Public legal assistance services provide free or subsidised legal advice, primarily to people on low incomes. Surveys have shown that on average about half of people experience a legal problem each year, so potential demand for these services is high. In the context of restricted funding, there is increased interest in targeting resources to those in greatest need. The challenge is in identifying these individuals and where they live.

The best available measure of the extent of legal problems at state/territory level is the Law and Justice Foundation’s LAW Survey. The survey also identifies the personal characteristics that increase the chance of experiencing a legal problem. However, because it is a sample survey, the number of people interviewed in smaller geographic areas, such as LGAs, is generally insufficient to provide robust measures of legal need. Some services have therefore used small area estimates of legal need derived from surveys (which are subject to estimation error) and also measures of area disadvantage, such as the Socio-Economic Index for Areas (SEIFA). However, SEIFA is not well related to legal need, in part because of the characteristics included in the indicator and also because of the variation in individual experience within an area.

With the support of a grant from the Commonwealth Attorney General’s Department, the Law and Justice Foundation therefore developed a new set of indicators from ABS census data that can be used at the smallest geographic level and are directly related to the potential need for services (rather than the prevalence of problems). The indicators identify the number of residents in an area likely to require legal assistance if they were to experience a problem. There are currently four “Need for Legal Assistance Services” (NLAS) indicators. The first two use low educational achievement as a proxy for personal capability to resolve problems should they arise: NLAS(CapabilityP) also sets a limit on personal income while NLAS(CapabilityH) sets a limit on household income. The other two NLAS indicators recognise the requirement for culturally specific services by providing a count of the number of low income Indigenous and non-English speaking (CALD) residents.

This presentation will outline some of the methodological issues that arose in developing the indicators for the legal sector, and demonstrate the potential of the approach for service planning in similar sectors.