The LSC Matters Reporting System
August 8, 2002
Introduction
Starting on July 1, 2001, all LSC grantees began collecting
information on non-case activities using the Matters Reporting
System. LSC had long noted that grantee programs provide referrals
and community legal education, that they engage in outreach, and
that they work cooperatively with other groups to address the needs
of the low income community. We recognized that this work often
entails a great deal of effort and produces significant results.
With the Matters Reporting System in place, an important tool has
been created for use by legal services leaders at the national,
state and local levels in describing the full scale and scope of
legal services being delivered in communities across the
nation.
Although the 2001 data reported in March of this year should be
regarded as preliminary (it covered only half a year and reflected
the usual kinds of startup problems one would expect of a new data
system), it already has produced a wealth of information that
allows the Corporation to provide a more complete picture of legal
services practice than has ever before been possible on a
nationwide basis. For example, we can already say that:
! The total number of people being served annually by LSC
grantees is several times the number of cases being reported on the
Case Service Report (CSR). A conservative estimate of just the
people receiving services that can be easily counted, such as
referrals and legal education presentations, shows that more than
two million people were provided with these services in the last
six months of 2001 alone. Many more were provided with other
services using delivery vehicles whose reach is more difficult to
quantify, such as web sites, weekly radio and TV shows and legal
information columns in newspapers.
! More than 75 percent of grantees are providing various forms
of pro se assistance. These include workshops, courthouse help
desks, forms, pleadings, self-help packets and other resources for
self-representation in simple legal matters. In addition to
providing an important service to people who cannot afford lawyers,
LSC grantees are playing a significant role in helping courts to
deal with the flood of self-represented litigants appearing in
courtrooms across the nation.
! Increasingly, LSC grantees are important gatekeepers, or
"hubs," in referral networks of agencies and service providers
serving low income people. These are addressing a wide range of
needs of the poor, including access to jobs, education, shelter and
personal safety. Many LSC grantees operate intake systems that
systematically diagnose each applicant's problems and make
referrals through a network of legal and non-legal service
providers in the community who can provide the most appropriate
types and levels of service.
With the implementation of the Matters Reporting System, the
Corporation has created an asset offering significant dividends for
stakeholders at all levels of the civil justice system. Along with
the CSR system, which quantifies "case" services, the Matters
Reporting System provides an expanded capacity to produce numerical
and narrative data describing the full range of services provided
by the core network of legal services programs serving communities
across the nation. With further refinements underway to improve
reliability, this system will enable program leaders at all levels
to provide Congress, client groups, state legislatures, bar
leaders, courts, funders and other stakeholders with a more
accurate picture of how many people are being served by LSC-funded
programs. It will help to identify innovative, best-practice models
that point the way toward more efficient and effective methods of
addressing the legal needs of low income people. It will inform LSC
grantees about the range of methods being used by their fellow
program managers to deliver more and better services and to assist
people with the precise level and type of service appropriate to
their legal situation. It will enable leaders to do a better job of
marketing legal services by telling the "story" of what LSC
grantees are contributing to their communities through the
partnerships they have created and the wide range of solutions they
have put in place.
In the next section of this report, we describe in more detail
the picture that emerges from the 2001 Matters Service Reports. In
addition, we outline some changes that the LSC "Results Group" (a
working group of senior LSC professionals plus Ken Smith, an
outside consultant, that designed, tested, and is currently
evaluating and refining a system for reporting matters services) is
considering for improving the reliability of the data obtained for
2002 and 2003.
Overview of Matters Services Provided by LSC Grantees
A. More than two million people received significant Matters
services from LSC grantees in the last half of 2001.
This figure is conservative. It only includes the counts that
the LSC Results Group deemed reliable based on a review of the data
and follow-up interviews with a sample of grantees. (See Exhibit 1
for a summary of "reliable" versus "soft" numbers.) The actual
number of people provided various non-case services by LSC-funded
programs is almost certainly several times higher. Refinements in
the guidelines provided to grantees, planned for distribution in
October 2002, will provide more reliable figures to be generated
covering 2002 and 2003 services.
B. "Matters" services were of six types.
1. Community legal education. 195 LSC grantees (99.5 percent)
reported providing community legal education services to low income
people in their communities. According to "matters" reports by
grantees, in the second half of 2001, more than 1,450,000 people
received these services. Among the services delivered were the
following:
! Presentations at gatherings of low income people (for example,
residents of a local senior center);
! Legal education brochures distributed at community centers,
helping agencies and other community sites;
! Legal education videos distributed through libraries,
courthouse kiosks, public access TV and community sites;
! Legal education materials downloaded over the Internet by
people visiting web sites maintained by LSC grantees.
