Agency 14: Legal Affairs Agency
The Legal Affairs Agency is the 14th agency in the community. The agency handles the community’s legal issues, facilitating access to legal services by agencies and participants, and the alignment of community operations with the law bylaws, and contracts.
Legal Affairs is the second agency in the Regulatory Bureau, which also includes the IP (agency 13) and Audit (agency 15) agencies. The Regulatory Bureau plays an important role in shaping how the community interacts with innovation – by encouraging and processing intellectual property, and therefore innovation, a keystone of the community system. The bureau also ensures that the community operates within the law and that businesses and agencies perform their operations in accordance with best practices in all respects.
The Capital Bank Agency (agency 8) receives investment in the form of partnership interest from limited partners, which it in turn invests in community agencies, including the Legal Affairs Agency. The Legal Affairs Agency uses these funds for operations, including delivering chargeable services to participants. From its revenues, it pays the Capital Bank a return on its investment, which in turn enables the bank to pay limited partners handsome returns on their investments.
Roles of the Legal Affairs Agency
With the agency’s agency presidency providing the necessary strategic direction, which is implemented by the regulatory presidencies, the agency performs a number of duties as detailed below, with the help of its automated system and contractors. The duties include:
- Aligning the community’s activities with existing laws and community bylaws
- Acting as the community’s legal advisor and litigator
- Coordinating the community’s legal strategies and security
Aligning community’s operations with laws and community bylaws
The Legal Affairs Agency constantly scans the legal environment in which the community operates and notes any changes. New legislation, for instance, needs to be accommodated in the community’s bylaws and practices. Normally, different laws will concern different agencies. The agency ensures that the affected agencies are familiarized with these changes and that they implement them.
Bylaws are also likely to change from time to time. The process of changing them must be done in a way that does not contravene the law, or fundamentally change what the community stands to achieve by its existence. The Legal Affairs Agency monitors the process to ensure compliance. Once the bylaws have been adopted or amended, the agency again ensures that they have been implemented properly.
Normally, the process of monitoring the environment and the community to check for changes and guide their implementation is tedious. The Legal Affairs Agency works with contractors to pick out changes and design how best to respond to them. The agency also works through regulatory presidencies that help agencies conform to changes and implement various regulations. The automated system carries regular information updates to get participants and community public servants up to speed with changes. It also ensures that people are drawn to these updates, through applicable digital marketing communication strategies.
Legal advice
As agencies go about their operations, they may need legal input to ensure they are on track. The Legal Affairs Agency helps agencies with legal advice as needed. The agency can do this by having regulatory presidents interact with the agencies involved or recommending legal experts who can offer hands-on assistance to the presidencies that need it.
The community may also run into legal issues with external entities. The Legal Affairs Agency is responsible for seeking out-of-court resolutions to issues. When this fails, the agency spearheads the community’s legal effort. The agency engages quality legal experts to pursue its issues in law courts, and to adopt resulting judgments in its operational guidelines, regulations, and bylaws.
Legal coordination and security
The community needs to constantly engage with external authorities in the area where it operates. Each aspect of the community’s operations including recruitment, business operations, and financial operations needs the input of regulators. The agency interacts with these regulators to proactively find the best means of operating and leveraging any opportunities.
Additionally, the Legal Affairs Agency coordinates the work of security contractors who provide the systems needed to secure participants. The agency coordinates with both these contractors and law enforcement authorities to synergize operations and ensure operation within the law. Some of the security systems are highly advanced in the way they collect and analyze information, necessitating coordination with the Data and Publishing Agency as well as data protection authorities to properly manage these approaches.
The agency works with other agencies to ensure there are enough security solutions providers in the community. It then vets them and accredits them, providing community agencies and participants with the necessary information to make decisions on hiring. Through regular reviews by their clients, security contractors can constantly improve and enable the agency to achieve its objectives to secure the community and liaise better with law enforcement.
Security contractors’ services are limited to using digital tools to monitor the community and do not include actual enforcement of the law. Therefore, rather than carry out arrests and hand over suspects to law enforcement agencies, or actively investigate suspected crime, the security contractors will leverage the community’s existing systems – face and voice recognition, access control, biometric data, and other tools to prevent and detect crime.
How the agency works
Background on presidencies
Every presidency is a four-member entity whose members represent one of the four major demographic groups, known as divisions: married men (A), married women (B), single women (C), and single men (D). However, a president serves the whole community in their role, rather than only their demographic. Presidents’ diversity and commitment to serve all is provided for in the community bylaws and ensures that all access services without any discrimination.
