By Rochelle Allison-Moore and Chantelle Lines from Community Legal WA
Access to justice is a core objective of our justice system and a shared aspiration across Government, the legal profession and community sector. Yet for the more than 100 Western Australians who contributed to our new publication, Justice Through Our Eyes: 100 Voices for Change, justice is not simply a policy goal. It is something that profoundly shapes daily life. It influences safety, stability, relationships, and wellbeing. It determines whether a family stays in their home, whether a parent maintains connection with their children, and how someone moves forward after a legal crisis.
Justice Through Our Eyes, launched by Community Legal WA (CLWA) as part of the Lived Experience of Legal Assistance (LELA) Change Project, brings together stories from people who have needed legal help across Western Australia. It offers rare, unfiltered insights into what it feels like to seek legal help in a system that is essential and highly valued, yet often under-resourced and challenging to navigate. Their voices remind us that behind every file, case, or referral is a person – someone carrying not only a legal issue, but fear, stress, responsibility, and hope.
Daisy: 13 years after a life-altering legal event
Daisy did not imagine she would one day be standing beside the Attorney General, CEOs, members of the judiciary, MPs, and her peers, launching Justice Through Our Eyes, a call to action grounded in lived experience. Thirteen years earlier, when a vexatious Violence Restraining Order abruptly displaced her from her home, separated her from her children, and destabilised her wellbeing, her focus was simply survival.
A community legal service stepped in and provided free advice and representation, helping her overturn the order. Yet her story is not only about the legal issue itself; it is about the long-lasting ripple effects that legal problems create across every part of a person’s life. In the years that followed, Daisy continued to face long-term challenges in her family relationships, finances, employment and health that stemmed directly from the initial legal problem.
She has engaged with community legal services, received pro bono support, and at times been forced to self-represent. Throughout, she encountered a system that felt impenetrable: forms, deadlines, referrals, contradictory information, and processes that assumed knowledge she did not have. For lawyers, these systems are familiar. For people like Daisy, they can be isolating and overwhelming, particularly during periods of trauma or crisis.
Receiving legal help should not feel like “winning the lottery”
One of the more confronting truths in Justice Through Our Eyes is how many people struggle to access timely legal help.
Phil’s story illustrates this clearly. He sought legal assistance for a matter that carried significant consequences, but the service he approached could not help. Left to self-represent, he ultimately received a criminal conviction, a result that affected his ability to secure work and had long-lasting impacts across multiple areas of his life.
Unfortunately, Phil’s story is not unusual. Unmet legal need in Western Australia is rising rapidly. New data from Community Legal WA estimates that 48,000 people will be turned away from community legal services this year — a 225 per cent increase over three years. The housing crisis and cost-of-living pressures, along with escalating rates of family and domestic violence, mean more people than ever are reaching out for legal assistance. For every 10 people who receive help, an estimated 14 people will be turned away.
As the people who have used the justice system told us, many of those who are turned away do not try to get help again. Shame, fear, trauma, exhaustion and uncertainty about what to do next all play a role. Once the first attempt at help fails, problems often escalate. Legal issues grow more complex; financial stress deepens, housing and employment become less stable, and opportunities for early intervention disappear quickly. The human cost of one closed door can be significant and long-lasting.
Yet Justice Through Our Eyes is equally clear about something else: good legal help, delivered at the right time, can be transformative.
Kerry and Cheri: What changes when someone truly listens
Many people shared the impact of high-quality legal assistance; the times when having someone on their side helped “balance the scales”. These moments matter not just because of the legal advice, but because of the human connection behind it.
Kerry describes navigating the family law system while carrying significant emotional weight. Her experience was shaped by a deep sense of powerlessness – a feeling that the weight of the system’s authority overshadowed her own voice, insight, and dignity. Everything changed when she met a lawyer who listened without judgement, explained things clearly, and treated her with respect.
