Self-Help

Research: 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. People who participate in the project will be a part of a randomized control trial to understand the effectiveness of attorney representation, financial counseling, and self-help materials on financial health outcomes.

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 in financial distress.

Research Team: Jim Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Dalié Jiménez, Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law

Lois R. Lupica, Professor of Law, University of Maine School of Law

Research: In partnership with the Boston Court Service Center and the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association, the Lab’s Guardianship Service of Process study evaluates whether self-help materials can make a difference for court users navigating the complex web of court procedures to initiate a guardianship case.

The Guardianship Service of Process Study, which launched in early September 2017, tests Lab-designed self-help materials. Participants receive printed materials (developed in large part at our first hackathon) on a randomized basis for both adult or minor guardianship cases and in English or Spanish. In addition, minor guardianship petitioners randomized to receive the hard copy booklets will also gain access to an online tool developed by Bill Palin, the Access to Justice/Technology Fellow with Harvard Law School’s clinical programs. That site walks users through their case to provide personalized instructions, using new guided interview software similar to TurboTax. The RCT will compare rates of successful service, among other outcomes, between the treatment and control groups.

What We’ll Learn: If self-help packets or a new tech tool can help people file for guardianship and then correctly complete service of process, then legal services providers know what types of resources to invest in and how best to allocate their limited resources. And if the self-help materials aren’t at all effective, perhaps we can learn something about the procedural hurdles and have a better understanding of how these hurdles themselves may need to change.

Research Team:

Boston Court Service Center

Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association

Court Centers Services of Worcester & Springfield

Jim Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; Professor of Law at Harvard Law School

Chris Griffin, Visiting Professor and Research Scholar, James E. Rogers College of Law, University of Arizona

Erika Rickard, Senior Officer, Civil Justice Innovation Project, Pew Charitable Trusts

With intervention design thanks to our affiliates,

Bill Palin, Developing Justice, Harvard Law School

Hallie Jay Pope, Graphic Advocacy Project

Research: The Debt Collection Default Study measures what kinds of mailings from legal services providers to defendants are effective in reducing default rates in debt collection cases. To our knowledge, our study is the first of its kind to evaluate an intervention intended to reduce default rates in civil cases using a randomized control trial.

Designing self-help materials: The goal of our self-help materials was to induce debt collection defendants to (1) open, (2) read, and (3) act upon them. In terms of what action needed to be taken, our materials needed to induce a litigant to fill out three copies of an Answer form (which we would provide), mail two of those copies, receive a notice from the BMC of a scheduled court date, and appear in court on that scheduled date.

We designed interventions consisting of two forms of mailings based on research from other disciplines, including psychology, public health, and adult education.

Field operation: The Research Team received debt collection case information on a weekly basis from court staff at the Boston Municipal Court. After identifying potentially study-eligible cases, we compared the defendant’s address in the court file with that in an online address-checking system, and excluded those with inconsistent addresses.

The Research Team randomized whether each defendant receives a mailing, and if so, what kind. Using different formats and messages, the mailings urge defendants to contest their cases (by filing any necessary paperwork and showing up to court) and provide information/materials useful for such a defense (such as an Answer form).

Treatment group A, the Limited treatment:

• letter from the legal services provider
• three copies of a check-box style Answer form
• business envelopes pre-addressed to the court and the plaintiff’s attorney
• map to the courthouse
• and a post-it note appropriate for a wall calendar saying “Go To Court Today!”

Treatment group B, the Maximal treatment:

• First, a postcard with the signature Blob cartoon, stating: “Dear [Recipient Name], Help is on the way. Look for me!.” Next to “me” was a hand-drawn arrow pointing to an image of Blob.
• The next day, we mailed the defendant the same manila envelope (with corresponding contents) that those in the “Limited” group received, except that the two business envelopes to the Court and to the Plaintiff’s attorney had stamps.

Control group: no mailing

Results: We tracked two outcomes:

• Whether the defendant filed an answer, and
• Whether the defendant attended the first court hearing.

We find no difference in effectiveness as between our two mailings, but that both roughly double the rate at which defendants participate in their lawsuits. Specifically:

Chart comparing answer rates in debt collection cases

As compared to a randomly selected Control group with a 13% answer rate (corresponding to an 87% default rate), our “Limited” intervention group saw a 24% answer rate, and our “Maximal” intervention group saw a 24% answer rate.

The corresponding rates for whether the defendant appeared at the first scheduled court hearing were 7.5% for the Control group, 14% for the Limited group, and 15.3% for the Maximal group.

Differences between the Control versus the Limited and Maximal groups were statistically significant. Differences between the Limited and Maximal groups were not.

