Access to Justice commissions need formal evaluations
In the summer of 2023, Keisha missed her rent. The Maryland mom was taking care of her daughter’s life threatening illness, and the rental assistance didn’t arrive in time. The landlord filed an eviction. As soon as Keisha showed up to the courthouse, she met an attorney from Maryland Legal Aid in the hallway. Immediately, he conferred with the landlord’s attorney, negotiated a deal, and got the case dismissed.
Later that year, Nebraska resident Kirstyn Gillotte had trouble finding work after her car broke down. Her rent was heavily subsidized by the Omaha Housing Authority, and based on the agency’s own policies, she qualified for a hardship protection. But no one ever told her. There were no lawyers in the hallway waiting to help her. Instead, she went through the process alone. And she was evicted. What followed were many of the hallmarks of housing instability: living with relatives, moving across state lines, kids switching schools, and custody battles. All of it unnecessary.
Across the United States, our patchwork of non-standard laws, programs, and funding sources create massive gaps in civil justice outcomes. The stakes are high: your day in court can determine whether you keep your home, have your wages garnished, or even declare bankruptcy. And once the court makes a ruling, the game is basically over. Sometimes it can happen in just five minutes.
Yet there are glimmers of hope. There are communities of practice designed to address these failures of the justice system. They come together in the form of access to justice (A2J) commissions, typically consisting of attorneys, judges, and court personnel who develop new solutions and adopt best practices. 40+ states and DC have an A2J commission, but they are not all created equal.
Measuring access to justice is a big challenge
Ten years ago, Rebecca Sandefur said: “The kinds of fundamental data infrastructure that exist for major social institutions like education, health, and criminal justice do not exist for civil justice.” This remains true today.
Key data points in other fields are readily available. We know high school graduation rates, or hospital readmission rates, or incarceration rates across the country. But if you want to know how many people were evicted last year? It’s not an easy answer.
Without data, we can’t tell the difference between an access to justice commission that’s actually helping people and one that’s just holding meetings. The creative programs that are successful never have the chance to scale, and it’s harder to fix the programs that fail.
The National Center for Access to Justice has made real progress measuring policies across the country. They focus on four key areas of attorney access, self-representation, language access, and disability access. Their justice index creates an apples-to-apples comparison of state laws that show major disparities across the country. But a state gets credit whether their commission meets regularly or hasn’t convened in years.
Measuring policies is a huge step forward. Measuring the way policies get developed is another matter. How do we know which access to justice commissions are truly committed to closing justice gaps, and which ones are just checking boxes? A good place to start is looking at the programs that have already been evaluated.
Program evaluations reveal what works
The good news is that some A2J programs are already being evaluated. The results are striking.
For right to counsel programs, where tenants facing eviction get a lawyer, the evaluations tell a consistent story. In city after city, the vast majority of represented tenants avoid displacement and each program has a clear return on investment.
Court navigator programs, where trained non-lawyers help people fill out forms and understand procedures, are also effective. In New York City, people who worked with navigators asserted twice as many legal defenses and were 56% more likely to feel heard by the judge. And a survey of 23 navigator programs across the country found zero complaints about unauthorized practice of law.
Legal paraprofessional programs are newer, but the early data is promising. Arizona’s 2024 survey found that 48% of clients served by licensed paraprofessionals would otherwise have had no help at all. Minnesota’s pilot tracked 2,312 cases over several years, and became the only program in the country to transition from pilot to permanent based on evaluation data.
But there’s a pattern worth noting. These evaluations focus on individual programs. Nobody is measuring the commissions that create these programs in the first place.
Measure the commissions, not just the programs
With all these emerging programs in mind, how could we measure the effectiveness of access to justice commissions? The American Bar Association has a series of self-assessment materials. In addition to these excellent templates, here’s a high level framework that looks at five dimensions of effectiveness.
- Logic modeling. Does the commission follow an established logic model? Are they clear about the problems they want to address, the partnerships they have established, the activities they will perform, and the outcomes of those activities? Do they have a way to measure those outcomes? A logic model clearly communicates the goals of the commission and draws a through-line from meetings to actions to results.
- Activity. Is the commission actually doing work? Does it meet regularly? Does it publish annual reports? Does it have dedicated staff? The ABA found that professional staffing is one of the three key predictors of commission effectiveness. A commission that meets quarterly, publishes its work, and has partially dedicated staff looks very different from one that exists only on paper.
- Responsiveness. Is the commission addressing real problems and engaging the broader legal community? Every state has documented justice gaps in housing, family law, debt, and public benefits. Is the commission’s agenda aligned with those gaps? When a crisis hits, does the commission respond? Or is it running programs that are disconnected from what people actually need?
- Program generation and evaluation. Does the commission create new initiatives? Does it measure them? Minnesota’s paraprofessional pilot went permanent because the evaluation justified it. Access to justice commissions that launch pilots, evaluate outcomes, and scale what works have more impact than their peers.
- Changes to policy. Does the commission recommend changes to state law that increase access to justice? In Michigan, they added a way to track consumer debt cases. In Minnesota, their work helped the attorney general push medical debt reforms and garnishment protections. How does the access to justice commission enshrine its work for the long term?
All of this matters because right now, we can’t tell the difference between a commission that is transforming access to justice and one that is just holding meetings. Funders have a tough time directing resources to what works. Advocates have trouble pointing to models worth replicating. And actual access to justice depends on what state you happen to live in.