“When someone actually listens to you, everything changes,” she reflected. Kerry’s experience shows what becomes possible when the imbalance of power and privilege is reduced through wrap-around support, empathy, clarity, and trauma-informed practice.
Cheri also highlighted how services could better support whole families. Drawing on her lived experience, she offered focused, practical suggestions for designing processes that keep families connected during lengthy proceedings, reducing trauma and improving long-term outcomes.
Their insights point to a truth sometimes acknowledged, but one that has not yet been fully addressed; that legal systems can unintentionally retraumatise those seeking safety, and they can also be healing if designed with people at the centre.
Putting people at the centre: co-design in action
Justice Through Our Eyes is not a standalone publication. It sits within the broader Lived Experience of Legal Assistance (LELA) Change Project, a state-wide initiative that places people’s lived experience of legal help at the centre of service design, planning, and reform.
Through co-design workshops, a Lived Experience Steering Group, partnerships with community legal services, and ongoing evauation, the project works to ensure that people who have navigated the justice system help shape the services that support them. Co-design in this context is not symbolic. It is a structured approach that values lived expertise alongside professional expertise. It brings transparency, shared decision-making, and deeper insight into what people need to feel safe, respected, and supported.
This approach is transforming how we work at Community Legal WA and is beginning to reshape how the broader sector engages with lived experience. It is not enough to care deeply for clients; we must also understand what it feels like to receive a service – or to be turned away from one – and learn from those insights.
The role of pro bono partnerships
The experiences captured in the publication also highlight the value of strong pro bono partnerships. Many contributors, including Daisy and Cheri, received pro bono assistance at critical moments; support that helped stabilise their circumstances, advance their matters, or navigate overwhelming processes.
Pro bono contributions expand the capacity of overstretched community legal services, provide specialist expertise where demand is acute, support early intervention, and strengthen the safety net for people in crisis. Partnerships between firms, CLCs, and other legal services are essential to ensuring that help is available for people when and where they need it most.
The launch event: an invitation to act
When more than 90 people gathered to launch Justice Through Our Eyes – including the Attorney General, lived experience contributors, community legal workers, pro bono partners, members of the judiciary, and sector leaders – the message was clear. The publication is not a conclusion. It is an invitation.
It invites us to look closely at lived experience and to reflect on what the justice system feels like for the people it serves. It invites stronger collaboration across government, the legal profession and community services. It invites us to invest in early help that puts people in the centre and recognises the impact of trauma. It calls for us to embed people’s lived experience as a driver of system improvement. Above all, it invites us to listen deeply, think differently, and act with intention.
The bigger picture: rising legal need and human consequences
Across Australia, legal need continues to rise while community legal services face overwhelming demand. Some of the people who contributed to this publication are living in the widening gap between need and support. Their stories demonstrate how it feels to be turned away at a moment of vulnerability, what it costs to navigate an intimidating or complex system alone, and what becomes possible when help is timely, person-centred, and trauma-informed.
Phil’s difficulty accessing help, Daisy’s long-term ripple effects, Kerry’s shift in power and confidence when she was finally listened to, and Cheri’s hope for a more connected and supportive system are not isolated experiences. They are the stories of our neighbours, clients, families, and communities. Together, they underline a simple truth: the legal system exists for people, and people must be at the centre of its design.
A call to the legal profession
The legal profession is part of this story. The choices lawyers make – how time is allocated, what partnerships are formed, how services are delivered, and how clients are treated – shape what justice feels like in Western Australia. Justice Through Our Eyes invites us to listen more deeply to people’s lived experience, to collaborate across sectors, to co-design services alongside the people who rely on them, and to strengthen pro bono partnerships that expand the reach of community legal services. It invites us to support the services working on the frontline of unmet legal need and to help build a system where no one is turned away, overlooked, overwhelmed, or left to manage alone.
Access to justice becomes truly possible when we see people, hear them, and act together.
Read the report at Justice Through Our Eyes: 100 Voices for Change – Community Legal WA.
