The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans (2022)

Used in 2 entries

For each citing entry, the verbatim excerpt and Likelier's calculation notes (how the source's number was converted to the lifetime-probability framing) are shown below. Click through to read the full claim ledger.

1. [1] Appeal vs accept Decision · inaction side

   Statistic

   92% of civil legal problems of low-income Americans receive no or inadequate legal help; legal aid organizations must decline approximately half of all requests due to resource constraints

   “"For 92% of their substantial civil legal problems, low-income Americans do not get the legal help they need. Legal aid organizations receiving LSC funding must decline approximately half of all requests due to insufficient resources, leaving an estimated 1.4 million problems annually without adequate assistance."”

   Calculation notes

   Retained as background context only. This report documents severe access-to-justice constraints in US civil legal aid generally, but it contains no statistic on appeal rates or on litigants who forgo appealing a judgment specifically, so it is not used to derive the inaction-side regret_rate. It supports the qualitative point that cost barriers and lack of counsel are real and large, which may explain part of why civil litigants who lose at trial do not appeal — see the Eisenberg & Clermont source below for the actual regret_rate derivation.
   

   Source date: 2022-04-01 · Accessed: 2026-05-09

2. [2] Litigate vs settle Decision · inaction side

   Statistic

   Low-income Americans received no or inadequate legal help for 92% of the civil legal problems that substantially impacted their lives in the past year; 74% of low-income households experienced at least one civil legal problem in that year

   “"Low-income Americans did not receive any legal help or enough legal help for 92% of the problems that substantially impacted their lives in the past year. This study finds that nearly three-quarters (74%) of low-income households have experienced at least one civil legal problem in the past year."”

   Calculation notes

   Legal Services Corporation contracted NORC at the University of Chicago for a nationally representative survey of more than 5,000 US households at or below 125% of the federal poverty line. The report's two headline figures are distinct: the 74% is a problem-PREVALENCE rate (nearly three-quarters of low-income households experienced at least one civil legal problem in the past year), while the 92% is the UNMET-NEED rate (low-income Americans got no or inadequate legal help for 92% of the problems that substantially impacted their lives). An earlier version of this entry incorrectly read the 74% as "received no legal help whatsoever"; the report makes no such claim. We use the 92% no-or- inadequate-help figure as the inaction-side proxy: it is the closest published measure of how often a substantial civil legal problem goes without effective legal action. It is an access-gap proxy, not a direct regret survey — many of those unmet problems reflect lack of resources or representation rather than a felt decision to walk away, so the rate likely overstates true inaction regret. No direct survey of regret for not pursuing a civil claim exists.
   

   Source date: 2022-04-01 · Accessed: 2026-05-09