The Study: Part II

Field operation

This study builds on the smaller pilot study in Boston, and will include multiple legal service providers and multiple court locations.

By randomly varying the format and content of the package, the Research Team will learn what is necessary and cost effective to reduce default rates. Potential areas of exploration include the appearance of the external envelope; the text of the letter; whether the letter includes cartoons and/or other illustrations; the contents of the package (e.g., whether Answer forms, return envelopes, maps to courthouses, and reminder post-it notes are included); and whether the materials are translated, and if so, into what languages.

What We Learned: The results of this study shed some light on a few different areas of debate in the legal arena:

• why people obey the law and engage in official proceedings (and why they don’t)
• the role of civil legal services providers and the types of services they provide
• how courts present themselves to and interact with people without lawyers

Research Team: Jim Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; Professor of Law, Harvard Law School

Dalié Jiménez, Professor of Law at the University of California, Irvine School of Law

Andrea Matthews, Bureau of Consumer Protection

Resources:

Research: Those who focus on self-help often propose that simplifying language in court forms will help self-represented litigants. This RCT tested that theory by randomizing people seeking divorce to assignment to a plain language form or the existing form.

What We Learned:

Research Team:

April Faith-Slaker, Executive Director, Texas Access to Justice Commission

Resources:

Research: Over four decades ago, the United States Supreme Court decided a trio of cases addressing the constitutionality of a court system’s imposition of filing fees without a corresponding in forma pauperis (“IFP”) process. These cases established that a court system could condition access to itself on a would-be litigant’s paying a mandatory (nonwaivable) filing fee, but that the due process clause demanded that courts waive the fee for indigent litigants in cases involving constitutional rights that could be effectuated only by resort to the courts. An example of a right within the exception was divorce, it being a feature of the United States legal system that when two spouses (even if childless and penniless) both affirmatively desire to exercise their constitutional right to terminate their marriage, one must sue the other in a court. The legal subject area in our study, divorce, is the same as that in the Supreme Court’s filing fee cases, and it remains the quintessential example of a constitutional right that can be effectuated
only by resort to the courts.

What if a court imposed other costs on mandatory “costs” on litigants in divorce cases? What if, effectively, a court system demanded that an indigent litigant find a lawyer in order to obtain a divorce?

Study Design: Our study randomized an individual seeking assistance to pursue a divorce to either an effort by a pro bono matching service to find a pro bono attorney to represent her (treated group) or a referral to existing self-help or low bono resources coupled with an offer to answer questions by telephone (control group). Our study partner was the provider of last resort for free legal services in our study site, Philadelphia County: it accepted intakes primarily via referrals from other organizations, and it required that service seekers exhaust all other options.

What We Learned:

Research Team: Jim Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; Professor of 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:

D. James Greiner, Ellen Degnan, Thomas Ferriss, and Roseanna Sommers, “Using random assignment to measure court accessibility for low-income divorce seekers,” PNAS April 6, 2021 118 (14)

Research:
Residential displacement can disrupt a host of life activities and undoubtedly takes an emotional toll on tenants and their families. To mitigate those impacts, we need to know more about how tenants find themselves as defendants in summary eviction proceedings, the role that lawyers play in stopping or delaying those proceedings, and whether existing legal solutions address the problems of eviction as we understand them.

The Questions:
How well do lawyers allocate the scarce resource of their time? Does legal representation yield improved outcomes for those facing eviction?

The Study: 
With its field partners, the A2J Lab has designed a double-randomized study. This RCT will investigate (1) how well lawyers make decisions about whom to represent; and (2) whether outcomes with direct representation are measurably different from those where tenants only have access to self-help materials. After staff attorneys conduct intake and make provisional representation decisions, the A2J Lab will randomize each potential client into one of two groups (the first level of randomization). In the first group, the attorney’s decision will be followed; in the second group, another random decision will replace the attorney’s. Among that second group, a computer-based randomizer will “decide” whether the potential client receives an offer of representation or self-help materials (the second level of randomization).

What We Hoped to Learn: 
This RCT design was intended to help identify which eviction defendants’ outcomes truly depend on representation, whether those outcomes are continuances, stays of execution, or even possession of the apartment. It also was intended to reveal whether the offer of direct representation increases the probability of success relative to receiving the self-help packet. Considering the larger social impact of eviction, this study was expected to include non-adjudicatory outcomes measures such as the incidence of homelessness, unemployment, and adverse health effects, among other individual welfare consequences.

Research Team:
Access to Justice Lab
Rhode Island Center for Justice
Roger Williams University School of Law
New Mexico Legal Aid
University of New Mexico School of Law