Familial Relationships

The Setting: This project will field a randomized controlled trial (“RCT”) of a program that integrates poverty-focused holistic legal and social work services into medical and educational settings that include mandated reporters.

The Problem: The law requires certain professionals (“mandated reporters”) to report to local child protective services (“CPS”) agencies what those professionals perceive as potential child abuse or neglect. Because these mandated reporters—for example, physicians or teachers–lack alternatives, they sometimes also refer to CPS cases that they do not have to report and might prefer not to report if there were an option other than CPS to attempt to address the situation. To reiterate, these optional reports are for cases near the margin – cases for which, if there were another alternative, reporters would not refer to CPS. Mandated reporters inform the A2J Lab that many of these “marginal cases” exist. These marginal cases often share some characteristics of instances of actionable neglect but might more accurately be characterized as resulting from poverty and its associated legal consequences. If so, then the problems could be susceptible to poverty-focused social and legal assistance (such as help with benefits applications, bankruptcy, or domestic violence protection orders) instead of CPS’ more punitive approach.

The Questions: The hypothesis is that such poverty-focused services will reduce the frequency with which these marginal cases are reported to CPS. In particular, the hope is that there will be fewer reports to CPS that result in “no-action” determinations, i.e., cases in which CPS investigates (thus imposing harm on the family) but takes no action (thus providing no benefit to the family).

The Study: This project will evaluate the impact of embedded holistic legal and social work services in a medical care facility serving eight counties in and around Columbia, South Carolina and an early childhood educational facility in Douglas County, Kansas. The study is a randomized control trial (RCT), in which patients presenting at the sites are randomly assigned to receive either full scope help from the multidisciplinary legal and social work team at the Carolina Health Advocacy Medicolegal Partnership (CHAMPS), housed in the University of South Carolina School of Law, in South Carolina, or the Kansas Holistic Defenders (KHD) in Kansas, or comprehensive self-help materials to attempt resolve the issues on their own without help from the legal and social work teams.

CHAMPS and KHD’s current client-bases most often present with issues of accessing Supplemental Security Income (SSI), accessing housing and homelessness resources as well as avoiding evictions, and managing individual education plans or enrolling in school. CHAMPS and KHD also serve clients needing to access food insecurity services; family planning including custody arrangements as well as domestic violence and intimate partner violence assistance; health benefits such as Medicaid; financial stability benefits such as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits; end of life planning for parents and children; and criminal justice record-clearing remedies. By reducing burdens such as food insecurity, financial insecurity, education challenges, and lack of access to health insurance, CHAMPS and KHD attempt to stabilize families such that medical and educational professionals will no longer feel compelled to report to CPS.

What We’ll Learn: These poverty-focused holistic legal and social programs target marginal cases, again, cases approaching but not on or over the line of a mandated CPS report. Given the national reach of the CPS system, evidence that poverty-focused legal and social services reduce the rate of investigations, especially no-action investigations, would improve the wellbeing of children and families and could revolutionize national CPS reporting policy.

Research Team: We partner with the Carolina Health Advocacy Medicolegal Partnership (“CHAMPS”), housed in the University of South Carolina (“USC”) School of Law, and the Kansas Holistic Defenders, serving Douglas County, Kansas, to field the evaluation. We partner with Dr. Shaniece Criss, Associate Professor of Health Sciences and Director of the Master of Arts in Advocacy and Social Policy at Furman University to conduct the evaluation.

Resources:

The Setting: This research examines the comparative advantages of online versus in-person appearances in sensitive cases for vulnerable litigants (Self-Represented Ls).

The Problem: The Problem: Research to understand the effect of widespread remote justice necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic is scant, and particularly scant in the area of family law. What we know thus far, from two articles, both with severe methodological limits, is that litigants believed that online hearings hindered procedural justice as compared to in-person hearings.1 But litigants believed online proceedings improved their ability to attend hearings as compared to in-person proceedings. No studies assessed how remote appearances affected case outcomes. Within the context of these studies, issues of civility and safety are not addressed either. Neither study deployed a credible research design.

On a related front, research using sampling and qualitative analysis has attempted to understand the effects of different types of custody orders on children. Most of these studies occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, after a movement away from a presumption of primary or sole maternal custody.2 As such, arguably, we may have some knowledge of the preferred arrangement for children.

The Questions: But we do not know how methods of conducting hearings, which constitute the key decision points in the judicial process, affect or inhibit courts’ capacity to order preferred arrangements. It is easy to suspect that parental poverty poses challenges to reaching optimal court decisions. Perhaps online proceedings, which may lessen the formidable mental bandwidth, scheduling, and organizational challenges low-income parents face, are a partial solution. But, if we believe remote appearances hinder procedural justice, will the outcomes resulting from a more organized, more accessible hearing still be meaningful if litigants do not feel heard, and if that dissatisfaction translates to dissatisfaction with their orders? Again, we do not know, and we need to in order to promote better outcomes for families.

1 Elizabeth G. Thornburg, Observing Online courts: Lessons from the Pandemic, 54 Fam. Law. Q., 181, 198-199 (2020); Lynda B. Munro & Nicole M. Riel, Our Virtual Reality: Facing the Constitutional Dimensions of Virtual Family Court, 54 Fam. Law. Q., 245, 261 (2020).

