I’ve been thinking about the ratio of people who contact a legal aid organization vs. the amount of people that org is able to represent. Some rough back-of-the-napkin figures for a typical legal aid organization in a large metro in the U.S. (1.5 million plus population):
Total requests for legal assistance via phone, web, email, in person for a year: 50,000 to 100,000;
Total number of people who get full representation from that org in the same year: 1,000 to 1,500.
An aside: what frustrates me most (“most” doing work here - I’m frustrated to varying degrees by many things in this field) about how most people talk about the “justice gap” is that it assumes:
Full representation of every person with a legal issue is the goal, and
We can get to full representation of every person through simply spending more money.
Back to the point: a lot of money and time gets spent on the assumption that people are having trouble finding a legal aid organization to contact. I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I think we have too little legal information and guidance that’s findable and actionable, and instead we’re building intake funnels.
From the person seeking help’s perspective, I think whether they prefer to talk to someone or “do their own research” depends on demographics. Personally (as an older millennial) talking to a live person is the last thing I’d rather do, but people in older groups may prefer calling a phone number. I’d really like to see some research on this - some has been done in the healthcare context, but none that I know of in the legal context.
From the legal aid org’s perspective, maybe the problem isn’t that people aren’t able to find them or contact them. It’s that too many people are getting to the business end of the funnel without getting the information they need first. In other words we’re building highways with multiple on-ramps but only one off-ramp.