Meeting Legal Needs in Australia

The Law and Justice Foundation of New South Wales has been doing some serious research into legal needs across Australia and how those needs are in fact met. The resulting

Legal Australia-Wide Survey (LAW Survey), provides the first comprehensive quantitative assessment across Australia of an extensive range of legal needs on a representative sample of the population. It examines the nature of legal problems, the pathways to their resolution and the demographic groups that struggle with the weight of their legal problems.

If the 350+ pages of the full report daunt you, you might be interested in the Foundation’s “Updating Justice” series, a collection of 2 or 3 page “simplified excerpts” from the report, released in the months since the report’s publication. The latest of these, just released, is “Seeking formal advice for legal problems in New South Wales,” a summary of the findings “concerning the use of advisors for legal problems in New South Wales.”

The insights from this report will add to those flowing from somewhat similar, though less elaborate, Canadian studies, such as the 2010 Report of the Ontario Civil Legal Needs Project and the British Columbia Legal Services Society 2008 report, “Legal Problems Faced in Everyday Lives of British Columbians.“