2 See, Robert Bauserman, Child Adjustment in Joint-Custody versus Sole-Custody Arrangements: A Meta-Analytic Review, 16(1) J. of Fam. Psych. 91 (2002) (analyzing 21 studies).

The Study: We investigate via a randomized control trial the effect of online appearances, as compared to in-person appearances, in family law cases involving self-represented litigants (“SRLs”). This project will study procedural justice, civility, safety, and the meaningfulness of court rulings for the most vulnerable, and most common, class of parents: SRLs. We will randomly assign roughly 1500 cases over a one-year period to either appear remotely or in-person allowing us to compare the effects of each medium. We will follow cases for up to two years thereafter to learn time to disposition, meaningfulness of orders, and appearance rates. Incorporating a qualitative component we will observe metrics of procedural justice, civility, and litigant safety. The result will be the credible guidance courts need to make the critical choice of how to do business post-pandemic.

What We’ll Learn: This research will contribute two perspectives. It will examine whether SRLs in family court proceedings uniquely suffer when asked to participate in remote proceedings. It will also investigate whether online proceedings worsen, improve, or merely replicate the problems of in- person hearings with particular focus on issues of procedural justice, civility, and litigant safety.

Research Team: We partner with the Commissioners and the Self-Help Center of the Third District Court in Salt Lake County, Utah to field the operation. We conduct the evaluation in consultation with Emily LaGratta of LaGratta Consulting, LLC.

Resources:
Emily LaGratta, Renee Danser, D. James Greiner, “Litigant Empowerment Through Choice? Insights from an Ongoing Study of Remote versus In-Person Family Court Hearings,” Trends in State Courts, 2024

The Setting: 

What We’ll Learn:

Research Team:
Access to Justice Lab
Mothers Outreach Network

The Setting: In partnership with the Boston Court Service Center and the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association, the Guardianship Service of Process study evaluates whether provision of state of the art self-help materials raises the rate of, and lowers the time required to effectuate, service of process in guardianship proceedings in four Massachusetts locations.

The Problem: Legal services providers reported to the A2J Lab that a common problem for individuals seeking help in self-help and brief advice centers was difficulty in serving process in guardianship proceedings. By way of background, guardianship proceedings are court cases in which a petitioner alleges that either a minor or an incapacitated adult is unable to make consequential decisions for themselves and therefore requires a guardian to do so. Service of process refers to notification of potentially interested parties about the existence of the guardianship proceeding. Court rules typically require ritualized methods of notification including, for example, use advertisements in local print media but excluding, for example, any form of electronic communication.

The Questions: Does provision of a self-help packet raise the rate of, and lower the time required to effectuate, service of process in guardianship proceedings?

The Study: The Boston Court Service Center and brief advice clinics run by the Volunteer Lawyers Project of the Boston Bar Association randomized whether individuals seeking assistance in initiating guardianship proceedings received state of the art self-help packets designed after an Access to Justice Lab hackathon. The A2J Lab measured the rate of and time necessary for service of process in guardianship of minor and guardianship of incapacitated persons cases.

What We’ll Learn: If self-help packets help people file for guardianship and then correctly complete service of process, 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 are not effective, perhaps we can learn something about court-induced procedural hurdles and have a better understanding of how these hurdles may need to change.

Research Team:
Patricia Gansert, Assistant Data Analyst, Access to Justice Lab
D. James Greiner, Faculty Director, Access to Justice Lab; S. William Green Professor of Public Law, Harvard Law School
Elizabath Guo, J.D. Candidate, Harvard Law School
Natasha Khwaja, MPP Candidate, Harvard Kennedy School
Matthew Stubenberg, Innovator in Residence, William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawaii

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: Victims of domestic violence/sexual assault (DV/SA) experience the highest incidence of ancillary civil legal needs: on average, about eighteen per person in one state [this is crucial because the estimate isn’t nationwide, only from Washington State]. Yet the standard of care for civil legal assistance in the DV/SA context lags behind support for criminal prosecution. Compounding the problem is a severe lack of legal services in high-volume matters such as eviction and small-claims suits. The general expectation, therefore, is that DV/SA survivors will navigate the court system alone.

The Questions:
Does supporting DV/SA survivors in accessing available civil legal resources improve social outcomes and/or reduce revictimization? If so, could that model be replicated in other jurisdictions? This high-need, vulnerable population is difficult to study; they also have complex needs that demand the best possible allocation of limited resources. Can service providers employ research tools that indicate what really works?

The Study:
The A2J Lab has designed an evaluation to determine the impact of a unique resources referral program that assigns a legal navigator to assess survivors’ needs holistically and match them with appropriate resources. Participants will be randomized to one of two conditions: (1) automatic referral to the program; or (2) referral to other services, including direct referral to legal aid providers without the assistance of the program. The program will use a new survey tool to follow up directly with participants.

What We Hoped to Learn:
The study was expected to provide policymakers with concrete data about whether or not the program works and thus whether it is advisable to replicate (and continue to evaluate) the model elsewhere. By using new digital tools to survey DV/SA survivors, the evaluation was also expected to generate valuable data about whether or not online and text-based survey tools are effective ways to communicate with this vulnerable population.

Research Team: 
Access to Justice Lab