Since our goal for this phase was to gather input for a workable framework, community and stakeholder engagement was paramount. To that end, we brought together 32 stakeholders from across the pro bono ecosystem for a three-day summit. Participants included pro bono lawyers/partners from leading law firms, executive directors and pro bono coordinators of OSLs in the United States, as well as global and national forensic data experts from a number of leading organizations. We also reviewed volunteer client feedback and testimonials from the Société des services juridiques to inform our research and structure our summit activities. In addition, only one other company was aware of one of the existing frameworks we cited, suggesting an important opportunity to educate and leverage the wealth of existing research. Paladin is very interested in the purpose of the summit; However, we want to make sure that our work serves the ecosystem. To this end, we also wanted to validate our hypothesis that collecting outcome data would indeed add value to key stakeholders working within and between pro bono legal services. Gather feedback for an achievable framework focused on measuring client outcomes pro bono. At the highest level, almost all participants agreed that the primary objective of pro bono is to support the capacity of legal aid to address the justice gap faced by millions of low-income people. Serving clients in need was prioritized over other objectives such as lawyer development, law firm business cases, or ASL fundraising considerations.
Although we are still far from achieving this long-term goal, we are pleased to contribute to an interdisciplinary dialogue on the desirability of structuring such a framework and the criteria to be considered. This interest was lower than expected, which is based on anecdotal data, but we felt it was still high enough to warrant proceeding with the project. While we want to delve deeper into specific use cases for outcome data, we recognize that there are currently few incentives for individual organizations to invest in outcome measurement, and in some cases, there may even be negative incentives. This interest could also be related to the fact that there has been little ability to measure outcomes pro bono and therefore little experience in working with the data that could become available if we could introduce such a framework. Second, stakeholders assessed “How was the case resolved?” as the second most important thing, which we had considered as the attribute of immediate outcome for the client. Case type followed as the third most common case type, but stakeholders differed in the level of detail required and the case type systems and frameworks they used. This would probably make it difficult to introduce a uniform system or, alternatively, interoperability between systems. One of the most pressing challenges in access to justice today is the staggering lack of standardized data. For example, the recent report by the American Academy of Arts & Science, which calls for a significant expansion of judicial data collection, describes how the lack of data currently makes it difficult to know whether low-income people are getting enough help from the legal services they receive. These reports are accompanied by growing calls for the development of a common interoperable system for judicial data, efforts to consolidate monitoring results, and international efforts to align progress under proposed SDG indicator 16.3.3. Very few volunteer stakeholders were aware of the frameworks and approaches presented, which may indicate the often isolated nature of volunteer work within the broader access to justice ecosystem.
At the very least, it indicates a clear opportunity to better link pro bono data collection efforts to current best practices in judicial data. We know that a mutually agreed framework is an ambitious goal and that any approach we take together will in many ways only be a first step. However, we believe it is important to engage in an interdisciplinary dialogue about the value of structuring such a framework and the criteria to be considered, so that a foundation can be laid to support what we believe to be the common goal of the ecosystem: to directly improve access to justice for individuals and communities. In later steps, we will use this feedback from the pro bono and justice community to develop an actionable framework that is not only useful to the ecosystem, but also integrated with Paladin`s product to measure the results of the pro bono work made possible by the platform. Finally, to validate the outcomes of our summit, we asked 15 other volunteer leaders from law firms and legal aid organizations (LSOs) for written comments, to whom we asked a series of standard questions. We also reviewed 22 random LSC customer impact stories to identify the top issues that were important to pro bono customers. These written interviews and companion stories are part of the following synthesis, but we would like to highlight some commonalities of pro bono clients that match the comments of pro bono stakeholders: We see this as a missed opportunity for many reasons. Without data interoperability and communication of results for clients, we lose the ability to achieve a data-driven pro bono narrative and to assess and articulate its impact on access to justice more broadly. Is pro bono worth it? Under what circumstances does it best meet customer needs? When is it most effective and efficient? How can we compare pro bono work with other interventions in our society? How do stories of impact on existing clients reflect what clients see as important pro bono outcomes compared to how those providing legal services measure success? Following the above discussion, we distilled twelve attributes discussed by participants into a potential pro bono outcomes framework so that participants could be ranked in order of importance. The attributes were: Why is this important on a large scale? If the pro bono ecosystem were to implement such a framework, it could pave the way for: Fourth, participants felt it was important for outcome measures to help assess the value of pro bono legal services as a tool to improve access to justice for individuals and the community at large.
This aligns well with the findings of Question 1 as well as the broader global effort to measure access to justice under SDG 16. From the perspective of LSAs, such data would also help them assess whether pro bono clients` outcomes were as effective as those of lawyers and, for those who do not receive legal aid, as well as allow comparison (taking into account other factors) of outcomes between their pro bono partners in the law firm. It was agreed that knowing how a case was resolved and whether the client achieved the desired outcome were the two most important requirements of a results framework.