Limited Legal Assistance

The Setting: There will never be enough resources to provide full representation to all Alaskans who could use it in civil cases. The question is: Are there other alternatives that could help the residents of Alaska get the support they deserve? Could trained advocates or other non-lawyer supports be part of the solution? This RCT is studying how effective trained advocates are at increasing success in SNAP benefits cases.

The Access to Justice Lab has partnered with Alaska Legal Services Corporation to design a randomized control trial to evaluate community advocates services in the context of the SNAP benefits arm of their program.

What We’ll Learn:

Research Team:
Access to Justice Lab
Alaska Legal Services
Legal Services Funded Corp.

The Setting: The Financial Distress Research Project is a partnership among multiple branches of government, academia (students and professors), multiple non-profit service providers, and the private sector. The RCT investigates the effectiveness of attorney representation, financial counseling, and self-help materials on financial wellbeing.

The Problem: For many individuals and families in the United States, the problems of debt deteriorate into legal challenges, particularly into debt collection lawsuits and the possible need for bankruptcy. Debt collection lawsuits and especially bankruptcy proceedings, which require completion of a financial management course of questionable value, are challenging for the unassisted. Meanwhile, documentation practices in the consumer debt industry, along with some transparently abusive practices, suggest that many collection lawsuits could and should be successfully defended. But we will never have enough lawyers to offer a traditional attorney-client relationship to all in need, particularly because debt is considered less of a priority for legal services providers. Thus, we must find a way to deliver legal assistance through other methods. This project investigates the provision of paper-based self-help materials that implement the state of the art in adult communication, psychology, sociology, and behavioral economics.

The Questions: First, how closely does provision of paper-based state of the art legal self-help materials approximate the court and socioeconomic outcomes produced by an offer of a traditional attorney-client relationship? Second, does the financial management course required to complete bankruptcy provide any benefit to consumers?

The Study: The A2J Lab randomized individuals recently sued in a Connecticut small claims court debt collection proceeding to one of four conditions. Group 1 received state-of-the-art self-help materials and an incentive to undergo standard bankruptcy financial counseling. Group 2 receive state-of-the-art self-hep materials and an incentive to undergo placebo counseling addressing food safety. Group 3 received an offer of a Connecticut Legal Services attorney and an incentive to undergo standard bankruptcy financial counseling. Group 4 received an offer of a Connecticut Legal Services attorney and an incentive to undergo placebo counseling addressing food safety. The self-help materials covered the same topics as the Connecticut Legal Services attorney, namely, defense of the debt collection lawsuit, diagnosis as into either bankruptcy or debt management, and (if chosen) assistance in a bankruptcy proceeding. A2J Lab researchers will collect outcomes from small claims court files, from participant surveys, and from de-identified credit attributes from a credit reporting agency.

What We’ll Learn: A comparison of financial health across our four groups will provide gold-standard evidence regarding the effectiveness of self-help packets, financial counseling, and attorney representation. The result will be the richest and most detailed dataset ever conducted in an evaluation of what works for individuals whose debt problems have become legal problems.

Research Team: 
D. James Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; S. William Green Professor of Public Law, Harvard Law School
Dalié Jiménez, Professor of Law, University of California, Irvine School of Law
Lois R. Lupica, Emeritus Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law; Lead Designer, Community Economic Defense Project

The Setting: There are two ways to view this project. First, the ability to get married, and to get divorced, are both fundamental federal constitutional rights in the United States. But only the latter requires a lawsuit: marriage is the only contract that the contracting parties cannot dissolve on their own. The requirement that courts be involved in a divorce raises the possibility of access to justice problems for individuals who cannot afford to hire lawyers. Some state or local bar associations run services that attempt to match lawyers seeking certain kinds of pro bono matters (e.g., such as divorce) with clients who have that type of problem (e.g., needing a divorce). There has never been a credible assessment of whether this kind of pro bono matching program improves access to justice for low-income individuals with any legal problem, including divorce.

The second way to conceptualize this research focuses on using RCTs as measuring tools. All court systems have certain procedures, paperwork requirements, informational requirements, and more. All courts have pro se litigants attempting to navigate the system without a lawyer. No one has ever proposed a way to measure, quantitatively, whether a court system is accessible to its pro se litigants.

The Problem: This study addressed two problems. First, until this study, we did not know whether state or local bar association pro bono matching services were effective at providing access to justice to low-income individuals. Second, until this study, no one had ever proposed or implemented a quantitative way to measure the pro se accessibility of a court system.

