Legal processes shape people's experiences of significant economic challenges. Professional assistance is differentially available to people. Professional assistance may allow people to engage legal processes more effectively; it can be variable by place, area of law, and time. Legal assistance may not make a difference because the legal problems themselves are too substantial and are too deeply tied to ongoing problems. Alternatively, legal assistance may improve outcomes for people because assistance allows better negotiation of legal processes. This project will examine the how legal processes work for clients in one type of case. By only examining one type of legal problem, the project will allow the investigator to draw conclusions about legal effectiveness in a way that would not be possible were the project to focus on multiple kinds of legal problems.
The project will develop a unique dataset on cases, including contextual information concerning economic characteristics of places, that will be useful to researchers in the future. In addition, the project will contribute to training in the social sciences for both the investigator and a student who will be trained on the project.
