Ottawa, September 6, 2016 – The Ontario Legal Information Centre (the Centre) is proud to announce that it has processed over 2,000 service requests for legal information since opening in January 2015. These promising results come almost halfway through the four-year pilot project and demonstrate that the Centre meets a real need in Ontario.

The Centre has received an increasing number of service requests since it opened, even more so since the beginning of the year. Between January and July 2016, the Centre held 40% more meetings compared to the same period of time the previous year.

These statistics are a result of the Centre becoming better known and reflect the importance of offering clear and comprehensible legal information services to ensure access to justice, particularly for vulnerable members of society (in 2015-2016, 58% of the Centre’s clients had an income of less than $30,000 and 86% did not have legal representation).

These results also demonstrate the vitality of the Centre’s network of partners, which is mostly comprised of local and provincial resources that provide services to Ontarians. The Centre sincerely thanks its government, legal and community partners for their client referrals and their support of its daily activities.

The Centre offers a free 30-minute meeting with a lawyer to anyone faced with a legal issue. The lawyer provides legal information and steers Ontarians toward the appropriate local and provincial resources. Information, referral and support services are offered in English and in French, in person or by telephone, on a confidential basis.

The Ottawa Legal Information Centre is an initiative of the Association of French-Speaking Jurists of Ontario (AJEFO). AJEFO would like to thank the Department of Justice Canada for its financial support by the means of the Access to Justice in Both Official Languages Support Fund, an initiative of the Roadmap for Canada’s Official Languages 2013-2018: Education, Immigration, Communities.