These four major demographics are evenly split in a normal society. Each group accounts for between 23 and 27% of the population, with regular fluctuations as people’s status changes. The community appreciates that discrimination across all social categories happens based on marital status, other social categorizations notwithstanding; married men are likelier to dominate other demographics, especially single men and single women.
The community’s infrastructure promotes equal access to economic and social resources and opportunities. The composition of the community as a whole and those who serve it in the community public service is closely monitored to prevent numerical domination, which can lead to nepotism or unequal access.
Besides marital status, the recruitment to be a participant, and to serve in the public service carefully considers other social categorizations, to ensure racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual groups are well represented in the community as they are in the society in which a community operates. These considerations inform the constitution of the community public service. The diversity in community public service, which is provided by bylaws, is aimed at creating a community that is blind to all other considerations besides service to participants. The service is therefore designed to be free of discrimination.
Agency presidency, bureau board, and demographic presidencies
The Legal Affairs Agency is served by an agency presidency, comprised of 4 presidents[1] which handles strategy formulation and adjustment, as well as formulating and communicating operational procedures for the agency. Additionally, the presidency also facilitates the setting up of the agency’s automated system and adjusts it as necessary to better achieve its goals.
As part of the Regulatory Bureau, the agency presidency forms a bureau board with agency presidencies serving the IP and Audit agencies. The board acts as a check and monitoring tool for individual presidents and agencies, especially when decisions have far-reaching implications for the community.
Within the bureau board, three presidents from the same demographic form a demographic presidency. There are four such presidencies in the bureau. The demographic presidency performs an advisory role to presidencies and agencies regarding a particular demographic; it does not have operational or executive authority. that cut across the three agencies. The demographic presidency also plays an important role in the mentorship and training of new presidents.
| Demographic presidency A | Demographic presidency B | Demographic presidency C | Demographic presidency D | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Agency presidency, IP (13) | 13A | 13B | 13C | 13D |
| Agency presidency, Legal (14) | 14A | 14B | 14C | 14D |
| Agency presidency, Audit (15) | 15A | 15B | 15C | 15D |
Regulatory presidencies
As part of the Regulatory Bureau, the Legal Affairs Agency is served by a team of 12 regulatory presidencies. Each presidency serves 2 district buildings, where they interact with agency presidencies of the agencies that have their offices in those buildings, and district, village, and branch presidencies. Since each presidency consists of four presidents, there are 48 regulatory presidents.
Reguatory presidents implement the strategic plans and policies that the agency presidency formulates. The presidents also interact with contractors and branch presidencies, offering them any facilitation necessary to serve participants better, collecting important information on the system’s functionality, and advising the agency presidency on how this system can be improved. They monitor the system to ensure it is meeting the participants’ expectations and needs.
Limited partners and branch presidencies
Limited partners and dependents
A limited partner is the basic unit in the community. A limited person, usually above 18 years old, but sometimes as young as 16, has been admitted into the community and has invested $20,000 as partnership interest, for which they earn a return. This is regarded as one unit of partnership interest.
Over time, a limited partner can add more units of partnership interest, as their business prospers. The more partnership interest units a limited partner has, the more the return they receive from the Capital Bank.
A dependent is a minor, or a person living with a disability, under the care of a limited partner. In some instances, a dependent may be a fit adult, who for various reasons is supported by community agencies, and assigned by contract to a limited partner. Limited partners are responsible for any legal agreements that their dependents enter into, either with community agencies or other participants, and therefore have the right of attorney.
Together, limited partners and dependents are referred to as participants. Participants who are dependents, because they are still minors, can start a business when they reach 12 years of age. This allows them to save up and invest $20,000 into the community by their 18th birthday, and possibly as early as 16.
Limited partners and their dependents reside in apartments (village buildings). Each apartment has 4 floors, with each floor containing 16 apartments. Each floor has floor has 7 – 12 limited partners, with each limited partner having 1 – 3 dependents. Each floor therefore has around 25 residents. With four floors, each building has approximately 100 residents. An apartment building also forms a branch.