Questions: This research investigates two questions. First, how effective are pro bono matching services at providing access to justice for no-asset, no-income, no-custody, no-protection-order, no-alimony, no-child-support, and no-spousal support divorces? Are lawyers even necessary in this setting, which consists entirely of providing relevant paperwork? Second, how can we measure the pro se accessibility of a court system?

The Study: This study focused on the Philly VIP’s pro bono matching service. During the enrollment period (early 2010s), low-income Philadelphians with divorce matters called Philly VIP to request a match to a pro bono attorney for assistance in obtaining divorces. Philly VIP was the provider of last resort for these cases: no other free legal services provider at this time handled simple divorce matters. The study population consisted of 311 Philadelphians randomized either to a Philly VIP attempt to match them to a pro bono attorney or to no such attempt. Subsequent analysis revealed that, overwhelmingly, study participants sought simple divorces and nothing else. No opposing spouse contested the divorce. There were no child custody, child support, spousal support, alimony, or domestic violence matters, and only a vanishingly small fraction of participants had either assets or income streams for division. In all participants’ cases combined, there were no live hearings, four contested motions filed, and one contested court ruling. In other words, the process of obtaining divorces was wholly and entirely a matter of providing the right paperwork at the right time. 

In addition, the A2J Lab proposed to define a court system as pro se accessible if an RCT revealed that the court’s adjudicatory outputs were “roughly the same” (a definition that required further elaboration) for litigants with lawyers versus litigants without lawyers. Thus, this study also demonstrated how an RCT with a traditional attorney-client relationship involved in one of its treatment conditions can serve as a measuring stick for the pro se accessibility of a court system, in this case the Philadelphia County divorce system in the early 2010s. 

What We Learned: Even though these divorce matters, with a tiny number of exceptions, entirely of providing the right paperwork to the court system at the right time, the Philly VIP pro bono matching service made an enormous difference. Study participants randomized to a Philly VIP attempt to match them to a pro bono attorney achieved divorces in Philadelphia County at approximately four times the rate of participants randomized to no such attempted match. If one includes divorces obtained in other Pennsylvania counties, the Philly-VIP attempted match group achieved divorces at twice the rate of the no-attempted-match group. These enormous differences in success rates provided quantitative evidence that at this time, the Philadelphia County divorce system was not pro se accessible. Subsequent investigation suggested that the reason for this pro se inaccessibility was likely the procedures applicable in this court at this time, which for example included a requirement that a pro se divorce seeker (i) file a paper called a “Praecipe To Transmit the Record to the Prothonotary” and (ii) find and use a typewriter to fill out a particular form. 

Research Team: 
D. James Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; S. William Green Professor of Public Law, Harvard Law School
Roseanna Sommers, Assistant Professor of Law University of Michigan
Ellen Degnan, Senior Staff Attorney, Southern Poverty Law Center
Thomas Ferriss, Staff Data Scientist, Google
Philadelphia VIP

Resources:
Published version of the study: D. James Greiner, Ellen Degnan, Thomas Ferriss, and Rosenna Sommers, “Using random assignment to measure court accessibility for low-income divorce seekers,” PNAS April 6, 2021 118 (14)

Longer, unpublished writeup of the study: SRLN writeup of the study

Report of the study in The Atlantic

The Setting: Most existing studies use survey-based approaches that measure client satisfaction.^[1] We found no research measuring the legal outcomes of brief advice services. No evidence from credible studies links the advice provided to measurable effects on case results, let alone on socioeconomic outcomes of individuals and communities. There is, in short, no causal evidence showing that advice changes the court rulings that can damage client socioeconomic outcomes on any dimension.^[2]   

Moving from whether brief advice is useful to whether it is used, again, we cannot say.  As with the research we just discussed, any research conducted in this area relied exclusively on single point in time surveys of clients.^[3]  Without a comparison group, no one knows whether the actions clients took after receiving brief advice are the same as those they would have taken in the absence of brief advice.  There is no research using a credible design to test this hypothesis. 

The challenges described above transcend case type. Need exceeds capacity, necessitating creative service solutions such as “brief advice,” in every case type LSPs encounter.  Lack of research to understand even the most basic definition of “does it work” – court outcomes – is ubiquitous within civil legal aid.  Considering whether individuals or communities experience impacts beyond the courthouse steps is completely absent from the discussion in all case types. And an inability to know whether individuals even use the advice permeates attempts at evaluating service delivery.  These challenges exist in all civil case types serving pro se litigants.  This project will begin the process of creating a credible research base on these issues across differing case types, contributing new knowledge to the field.  It is urgent. 

