesaving legal help to the most vulnerable among us, I’m so grateful that legal professionals are doing their part to better serve their communities and I hope we can all step up even more.

This is why we do the APEX Awards, so that we can learn from and be inspired by practitioners doing the work. Hooray! Tune in for 2025 winners.

Go to the WSBA’s YouTube channel (@WashingtonStateBar) and search “2024 APEX Awards Navigate Law” to see this culture of pro bono in action.

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More on Navigate Law Group

Navigate Law was our 2024 APEX (Acknowledging Professional Excellence) honoree. They were nominated by the Clark County Volunteer Lawyers Program. “To date, the attorneys from Navigate Law Group have, by far, contributed the most pro bono hours to our organization, out of any other law firm.”

“Not only are Navigate attorneys consistent and dependable volunteers of ours; they frequently go above and beyond for clients and of what we expect of our volunteers. Our program asks volunteers to provide legal advice only—but the folks from Navigate rarely stop there. If they identify during their appointment with a client that the client has significant barriers to achieving their legal goals, they will, without hesitation, put in the extra effort to ensure the client is successful. This includes things like setting up extra one-on-one appointments with the client (outside their regular volunteer hours), making calls to the opposing party’s attorney, drafting documents, connecting the client with additional resources, working closely with [Clark County Volunteer Lawyers Program] staff to ensure the client is completing things properly, and more. Not only do our Navigate volunteers go beyond the call of duty, but they consistently do so with compassion and care for our clients.”

Navigate Law Group has about 24 employees and serves the greater Vancouver, Washington, area in many practice areas, including family law, estate planning, and employment and business law.

From the website:

The firm was founded on a business structure and firm culture that places a high value on wellness of the individual in order to do our best work.

It’s all about community. Navigate values giving back to our community in order to provide true access to the justice system. Our attorneys volunteer numerous hours each month in a variety of settings around the community.

Navigate Law Group values social justice work and giving back to the community, in addition to our private legal practice. Our clinics and volunteer efforts are well-attended and appreciated by the community. It directly provides people easy access to the justice system.

“They really build volunteering and pro bono work into their company’s ethos.”
Mia Demay, Clark County Volunteer Lawyers Program Director of Community Engagement