Community legal education is a crucial service provided by LSC
grantees. It informs low income people about their legal rights and
responsibilities connected with various situations they might
encounter as consumers, tenants, parents, spouses, employees and
citizens. It equips people to handle simple matters themselves,
reducing the strain on already-overburdened courts and legal
assistance programs. It is preventative, helping people to avoid
mistakes that can lead to more serious legal problems and the need
for representation in the future.
2. Pro se assistance. Legal services programs provide a broad
range of generalized information and assistance to people wishing
to handle simple legal matters themselves without extensive
assistance from an attorney. 150 LSC grantees reported that in 2001
they provided pro se assistance services. They indicated that in
the second half of 2001 more than 183,000 people were served. The
numbers of grantees providing different types of services were as
follows:
Number of Grantees
! Self-help workshops
or clinics 89 ! Help desk at court 56 ! Self help materials
posted on web sites 44 ! Other (e.g., self help
materials posted on kiosks) 70
3. Referrals. People come to legal aid offices with a wide range
of problems, some of them falling within the scope of the program's
priorities and others that do not. Referring people to other
organizations that can help them is a crucial service that most
legal aid programs provide.
Any referral which is not a "case" as defined by the CSR system
can be counted as a matter. Examples of "matters" referrals would
be criminal matters or civil problems excluded under a grantee's
priorities - for example, divorces not involving domestic violence
or children.
In the second half of 2001, grantees reported providing
"matters" referrals to 533,490 people. The table below indicates
the kinds of help to which these people were referred:
4. Outreach. LSC grantees seek to increase visibility in the
client community in several situations - for example, when
launching new services (for example, a toll-free phone hotline),
trying to reach special-needs populations (the elderly, homeless
people, families reaching the end of their eligibility period for
welfare, people in non-English speaking communities) or expanding
services into hard-to-serve communities (for example, to small
towns far from legal aid offices).
89 percent of LSC grantees reported that they conducted outreach
efforts in 2001. The method used most often (by 61 percent of
grantees) was referral agreements with other agencies. These are
agreements made with other service providers, such as domestic
violence shelters, to refer eligible clients to our grantees. This
is a very effective way of letting the public know we are
there.
Other outreach methods used were informational notices printed
in local media (53 percent), TV spots or public service
announcements (32 percent), radio spots or announcements (39
percent), newsletters of other organizations (44 percent), "how to
reach us" information on web sites (59 percent) and other methods
(49 percent).
Increasingly, grantees are using targeted outreach methods
rather than shotgun approaches like general media advertising.
These are designed to reach people specifically having critical
legal needs addressed by special legal aid projects such as
domestic violence clinics, eviction prevention programs and
disability advocacy units. An example of targeted outreach is the
posting of an advertisement for order-of-protection clinics in
domestic violence shelters and family counseling agencies.
5. Indirect services.
Number of Grantees
169
Some legal aid programs tap the significant resources of other
community organizations in an effort to expand their reach. They
are doing this by providing legal training and support to
non-lawyer "helping" personnel such as social workers, ministers,
teachers and shelter staff who apply this new knowledge to help
their clients find appropriate legal information and advice when
they have a legal problem. One hundred sixty nine grantees reported
they used such "indirect" service delivery models in 2001.
This has a multiplier effect: one lawyer trains 20 social
workers, each of whom helps 50 clients, resulting in 1,000 people
and families getting legal information, materials or referrals they
might otherwise not have had.
Applying this principle, legal aid programs are beginning to
form collaborations with other agencies to provide holistic
solutions for complex problems such as domestic violence that raise
other issues such as the need for income support, health care and
child care services. Legal aid lawyers and paralegals increasingly
are partnering with social workers, medical people, job counselors
and other specialists to provide the right mix of legal and
non-legal services people need to get back on their feet.
6. Other services. In addition to the above, there are a number
of newer kinds of services that grantees reported as "matters" in
2001. These include the following:
Number of Grantees
! Mediation / alternative
dispute resolution 38 ! Other 58
In the last six months of 2001 LSC programs reported providing
such "other " Matters services to over 49,000 people
C. Significance: "Matters" services have major impacts on our
communities, courts and low income population.
! Community legal education prevents small problems from getting
worse and reduces the strain on our legal system.
