Free Legal Advice—but Does It Work?
Free Legal Advice—but Does It Work? - Ideas - the Boston Globe
ALMOST EVERY MORNING, staffers at Greater Boston Legal Services arrive at work to find a line of people waiting on the street outside their offices. These people are there because they need help: some because they’re being evicted, others because they’re chasing down child support payments, still others because they’re filing for divorce.
Lawyers are expensive, and for millions of low-income people across the United States, nonprofits like Greater Boston Legal Services offer the best—perhaps the only—chance at professional help. Staffed by civic-minded attorneys and paid for with public money and private donations, these organizations represent our society’s primary mechanism for making sure that when it comes to civil proceedings, all people, including the very poor, are treated equally before the law.
For decades, it has been an article of faith among those who have devoted their lives to the cause of legal aid that if only the system had more funding, it could do more good and help more people. But lately, a difficult new question is being asked of the legal services community: What evidence do they have that the help they’re offering even makes a difference—and that they’re allocating their scarce resources as effectively as possible?
That is the challenge being laid down by a group of critics led by James Greiner, a professor at Harvard Law School. Greiner believes passionately in providing free legal assistance to the poor, but he is dismayed by what he sees as a lack of data on how it’s delivered and how it affects people’s lives. For all the good they think they’re doing, Greiner argues, the fact is that legal services providers are working off untested assumptions and operating largely in the dark.
Given the noble intentions and tireless dedication of the individuals who staff legal clinics around the country, it feels almost indecent to question the effectiveness of the help they’re providing. But from where Greiner sits, the sanctity of these efforts—and the fact that the system provides for just two attorneys per 10,000 low-income people—is precisely why it matters. In particular, as he sees it, we know very little about how legal service providers ought to determine which clients to take and which to turn down; in many cases, he argues, they may be wasting precious time and money on cases where they’re unlikely to have an impact.
“Most folks have concluded that we’re never going to be able to give a full attorney-client relationship to every person who has a legal problem,” Greiner said last week. “The funding is just never going to be there. So you have to take steps short of that, in an attempt to meet the need.”