Legal aid and clients with multiple problems: a first screening at the Dutch Legal Services Counter

Across European countries, legal aid systems show several similarities. The Netherlands, like England and Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Finland have a centralized legal aid system, complemented by local initiatives organized around municipalities. Other countries, like France, Germany, Belgium and Poland, have more decentralized systems, where legal aid is mostly organized locally (Barendrecht et al., 2014). Generally, legal aid in Europe is organized along two lines: frontline and secondary legal assistance. Frontline legal assistance provides information and advice while secondary legal assistance offers procedural assistance (Barendrecht et al., 2014). In the Netherlands, the division between frontline and secondary legal services is stronger than in other European countries, such as Finland or Scotland (Scholte et al., 2017). In the Netherlands, Legal Services Counters (Het Juridisch Loket, hereafter LSC) are one of the first contact points for citizens in need of legal aid. The LSC provide legal advice free of charge to all citizens, and can refer people with a lower income to a lawyer registered at the Legal Aid Board (Raad voor de Rechtsbijstand), who will provide legal services within an income-related fee system. Therefore, the LSC form a portal that provides easy access to frontline legal services, but at the same time regulates de facto access to secondary legal assistance, provided by professionals such as mediators and lawyers (it must be noted that any litigant is free to approach the secondary legal assistance in a direct manner). The LSC are accessible to all citizens, but first and foremost function as a point of access to the justice system for citizens who would otherwise be unable to afford legal representation. In 2018, around 37% of the Dutch population was eligible for legal aid (www.rvr.org, accessed 3 March 2020).

For several years, frontline legal professionals have been reporting a group of clients who approach them with a specific legal matter, but face problems in many more facets of their life, which seems to impair the service provision and its effectiveness (Commissie Wolfsen, 2015). This combination of problems, also known as “multiple problems” or a “multiproblem situation”, is commonly defined as the long-term presence of two or more related problems, which potentially reinforce each other, and whereas the involved individual is not able to develop and exert adequate control over the complex of problems, leading to a problematic participation in society and in the labour market. (Translated from Bosselaar et al., 2010, p. 3) Those problems encompass several fields of daily life, such as health (both mental and physical health), finances, work, family relationships, feelings of safety, as well as sense of purpose and social support. According to Currie (2009), the clustering of legal problems with problems in other fields, such as health or social problems, suggests that justiciable problems might hide a broader social exclusion. He therefore pleads for legal services to broaden their scope beyond the justiciable problem.

In the fields of public health and social work, the phenomenon of a multiproblem situation is well documented (Nagelhout et al., 2019) and several of those studies indicate that multiproblem situations are associated with increased use of services (Vedsted & Christensen, 2005; de Klerk et al.,2012). However, in the legal field, few studies address the issue of multiproblem situations. In the Netherlands, studies by Peters and Combrink Kuiters (2008), van Gammeren-Zoeteweij et al. (2017) and Wolfsen (2015) have shown that clients who repeatedly make use of legal services are more likely to experience multiproblem situations. In the period 2002–2014, the costs of legal aid (including the services of the LSC and lawyers) more than doubled for clients with multiproblem situations (Wolfsen, 2015). The Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security is currently coursing towards a reorganizationof the legal aid system, with the goal to resolve legal issues in the early stagesand with first line services, with increased attention for people in multiproblem situations (Rijksoverheid.nl, 2018).Though there seems to be a consensus on the relevance of multiproblem situ-ations among professionals in the field, there are no empirically based esti-mations of how many people who seek frontline legal assistance facemultiproblem situations. In order to adapt services to help this group moreeffectively, an estimation of the number of clients in multiproblem situationsis needed.Next to an increased use of services, dealing with problems in several lifedomains might also lead to higher levels of stress. Stress itself was shown to bea determinant of repeated public services use, although this has been primarily investigated in health care settings. Several studies have shown an independent effect of stress on repeated primary health care utilization,regardless of health status and other factors (Hajek et al., 2017; Smits, 2014). To our knowledge, the relationship between experienced stress andincreased use of legal services has not been systematically investigated.However, there are indications that chronic stress may reduce an individual’scapacity to resolve personal problems. Stress has been demonstrated to have anegative effect on executive functioning, or the ability to consciously steerbehaviour (Henderson et al. 2012). A recent study in the Netherlands showed that citizens in multiproblem situations who sought help fromtheir local government had a lower level of executive functioning, mostly regarding working memory and their capacity to plan and organize (Tonnon et al., 2019). Impaired memory or a lack of organization skillsmay become a barrier when trying to resolve complicated matters, such asfiling papers on time before legal deadlines, or getting one’s financial admin-istration in order. Stress can therefore become a driver for new legal issues. In that sense, repeated use of legal services at the individual level can reflect alack of effectiveness of the previously used services, an underlying complexneed or a lack of self-sufficiency. (Self-sufficiency is defined as “the abilityto maintain oneself without aid from third parties” (Jankowski, 2014).) People in multiproblem situations might experience more elevated levels ofstress, which might impair the effectiveness of services and lead to repeatedservice utilization.This study therefore addresses these issues by presenting a first screening of multiple problems among visitors to Legal Service Counters in theNetherlands. It also examines the relationship between multiproblem situations and the likelihood of repeatedly using LSC services. Finally, theassociation between multiproblem situations and level of experiencedstress is also examined.