Summary

The Data Digest reports are a series of quantitative reports that examine 'expressed' legal need in NSW. Expressed legal need may be defined as legal need that is identified through people seeking assistance for a legal matter through a public legal assistance service.

This series of online reports build upon the Foundation's 2004 report, Data digest - a compendium of service usage data from legal assistance and dispute resolution services, 1999-2002.

Reports will be published individually and will detail the nature of legal inquiries made to key not-for-profit legal assistance agencies in NSW — Legal Aid NSW, Community Legal Centres in NSW, and LawAccess NSW. Together these agencies deal with over 429,000 legal inquiries each year.

At this stage, only the LawAccess NSW report is available for the years 2002 to 2004. Reports for other agencies will be made progressively available. Agency reports will also be updated as more recent data becomes available and is analysed. Cross-agency overviews will also be prepared as separate documents. Reports in this series will be accessible through the left hand menu bar.

Each report will provide a detailed treatment for the particular legal service in terms of:

• the type of legal matter about which inquiries are made
• the demographic characteristics of those who seek assistance
• the pathways that service users take to resolve their legal issues
• changes in legal inquiries over time
• the rate of legal inquiries for particular population groups and geographic areas of NSW.

To facilitate comparison across a range of key indicators, raw data from the agencies were transformed, classified and mapped to common sets of categories.

The Foundation also analyses each agency's legal inquiries data to provide an indication of whether identified differences are statistically significant or not.

Inquiries to public legal services are an important sub-set of all legal issues experienced by the members of the NSW community. Nonetheless, expressed legal need must be interpreted in a broader context. Readers are, therefore, encouraged to complement their understanding of expressed legal need provided by these reports by considering the findings of the Foundation's legal needs surveys and other qualitative studies. These include, Justice Made to Measure: NSW legal needs survey in disadvantaged areas (2005) and Quantitative legal needs survey: Bega Valley (Pilot) (2003). A full list of Foundation reports on access to justice and legal need can be found on our research publications page.