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Status of research on legal events in Australia

As detailed earlier, a large-scale survey measuring the incidence of a broad range of legal events has not been conducted in Austraian in recent years. The Cass and Sackville (1975) study was conducted 30 years ago and restricted to Sydney, the study reported by Fishwick (1992) examined a set of only 11 legal events and the Rush (1999) study was narrowly focused on Commonwealth legal issues.

Furthermore, since the Cass and Sackville (1975) study, the legal service provision landscape in Australia has changed quite dramatically, including the development of state-funded legal aid schemes and the establishment of an extensive network of community legal services.²² There have also been significant changes in the law, such as the introduction of the Family Law Act 1975.

The appropriate targeting of legal services in any given jurisdiction requires a comprehensive understanding of the number and type of legal events people experience, what people do when faced with legal events, what legal services are available, how people use the existing legal services and what they think about any assistance they receive. Given the lack of recent comprehensive surveys of legal need and the significant changes in legal service provision over the last few decades, there is clearly a need for an up-to-date assessment of the incidence, handling and outcome of a broad range of legal events in Australian jurisdictions. This need is further underlined by the fact that existing studies demonstrate that the incidence, handling and outcome of legal events are not fixed, but vary across jurisdictions and populations.