When Legal Problems Become Life Problems: A Reflection on the CFCJ’s A2J Week “Measuring Impacts” Panel
by Nabilah Azim
A student reflection on “Measuring Impacts: Client Journeys Through a Community Legal Clinic”, presented during the Law Society of Ontario’s Access to Justice Week 2026.
Most of what we learn about outcomes in law school and during summer internships comes in tidy increments; either the motion was granted, the appeal was dismissed or the matter had settled. During Access to Justice Week, I observed a panel that challenged that notion. Presented by the Canadian Forum on Civil Justice (CFCJ), “Measuring Impacts: Client Journeys Through a Community Legal Clinic” asked a simple question: ‘When someone receives legal help, does their life actually get better and how would we know and measure that?’
The session opened with welcome remarks from Shalini Konanur, the Treasurer of the Law Society of Ontario, who framed the discussion around improving access outcomes through practical, people-centred programming. From there, Jean-Paul Bevilacqua, the Director of the CFCJ, Dean Trevor CW Farrow of Osgoode Hall Law School and the Chair of the CFCJ Board, and Scarlet Smith, Director of the Community and Legal Aid Services Program (CLASP), walked us through the project and what it revealed.
Why measure impact at all?
Dean Farrow began by placing the project in context. Over the past several years, legal needs surveys in Canada and around the world have given us a much clearer picture of what kinds of legal problems people face, and the CFCJ’s own research work has added a nuanced layer to what legal problems cost individuals and the state, what happens when legal needs go unmet, and the potential return on investments in legal services.
What that body of research has not yet fully captured is the human impact of receiving help. As Dean Farrow put it, everyone in the room knows that legal services make a difference. The harder question is whether we are actually studying, measuring, and demonstrating that difference in a way that supports evidence-based decisions about how justice is resourced in this country.
The project
The Measuring Impacts project is a multi-year effort. Phase 1 reviewed the existing literature, particularly research using longitudinal methods. Phase 2 was a pilot conducted in partnership with CLASP, a well-established Ontario legal clinic, and involved interviews with clients who agreed to participate.
The design was straightforward: two structured interviews. The first explored the client’s legal problem, the help they received, and what they had hoped to achieve. The second, conducted months later, asked what had changed, what had been resolved, and which difficulties remained in different areas of their lives. Twenty-six clients completed the first interview, and nine completed the follow-up.
The panellists were candid and stated that a sample this small cannot how common the reported experiences are among CLASP clients or community legal clinic clients generally. But Director Jean-Paul Bevilacqua emphasized that what the data lacked in breadth, it made up for in depth: rich, vivid, and often vulnerable accounts of what clients were going through, how legal services intervened, and where challenges persisted. Dean Farrow described it as a window into what a larger study could potentially find.
Four findings
Four closely connected themes emerged from the client interviews:
- Legal problems became life problems: Clients rarely experienced their legal issue as purely legal. A criminal charge became a barrier to employment. A housing matter affected physical health, sleep, privacy, and personal safety. Immigration and status issues restricted access to work and resources. Beneath those practical effects was a second layer: how a legal problem affects a person’s spirit and the way they engage with the world. Uncertainty itself was part of the harm. Scarlet Smith added an important point about CLASP’s client base. Client who qualify for Legal Aid Ontario assistance often come from vulnerable circumstances, and it was rare for anyone to have only one problem. Precarious immigration status could contribute to precarious employment, which could lead to unsafe housing. Resolving one legal issue did not untangle the rest.
- Legal help could restore agency, stability, and practical opportunity: Legal help mattered in ways that were practical, personal, and often both. One example that stayed with me was a client who found some closure, felt heard, and decided on next steps even without a “win” in the conventional sense. Timely, trusted legal help can become part of a larger movement from crisis and confusion toward relief and renewed stability.
- Legal help did not resolve every difficulty: Even when a legal problem was addressed, financial pressure, employment barriers, health concerns, housing insecurity, family strain, and the lingering effects of contact with the legal system often remained. This has real implications for service design since it points towards stronger referral relationships that connect legal help with other trusted supports, legal and non-legal, for people facing overlapping problems.
- Gratitude and distress can coexist: Clients described their experience with CLASP as meaningful and helpful whilst describing other parts of the justice system as confusing, dismissive, frightening, and difficult to navigate. Two things can be true at once. If we only ask whether a legal issue was resolved, we miss the experience of receiving the service. The panel’s recommendation was that future research needs to examine both the impact of legal services and the impact of going through the broader legal system, as well as the relationship between the two.
The challenge of listening
One of the most honest parts of the discussion, both in the presentation and the Q&A, was about how hard it was to gather this data. Once a file closed, clients were often difficult to reach. Many were working multiple jobs, managing family obligations, or living in poor housing conditions. Many also had good reason to distrust institutions even though they had built trust with their CLASP service providers, and so, being contacted again for a different purpose was not the same thing. Some clients simply did not want to revisit a painful chapter of their lives.
I found this both humbling and clarifying. The very circumstances that make someone’s legal problem a life problem also make it harder to learn from their experience. That is not a reason to stop asking; it is a reason to design research with the same care and trauma-informed approach we would want to see in legal service delivery.
Looking ahead
Dean Farrow closed by describing Phase 3: building on the network developed so far, refining the methodology based on the pilot’s lessons, and rolling the study out across multiple clinics and community partners in Ontario, and ideally across the country, over a longer period of time. The pilot, in his words, established the basis for why that work is worth doing. The end goal here is to give policymakers stronger evidence to support investments in justice that can improve people’s lives.
My reflection
As a law student who has previously worked in immigration, family, and employment law, this panel reframed how I think about “success.” In practice, it is easy to measure our work by the order obtained or the settlement reached; however, the clients behind those files are carrying housing worries, immigration uncertainty, financial strain, and exhaustion that no single order can fully resolve. My time at the Provincial Family Court and volunteering at Matthew House showed me how often one legal issue can sit inside a web of others, and this study gave language and evidence to something I had seen but never thought of from the perspective of the client.
The finding I keep returning to is the fourth one. A client can be grateful for their lawyer and still be frightened by the system that lawyer works within. That should push all of us, as future practitioners, to care not only about outcomes but about how people experience the process of getting there and to recognize that the legal profession’s responsibility does not end where one’s retainer does.
People-centred justice is a phrase we hear often. What this project offered was a glimpse of what it looks like to take that phrase seriously and in practice: to ask clients what changed in their lives, to listen to the answer even when it is complicated, and to build the evidence that might finally match our resources to what people actually need.