Nearly three-quarters of Californians faced at least one civil legal problem in 2024, compared with 55% who reported facing a legal problem in 2019, according to the state bar's 2024 Justice Gap Study, which was released Wednesday.
Californians got no or inadequate legal help for as many as 85% of those legal issues, a number unchanged from 2019, when the state bar published its last Justice Gap Study.
But low-income Californians aren't the only ones facing that problem, which has spread up the income ladder to all but the wealthiest state residents, according to the new report.
"One of the biggest takeaways is that the justice gap has only grown in the five years since our last study," state bar Executive Director Leah Wilson told Law360 Pulse on Friday.
"And you also see that there is little variation between income groups," Wilson said. "That's another really important takeaway because a lot of our focus, and I think appropriately so, has been on meeting the needs of low-income Californians. But what this study shows is that the justice gap is pervasive across all income levels."
Justice Gap Hits More People, and Better-Off Ones
The state bar report surveyed more than 6,000 California residents with help from NORC at the University of Chicago.
While more Californians are facing legal issues — almost 75% of Golden State households reported having at least one civil legal problem in the past year — fewer of them are asking for help, the researchers found.
Residents sought legal help for just 18% of their civil legal problems in 2024, compared with 32% in 2019. And they received either no or inadequate legal help for 85% of those civil legal problems, a percentage unchanged from 2019.
And now the unavailability and unaffordability of legal help affects people in all income groups.
While 83% of the lowest-income Californians, those with incomes below 200% of the federal poverty level, didn't seek legal help for their legal problems, the same 83% of high-income Californians, who have incomes above 120% of their county's area median income, also didn't look for legal help when they needed it, the survey found.
And while 86% of low-income Californians didn't receive any or enough legal help for their problems, 86% of high-income people in the state didn't either, according to the report.
"And one of the most significant things is how high up the income scale the justice gap extends," he added.
While significant, it's also not that surprising given that the average cost of an hourly-rate lawyer in California has risen to over $340 an hour, Wilson said.
"That is not affordable for many people with decent incomes if you're talking about anything more than a couple of hours," Wilson said.
Not Enough Attorneys Doing "PeopleLaw"
The report identifies multiple factors driving the growth in California's justice gap. But Wilson said one of the more fascinating ones is the number of attorneys and firms that have shifted from providing legal help to individuals to offering that help to businesses instead.
More than half of the national legal market involved offering legal services to individual clients in 1972. By 2017, what the report terms "PeopleLaw" was barely over 25% of the legal market.
The share of California's legal market that serves individuals was even lower, at 24% in 2022, according to the report.
"That's one of the biggest reasons, in my opinion, for the growth in the justice gap," echoed Londen.
The shift in focus comes as legal work has gained greater importance in the business world, so companies are increasingly willing to pay more for that work, Londen said.
More attorneys have gravitated towards that corporate work and away from helping individuals as a result, the report said.
"That's great for lawyers," Londen said, "but it leaves a huge gap for people who need a good lawyer and just don't have the money to pay market rates."
The legal industry's failure to keep up with population growth is also making it harder for Californians to find legal help, according to the report.
The number of active attorneys in California increased by 3% over the last 10 years, but the number of active attorneys outside California grew by 32%, the report pointed out.
And more than three-quarters of the state's counties saw a decline in their number of active attorneys. More than half saw that decline while their population was growing, according to the study.
Amador County, for instance, saw its population of active attorneys decline 31% between 2015 and 2025 while its population grew 11%. Trinity County lost 30% of its active lawyers while growing its population by 19%, according to the study.
As a result, 37 of California's 58 counties are now what the California bar labels "attorney deserts" or are at risk of becoming one, the report said.
"The imbalance is particularly stark in rural areas, where only a small fraction of the state's active attorneys reside," the report says. "Even within counties, disparities persist between urban and rural communities, exacerbating challenges in accessing legal services."
Adding Attorneys or Technology?
The report offers several recommendations to address this widening gap that focus on increasing the number of attorneys who charge affordable rates and the ability to connect people to those attorneys.
One of those suggestions is to expand legal incubator programs.
Legal incubators offer early-career lawyers training and support to help them establish affordable legal services and aid underserved populations. The programs usually require participants to complete a number of pro bono hours in exchange for office space, mentorship, training and other resources.
But the programs, which have only graduated about 400 California attorneys since the state bar launched its Incubator Task Force in 2013, are too small to significantly affect the number of lawyers providing affordable legal services, the report points out.
So the report says these programs' capacity should be expanded and state's lawyer referral services should also be enhanced.
State bar-certified LRSs connect clients to resources like mediation programs or rent control boards and, when a lawyer is deemed necessary, refer eligible clients to participating attorneys for a reduced or no fee.
But the number of certified LRSs in California shrunk from 52 to 37 over the last decade, according to the report.
So the state bar recommends exploring partnerships between LRSs and legal aid organizations, affordable attorneys and pro bono programs to make it easier for those who need legal help to find it.
Neither incubators nor lawyer referral services are going to close the gap on their own, acknowledged Matthew Lab of the Access to Law Initiative at California Western School of Law in San Diego, which provided information for the study.
But "a combination of increased support and structure for incubators, which would provide a flow of new attorneys, along with collaboration and coordination with legal aid and lawyer referral partners, to provide scale and structure, could make a meaningful difference," Lab said.
But those and other recommendations, which barely mention technology at all, miss the mark, said Nora Cregan, executive director of The Access Project Inc.
Cregan said she found the report frustrating because it focuses on increasing the number of affordable solo practitioners and small firms, particularly in rural areas, rather than on using technology to make it easier for more corporate attorneys to engage in pro bono work.
BigLaw firms have the money, time and ability to provide legal services to people in need, but their attorneys aren't being adequately connected with those people. Lawyers who are willing to do more pro bono work are also often constrained by distance and geography; technology can solve both of those issues, Cregan said.
"They spent how many pages talking about legal deserts," Cregan said. "I don't care about legal deserts. I can serve people from where I am. I do it every day."
Instead of adding legal aid attorneys and staffing at legal aid organizations, she said, California's legal industry should be using technology to make it easier for corporate lawyers to provide pro bono help, particularly in farther-flung areas. And courts should make it easier for attorneys to appear remotely.
"We're never going to solve this problem by adding three more attorneys to each legal services organization in the state," she said. "What we need to do is expand the geographic reach and the scale of services that attorneys can provide to people in need. We need much more focus on access to justice technology."
"To the extent that there is a way to take a bite out of this gigantic problem, it has to be tech-based," she added.
However California's legal industry does try to take a bite out of the state's justice gap, the information in the state bar study will hopefully make that easier, Londen said.
Legislators may consider policy changes based on attorneys' experience, but are much likelier to act on statistically valid survey information like what's in this report, he said.
"Budgets are really tight right now because of lots of reasons. If you're trying to decide what not to do and what other things to do, this is really important information," Londen said.
--Editing by Brian Baresch.
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