! Pro se assistance empowers people to help themselves and makes
our court system work better.
! Referrals help people find the help they need.
It is clear from the Matters Service Reports that LSC grantees
have dramatically expanded the range of strategies available for
addressing the legal needs of low income people. The data
collection system provides LSC with the capacity to track the
expansion of these methods and to better describe their scale and
impacts as this expansion continues.
The Matters data includes some people who were not eligible
clients. It is impractical to restrict grantees to counting only
matters handled on behalf of client-eligible people. However, we
believe that the number is a small proportion of the total. LSC
grantees go to considerable lengths to focus services on the
client-eligible population. In the first instance, this is done by
presenting the services as being for the poor, including the
targeting of outreach efforts on groups and areas in which poor
people congregate and live. The subject matter of written materials
and of events (for example, legal education workshops is on issues
of particular concern to our clients). The sponsorship and location
of events and location of grantee offices contributes to this
targeting. And where ineligible persons participate anyway, the
great majority of them are near-poor, often those who are eligible
under non-LSC funding programs such as IOLTA and Administration on
Aging.
Even with web-based services, which are notoriously difficult to
target exclusively to a particular segment, there is some evidence
that the majority of users are client-eligible people. For example,
web visitor survey data from Pinetree Legal Services in Maine
indicates that two-thirds of its site visitors are low income
people or persons seeking information on behalf of low income
people.
Implementation of the System: A Status Report
Planning for the matters service reports process was several
months in the making. In designing the instrument, consultant Ken
Smith and the LSC Results Group examined existing data collection
models that state IOLTA funders and individual programs had used.
The group then drafted an instrument and pilot tested it with a
volunteer group of 22 programs in January 2001. Their experience
led to the version that was implemented in all LSC grantee programs
in July, 2001.
What's working, what issues need to be addressed.
The general concept of matters is working well. The data system
seems to have been well accepted by field programs; The system
includes a narrative component as well as statistical reporting,
providing the Corporation with a strong capacity for describing the
character as well as the volume of services and delivery models in
use.
The 2001 reports have enabled the LSC Results Group to identify
adjustments for improving reliability of the numerical data being
provided by grantees. These include
! Clarification of definitions. For example, "web hits" were
counted in the 2001 version of the system, but this proved to be a
vague concept that produced huge numbers but little useable
information. Definitions will be clarified for measures to be used
in 2003 for quantifying the reach of web-based legal education and
pro se assistance models.
! Additional questions. Considering the difficulty of changing
data collection systems in mid-stream, few changes are being
considered that would require grantees to revise their forms or
procedures. However, in a few areas, small changes will be proposed
that are relatively easy to implement. For example, in 2002
grantees will be asked to report the number of newspaper articles
published rather than the number of people reached by newspaper
articles, which is nearly impossible to quantify in a useful
way.
! Improved guidelines. For example, more guidance will be
provided to grantees on quantifying the numbers of brochures and
materials packets they have distributed. Clearer distinctions will
be drawn between newsletter articles, which are targeted to
well-defined audiences, and newspaper articles, which are broadcast
to the general population. Additional guidelines will be provided
for estimating numbers that cannot be directly counted.
These changes are expected to lead to greater reliability in the
matters data for 2002 and 2003. Some of the figures which grantees
estimated in 2001 will be measured in 2002 as data collection
systems become better established and guidelines get wider
distribution to program staff. Figures which the Results Group
deemed too "soft" to be used in 2001 will eventually be moved to
the "reliable" column.
Conclusion
The data from the Matters Reporting System can be used for a
variety of important purposes. These include:
! Producing materials that provide Congress, bar leaders and
other stakeholders with a more accurate picture of how many people
are being served by LSC-funded programs.
! Describing the benefits that services such as community legal
education, pro se assistance and referrals to community agencies
provide to the communities served by LSC grantees.
! Identifying programs that have developed innovative,
best-practice models, pointing the way toward more efficient and
effective methods of addressing the legal needs of low income
people.
! Informing grantees about the range of methods being used by
their fellow program managers to deliver more and better services
and to reach more people with the precise level and type of service
appropriate to their legal situation.
! Doing a better job of marketing legal services by telling the
"story" of what LSC grantees are contributing to their communities
through the partnerships they have created and the wide range of
solutions they have put in place.
The Matters Reporting System represents an important asset now
in place in LSC-funded programs. It will provide a stream of
information about legal services practice serving the civil justice
community well into the future.
