Assessing Availability of Public Legal Aid: Evidence from Finland

In contemporary society, citizens are more prone to define different events with legal concepts and as objects of a possible legal process. As a result of this kind of judicialization everyday interactions are structured and interpreted from the perspective of ‘charges’ and ‘lawsuits’, constantly lowering the psychological barrier to take disputes to legal institutions for resolution. At the same time, increased diversity and complexity of legal regulation has resulted in an environment which effectively prevents laymen from pursuing their matter in court without obtaining professional, third-party legal advice. Although the growing demand for ever more specialized legal expertise has added pressure to facilitate better access to legal aid services, it is still common even for the citizens of developed countries to face a quandary as to whether and to what extent they are entitled to public legal aid. Prior literature identifies several common barriers in accessing justice at an international level. These can be categorized into societal and cultural hurdles such as literacy, education, poverty, and discrimination, as well as institutional and economic factors including insufficient governmental recourses, limited or nonexistent legal aid, and the fragmentation of legal services providers and limited coordination of private and public sector actors. Evidence from the United Kingdom suggests that the reduced scope of legal aid for private cases has resulted in restricted access to justice due to the consequent decrease in private providers of legal assistance. Consequently, the number of self-representing litigants in the United Kingdom’s family courts has increased significantly in recent years. Moreover, previous findings also suggest geographically uneven accessibility as well as a long waiting time for legal services – particularly when legal aid is not provided for early-stage advice and help, which may increase the costs of the resolution process. Evidently, the timely delivery of legal aid services also supports states’ efforts to manage public expenditure by preventing legal problems from escalating.

This study adds to the literature on barriers to legal aid services by providing novel empirical findings from Finland, which is a country with a small population, yet is highly developed with a relatively extensive welfare system. In Finland, public legal aid cases amount to roughly 70,000 per year, largely concentrating on criminal and family law cases. In particular, the Finnish public legal aid system is unique in terms of its dual nature, which allows legal aid to be provided by both private lawyers and public legal aid attorneys.

To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first one to focus on private providers of publicly funded legal aid. The contribution is twofold. First, we identify several procedural and bureaucratic frictions arising from the scope and eligibility criteria of legal aid that are potentially detrimental to the availability of and the accessibility to legal aid services. Second, we provide a context for our findings by examining and reporting fully representative socioeconomic and demographic statistics on all Finnish public legal aid clients between 2016 and 2018. This study is motivated by the Finnish Ministry of Justice’s ongoing work to revise legal aid eligibility criteria and redefine the emphasis between public funds and client contributions in covering legal expenditure. In Finland, the uncertainty over the extent of private legal risks is an issue particularly for middle class households, who may even be incentivized to avoid court proceedings altogether. Meanwhile, lowincome households are, in principle, provided with free public legal aid, whereas high-income households have enough resources to cover their own legal costs.