Limited partners and unit
A limited partner is the basic unit in the community. A limited partner, usually above 18 years old, but sometimes as young as 16, has been admitted into the community and has invested $20,000 as partnership interest, for which they earn a return from the Capital Bank Agency, which invests other community agencies. This is regarded as one unit of partnership interest. Over time, a limited partner can add more units of partnership interest, as their business prospers. The more partnership interest units a limited partner has, the more the return they receive from the agency.
A dependent is a minor, or a person living with a disability, under the care of a limited partner, and who has, in any of these cases, given their power of attorney to the limited partner. In some instances, a dependent may be a fit adult, who for various reasons is supported by community agencies, and assigned by contract to a limited partner. Limited partners are responsible for any legal agreements that their dependents enter into, either with community agencies or other participants. Together, limited partners and dependents are referred to as participants.
Participants who are dependents, because they are still minors, can start a business when they reach 12 years of age. This allows them to save up and invest $20,000 into the community by their 18th birthday, and possibly as early as 16. Limited partners and their dependents reside in apartment buildings (village buildings). Each apartment building has five floors, with four containing apartments. An apartment building also forms a branch.
Captains and branch presidencies
Of the approximately 100 residents in a branch, around 40 of them are limited partners.They are divided into 4 units, each of which has 10 limited partners and their dependents. The limited partner membership in a unit is diverse, containing different social groups that are reflective of the society within which a community operates.
Additionally, a unit contains members of the four main demographics: married males (A), married females (B), single females (C), and single males (D).
The 4 demographics in the branch form 4 groups, as follows:
- Group 1: married males and married females
- Group 2: single females and single males
- Group 3: married males and single males
- Group 4: married females and single females
Within each group, there are different subsets, known as classes, based primarily on age. There is a class for Nursery (0-2), toddlers (3 – 5), young children (6-9), pre-teens (10-12), teens (13-18), young adults (19-31), adults (32-72), and empty nesters (73+).
| Meeting week | Class 1 | Class 2 | Class 3 | Class 4 | Class 5 | Class 6 | Class 7 | Class 8 |
| Week 1 and 3 | All married adults | All single adults | Teen boys and girls | Pre -teens | Young children | Toddlers | Nursery | |
| Week 2 and 4 | All men | All women | Teen boys | Teen girls |
Further details on the composition of units, groups, classes, and branches, and their meeting schedules, is detailed here.
Recruitment and diversity
Captains are responsible for recruiting limited partners into the community through their council and by extension, branch. A captain does not recruit limited partners only from their demographic. Instead, they work to ensure that their recruits are diverse, considering social categorizations, gender, and social status, in addition to demographic groups.
Captains work in concert with their fellow captains in the branch presidency, and other presidencies in a village and district to ensure that the district is as diverse as possible. They are guided by present data on how diverse their district, village, and branch are, and what needs to be focused on to improve. They are also guided by community bylaws, which expressly require diversity as shown by demographic data about a population from which the community intends to recruit limited partners.
The captain serves as a service extension of the Human Relations Agency, though they also act as an interface between participants and other community agencies. For agencies that do not have operational presidencies, such agencies in the Economic and Public Administration Bureaus, captains come in handy in helping participants navigate these agencies’ automated system and other relevant tools used by the agency to deliver services.
The automated system is designed to help participants with all the help they need in matters related to various agencies, including the Human Relations Agency. However, should they run into problems, captains assist them in navigating the system, or direct them to relevant contractors who help them at a fee.
Automated system
The Legal Affairs Agency works through an automated system through which participants seek the help they need, and interact with bureau presidents. The automated system helps participants with most of their legal issues. It is mainly through this system that bureau presidents also interact with contractors, who may be contracted from time to time by both the agency and participants for legal services that the automated itself may be unable to deliver.
The automated system, using machine learning and big data analytics, collects information and analyses it to identify areas where the agency needs to adjust its legal strategies and any other instances that need the agency’s attention. These capabilities also enable the system to self-improve over time.
Contractors
Legal experts work with the Legal Affairs Agency and participants to help in legal matters. The Legal Affairs Agency needs legal contractors to set up its automated system, formulate training modules, and come up with legal strategies and policies. The agency also engages them in instances where it needs to align the community’s practices with changes in legislation and court pronouncements. Participants may need contractors to help them navigate the agency’s automated system, or in instances where the system is unable to help them. Contractors routinely report to the agency to help it better its systems and be more helpful to its users.
