CBA Record July-August 2022

Chicago Bar Foundation Report

Expanding Access to Free & Affordable Legal Help: New National Study is a Call to Action By Bob Glaves, CBF Executive Director, and Emme Veenbass, CBF Manager of Development & Communications

ethnic minorities. Low-income Americans also are likely to experience a civil legal problem that substantially impacts them, underscored by the fact that 35% reported a problem that substantially impacted their financial situation in the last year. While low-income Americans only sought legal help 25% of the time for

to legal help, the report shows that their confidence that the systemwill give them a fair shake is starkly lower as well. It also underscores the urgent need to sig nificantly expand funding and support for pro bono and legal aid services and to prioritize efforts to improve access for the middle market.

T he Legal Services Corporation recently released the 2022 Justice Gap Study, the first comprehensive national report on the state of access to legal assistance in years. Along with its focus on low-income and disadvantaged Americans, the report for the first time looks at access for middle-income and higher-income Americans and shows just howmuch more work is needed to improve access for low and middle-income people. The report confirms that the great majority of everyday people go without legal help for their civil legal problems even when they identify these issues as having a substantial impact on their lives. The prob lem is most pronounced for low-income Americans, but the report confirms that the gap in access to legal help also extends well into the middle class. Along with the immediate problems people experience when they lack access

civil legal problems with a substantial impact on their household financial situa tion, half of them were still turned away by legal aid due to limited resources. These findings under score that the need for legal aid continues to far outpace current resources. Closing this gap requires substan tially increased funding for

Excerpt from 2022 Justice Gap Study.

LSC and other federal programs, as well as more state and local government fund ing. Although it is primarily a government responsibility to ensure equal access to jus tice, it is also our leadership responsibility as lawyers to do so, and we need to lead by example both in our pro bono and financial support and in making the advocacy case to our elected officials.

You can read the full Justice Gap report at justicegap.lsc.gov/the-report. Some of the key takeaways for those of us in the legal community include: Staggering Scale of Need More than 50 million Americans are eli gible for legal aid in our country today (including more than 15 million children), and they are disproportionately racial and

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