Why the Access to Justice Field Needs Better Theories of Change

We have promising ideas about how to serve more people, in better ways. We just don’t know how to make these ideas stick and scale.

The access to justice field has no shortage of good ideas. At any given moment, dozens of promising pilot projects are underway — in courts, legal aid organizations, law school clinics, government agencies. New self-help tools, simplified forms, remote hearings, navigator programs, AI-powered assistants. The field convenes at conferences, publishes reports, circulates best practices.

And yet, the justice gap persists. Most civil legal problems experienced by low-income Americans still receive inadequate or no legal help. Pilots launch, run for a few years, and quietly end when funding expires. Successful innovations in one jurisdiction rarely spread to others.

Why?

In a new working paper — Paths Toward Access to Justice at Scale: Evaluating Theories of Change in the Civil Justice System — I argue that one underexamined reason is the absence of intentional, explicit theories of change in how the field approaches systemic reform.

“What is our theory of change?”

I interviewed eleven professionals working across the civil justice landscape — legal aid lawyers, funders, court reform advocates, legal technologists, researchers — and asked them two things:

1. Have you operated with long-term, systemic theories of change for your work?
2. How would you rate nine specific theories of change for their likelihood of producing lasting impact?

The most striking finding from Part One was how rarely anyone had been asked to articulate a theory of change at all.

“It’s a beef of mine in the sector — what is our theory of change, how are we going to reach out in the long term? It’s a huge weakness of how we do our work. You’re in a room with even early career international development folks, they know how to do a Theory of Change, a monitoring & evaluation plan, metrics. We don’t know how to do any of that.” — P8, Civil Justice Reform Expert

“Usually I haven’t been asked to present a Theory of Change when choosing what projects to pursue or evaluation stage. It’s been in the background.” — P10, Legal Aid Technologist

The Default Theory of Change — and Why It’s Not Enough

The field’s implicit default is: educate leaders on best practices, and they’ll act. This underlies the entire conference circuit, the white papers, the webinars. Participants rated it the lowest of all nine theories — 4.2 out of 7 — with unusual consensus.

Nobody said education is worthless. Everyone said it’s necessary but profoundly insufficient. The question is: what else do you need?

A Three-Layer Framework: Knowledge, Pressure, People

From the interviews, a framework emerged. The nine theories of change cluster into three categories, each representing a distinct mechanism for systemic change:

🔬 Knowledge Strategies

Building the evidentiary and intellectual case for change.

• Education of leaders (avg 4.2) — necessary foundation, insufficient alone
• Research publications (avg 4.8) — most impactful when they name a problem (like Herd & Moynihan’s Administrative Burden), not when they produce complicated or lengthy studies that practitioners struggle to read or understand
• Reframing beyond A2J (avg 5.3) — connecting to health, housing, education unlocks new partners and funding, but cross-sector collaboration is harder than it sounds

⚡ Pressure Strategies

Creating urgency and external motivation for institutions to act.

• Public accountability (avg 5.2) — the most contested theory; “empirically informed outrage” emerged as the productive middle path between complacency and adversarial shaming
• Litigation (avg 5.4) — powerful in specific cases, limited systemically; best used as leverage for collaboration, not a standalone strategy
• Data-driven evaluation (avg 5.2) — the distinction between “data-driven” and “data-informed” matters enormously
• Private capital (avg 4.5) — the most polarizing; “the market that has the need for service has no money”

👥 People Strategies

Transforming institutional culture so that access to justice becomes an embedded value.

• Human interest stories (avg 4.8) — powerful when strategically deployed (the LSC Voices initiative changed the congressional funding narrative), counterproductive when they create complacency
• Social movements (avg 6.2) — the highest-rated theory, and the one participants said was hardest to achieve; “it’s difficult to build a social movement when someone is scraping by”
• Institutional culture change — courts described as “toxic working environments” where “contempt of the public” is a normative value; the workforce crisis creates both a problem and an opportunity

The framework’s central insight: systemic change requires all three layers operating in coordination. Knowledge without pressure produces reports that sit on shelves. Pressure without knowledge produces reactive, poorly designed reforms. Neither produces lasting change unless the people inside institutions internalize new values.

Four Problems That Cut Across Everything

The interviews also surfaced structural tensions that constrain all theories of change:

The Champion Problem. Successful initiatives almost always depend on individual champions. When they leave, the initiative collapses. The field needs to build institutional structures — not just find heroic individuals.

The Coordination Problem. No single theory of change is sufficient. But the field’s fragmentation across jurisdictions, organizations, and funding streams makes coordinated strategy nearly impossible.

The Measurement Problem. Without agreed-upon indicators of access to justice impact, the field can’t learn from its own experience — and can’t tell which theories of change are actually working.

The Power Problem. Courts control the system and can invoke judicial independence to resist pressure. Access to justice advocates depend on courts for cooperation, limiting their willingness to push. The field defaults to education because it’s the least threatening strategy — which is also why it’s the least effective.

A Tenth Theory: AI and the Scale Question

The interviews were conducted in early 2023, before the full impact of generative AI became apparent. Since then, a possibility has emerged that none of the nine theories captured: technology itself as a distinct theory of change.

Every theory discussed in the paper operates within a scarcity constraint — there aren’t enough lawyers, enough funding, enough self-help center staff. AI challenges that assumption. Large language models can generate legal information, help people complete forms, triage problems, and walk users through procedures at marginal costs approaching zero.

A tenth theory of change might be: If we build AI-powered legal help tools that are accurate, accessible, and trustworthy, and embed them where people already encounter legal problems, we can shift from scarcity-driven triage to abundance-oriented service design.

This doesn’t replace the three-layer framework — it interacts with all three layers:

• Knowledge: AI tools generate real-time data about how people experience the justice system, creating feedback loops traditional research can’t match
• Pressure: If effective AI tools exist but a court chooses not to deploy them, that’s an accountability point
• People: AI can handle routine information provision so justice workers can focus on relational, judgment-intensive work — potentially addressing the burnout and culture problems participants identified

The risks are real — accuracy, equity, solutionism, regulatory pace. But they’re reasons for intentional theorizing, not avoidance.

So What Should We Do?

Based on the interviews, I propose six priorities:

1. Research theories of change, not just interventions. We need studies that track how a successful pilot in one jurisdiction does or doesn’t spread to others.
2. Require explicit theories of change in grant applications. Not just “how will you run this program?” but “how will this lead to systemic adoption?”
3. Develop shared indicators of access to justice impact that can be tracked across jurisdictions.
4. Consider the full range of strategies. Stop defaulting to education and conferences. Deliberately choose a combination of Knowledge, Pressure, and People Strategies.
5. Build coordination infrastructure. Cross-jurisdictional networks, shared dashboards, standing commissions.
6. Embrace the uncomfortable strategies. Social movements, litigation, and public accountability were rated highest precisely because they disrupt the status quo. A field that avoids them because they’re uncomfortable has chosen incremental improvement over systemic change.

The Closing Thought

The access to justice gap is not a knowledge problem. We know what the problems are. We increasingly know what interventions help.

It’s a systems-change problem — moving from knowledge to action, from pilots to institutions, from good intentions to lasting reform.

Addressing it requires not just better ideas, but better theories about how ideas become reality.

📄 Read the full working paper at SSRN: Paths Toward Access to Justice at Scale: Evaluating Theories of Change in the Civil Justice System