^[1] JOHN M. GREACEN, SELF REPRESENTED LITIGANTS AND COURT AND LEGAL SERVICES RESPONSES TO THEIR NEEDS 4–8 (2002), available at http://www.courts.ca.gov/ partners/documents/SRLwhatweknow.pdf. 

^[2] Linda F. Smith & Barry Stratford, DIY in Family Law: A Case Study of a Brief Advice Clinic for Pro Se Litigants, 14 J.L. & FAM. STUD. 167, 180 (2012). 

^[3] See, American Association of Retired Persons Foundation.  Legal Hotlines: Outcomes and Follow-up:  A Survey of Clients at Senior Legal Hotlines in Florida, Michigan, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Washington, 2000 (available in hard copy from the National Center on Poverty Law, http://www.povertylaw.org/hotline/hotline2A.htm) (80% of respondents receiving advice report following it); IOLTA Information Services and Sonoma County Legal Aid.  The Self-Help Access Center (SHAC) is Filling a Critical Niche in the Sonoma County Justice System:  SHAC:  The First Six Months.  Sonoma County, CA 2001 (80% of respondents receiving a referral or suggestion for non-legal help report acting on that advice); Garrett, Tom.  Survey of Former Clients of Legal Services Law Line of Vermont, Inc.  Burlington, VT, 2000 (61% of respondents report acting based on the advice they received). 

The Problem: Ordinarily, only the neediest qualify for free civil legal aid. But the number of “the neediest” is large enough to exceed the capacity of LSPs to provide a traditional attorney-client relationship for each legal matter implicating basic human needs. To increase the number of people served, LSPs provide services short of a traditional attorney-client relationship. One such service form is called “brief advice.” For many LSPs, brief advice is the most common form of service offered to low-income clients, even with respect to matters that LSPs traditionally prioritize.

LSPs running extensive brief advice programs assume without any evidence (much less credible evidence) that a little bit of lawyer (or paralegal) is better than no lawyer, that some lawyer is better than a little bit of lawyer, and that a traditional lawyer-client relationship is best of all. Moreover, they define “better” or “best of all” solely in terms of court rulings, without considering socioeconomic wellbeing. Thus, LSPs do not know whether brief advice improves socioeconomic wellbeing. Worse still, they do not know whether brief advice improves court rulings. Worst of all, LSPs do not even know whether their clients even follow the brief advice they receive.

The Questions: This randomized control trial (RCT) will investigate whether brief advice is a useful substitute for full-scope legal representation for low-income individuals in high volume civil dockets on three dimensions: (1) whether individuals receiving the brief advice follow it; (2) the impact on court outcomes, (3) the impact on socioeconomic outcomes including family stability, housing security, and general well-being or life satisfaction.

The Study: This project will focus on PLA’s child custody practice and DCLA’s assistance with respect to non-payment of rent for non-subsidized housing units in summary eviction litigation.  We purposefully chose differing case types.  We hypothesize results will generalize across case types, making them even more useful for policymakers interested in understanding long-term impacts of pro se litigant service models and acting using a credible research base.   

To assess the research questions discussed above, the A2J Lab will conduct an RCT, as follows: PLA will invite pro se individuals accessing the Family Court Help Center (FCHC) with a study-eligible child custody matter to participate in the study.  Similarly, DCLA will invite pro se individuals accessing their intake system (which includes online, telephone, and in-person modalities) with a non-payment of rent matter.  In Philadelphia, the A2J Lab will randomly assign those providing informed consent to either full-scope legal representation from an LSP (Full-Scope Group) or brief advice from either a paralegal or attorney with the LSP (Brief Advice Group).  The Brief Advice Group may include a second random assignment to limited-scope assistance provided by a PLA paralegal (Paralegal Sub-Group), or brief advice provided by the FCHC (FCHC Sub-Group). In D.C., the randomization will be to either the Brief Advice Group or the Self-Help Materials Group. Again, the variation in the treatment contrast across the two sites will provide more complete information to policy makers. 

What We Hope to Learn: Data will contribute to three categories of outcomes: (1) impact of type of service provided on long-term socioeconomic outcomes including family stability, housing security, and general well-being or life satisfaction; (2) impact of type of service provided on court outcomes; and (3) whether those randomly assigned to the Brief Advice Group acted on the advice.  We will combine administrative data, survey responses, and information from structured observations to create the full dataset.   

Research Team:
Access to Justice Lab
DC Legal Aid
Philadelphia Legal Aid