Inter-agency cooperation
The 24 community agencies form three columns of 8 agencies each. There is loose collaboration between the agencies in a column. The Legal Affairs Agency is part of the second column.
the Legal Affairs Agency coordinates with the Stewardship Agency (agency 2) as limited partners draw up their agreements with the community and with each other, and in monitoring businesses’ compliance with applicable laws.
The Legal Affairs Agency cooperates with the Capital Bank Agency (agency 8) as limited partners invest in the community, drawing up applicable contracts and helping in their execution. The Legal Affairs Agency also interacts with the Life Planning Agency (agency 4) in preparing insurance agreements with participants.
After the Bylaws and IT Infrastructure Agency (agency 11) has facilitated the formulation of bylaws, the Legal Affairs Agency works on their implementation and advises on whether they align with existing laws of the area of jurisdiction within which a community operates.
The Data and Publishing Agency handles extensive amounts of data, which it needs to handle properly. It needs to comply with privacy laws, for instance, while still leveraging the data to enhance agencies’ performance. The Legal Affairs Agency consults to enable this.
Presidencies’ offices, meetings, and quarterly conferences
Offices
The Legal Affairs Agency’s agency presidency has permanent offices in District Building 14’s first floor, on the western side. Facing them on the eastern side are the offices for trustee presidency and Regulatory Bureau’s bureau presidency serving the agency and District 14.
Trustees and the regulatory bureau presidencies alternate their offices. Trustees have the offices in building 14 on Tuesdays and Thursdays, while the bureau presidencies use the offices on Mondays and Wednesdays, as shown in this timetable:
| Building 2/ Stewardship Agency | Building 14/ Legal Affairs Agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Trustee presidency | Regulatory Bureau presidency |
| Tuesday | Regulatory Bureau presidency | Trustee presidency |
| Wednesday | Trustee presidency | Regulatory Bureau presidency |
| Thursday | Regulatory Bureau presidency | Trustee presidency |
The first floor’s layout is as follows, including other public servants who serve District 14.
Working hours and meetings
Agency presidents, trustees, and regulatory agency presidents work in their offices on a full-time basis. To allow for this, they are required to be at least 50 years of age, be experts in NewVistas concepts, an be semi or fully retired from their business. This allows them to dedicate much of their productive time to serving the community.
Other presidencies work from Monday to Thursday, from 8 – 8:45 AM. their offices are converted for this purpose, and can thereafter be used for other activities, such as office space for participants, hotel rooms and hospital consultation rooms. On Thursday, each presidency (four presidents serving A, B, C, and D) meets for a 45-minute meeting from 9:00 to 9:45 in the morning.
On the last Friday of each quarter, between 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM, each demographic presidency meets. The three-member presidency discusses common bureau matters that are of interest to the demographic they serve. On Saturday, again between 9:00 AM and 12:00 PM, the whole board meets, where the presidents present their input from the previous day’s demographic presidency meeting, and prepare for the quarterly conference. The aim is to have a cohesive presentation during the quarterly conference but tailored to specific demographic interests.
Quarterly conferences
Quarterly conferences are held on the last Sunday of each quarter, from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM, with a lunch break in between. During quarterly conferences, each demographic presidency sits together in the same row.
Quarterly conferences are held in District Buildings 5 and 17. Each building has a lower and higher assembly court. The different demographic groups use the assembly courts as follows:
| Building | Assembly court | Demographic |
|---|---|---|
| 5 | Lower court | Married men (A) |
| 5 | Higher court | Married Women (B) |
| 17 | Lower court | Single women (C) |
| 17 | Higher court | Single men (D) |
Branch presidencies do not attend quarterly conferences. Instead, they follow the relevant proceedings online alongside other participants.
Each of the four assembly courts has seats for 480 presidents representing the respective demographic. In the diagram below each of the 4 courts is illustrated. The ceiling of each court has an elliptical arch that enables agency presidents, who are the only ones who make a presentation during the conference, to speak without the need to amplify their voices. The 480 seats are easily rotatable to enable presidents to face whoever is speaking.
Each of the four courts has an identical arrangement and number of seats. The exact arrangement of each court can therefore be illustrated using one court, in this case, building 5’s lower court that is used by married men (A).
Within an assembly court, the 480 presidents are arranged in terms of demographic presidencies of 3. The Regulatory Bureau’s demographic presidency for married men (13A, 14A, and 15A) sits in the highlighted seats. Various district demographic presidencies also sit on the same row.
[1] These demographic groups are married men (A), married women (B), single women (C), and single men (D).