9

The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet

Margaret Hagan

Millions of Americans have civil justice problems every month, and most of these go
unmet. A recent survey of low-income Americans found that over 70 percent of
households had at least one civil legal problem in a year, including around health
care, housing, disability benefits, veterans’ issues, and domestic violence.1 But of
these needs, 86 percent of the problems received inadequate or no legal help.2
Without legal assistance, a person may lose their home to an eviction or foreclosure,
suffer physical abuse without protection, go into debt or bankruptcy, lose custody of
their children, or be denied medical care.3
Why is there such a large justice gap between the high volume of justice
problems and the small percentage that receive legal assistance? This may be due
to the increasing costs of providing legal services, with lawyers having to follow
burdensome procedures and licensing requirements that make it difficult to sustain
a business model serving low- or moderate-income households.4 Or another com-
monly cited reason is the undersupply of public interest lawyers to assist people with
civil justice problems. The underfunding results from decades of congressional
restrictions on legal aid funding, which both limits the supply of free lawyers and
restricts whom these free lawyers can serve.5 Without widely available free or
1
Legal Servs. Corp., The Justice Gap: Measuring the Unmet Civil Legal Needs of
Low-Income Americans (2017), https://www.lsc.gov/justicegap2017.
2
Id.
3
See more individual stories of experiences with and without legal assistance for their civil
justice problems at the All Rise for Civil Justice platform. Stories from the Civil Justice Crisis,
All Rise for Civ. J., https://allriseforciviljustice.org/stories/.
4
Gillian Hadfield, Legal Markets, 60 J. Econ. Lit. (forthcoming 2022).
5
See Rebekah Diller & Emily Savner, Restoring Legal Aid for the Poor: A Call to End Draconian
and Wasteful Restrictions, 36 Fordham Urb. L. J. 687 (2009). For a more recent news report
on the underfunding see Adiel Kaplan, More People Than Ever Need Legal Aid Services, but
the Pandemic Has Hit Legal Aid Funding Hard, NBC News (Apr. 25, 2021), https://www
.nbcnews.com/business/personal-finance/more-people-ever-need-legal-aid-services-pandemic-
has-hit-n1264989.

199
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 200 Margaret Hagan

affordable legal services, millions of people are turned away when they seek
assistance.6
But what about those people that never seek legal aid assistance in the first place?
This is the problem of awareness and capability. As Sandefur’s research has high-
lighted, many Americans do not conceive of justice problems as ones that are “legal”
or that legal assistance could help with.7 Instead, they often attribute them to
happenstance, bad luck, or other reasons – all of which make it more likely that
they do not seek out legal or social services to have their rights protected and experts
assist them. Here the problem is not a limited supply of affordable or free legal
services. Instead, the problem is people’s lack of consciousness of their legal rights
and how legal professionals can help them,8 and a lack of confidence, capability, or
trust that they want to engage with legal assistance to deal with their problems.9
Recent decades have seen a variety of interventions aimed at closing the justice
gap by increasing legal awareness among those with civil justice problems and their
capability to use available assistance. In the early 1970s, consumer-facing legal
clinics arose in storefronts with transparently priced menus of legal services, making
legal help more approachable, demystifying the process of engaging a lawyer, and
advertising how and why people should make use of legal services.10 At the end of
the 1970s, bans on attorney advertising were invalidated, and legal groups began to
release audio, video, and print outreach to the public to drive up people’s awareness
about when and how they could use a lawyer to help them.11 By the 1990s, however,

6
Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza, Making Justice Equal, Ctr. for Am. Progress (Dec. 8, 2016),
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/criminal-justice/reports/2016/12/08/294479/making-just
ice-equal/.
7
Rebecca L. Sandefur, Accessing Justice in the Contemporary USA: Findings from
the Community Needs and Services Study (2014), https://www.americanbarfoundation.org/
uploads/cms/documents/sandefur_accessing_justice_in_the_contemporary_usa._aug._2014.pdf.
8
For more about social-legal studies of legal consciousness and for more exploration of how
people think about and interact with the legal system, see Susan Sibley, Legal Consciousness, in
New Oxford Companion to Law (2008).
9
There is a growing literature framed around “legal capability” and “legal empowerment” that
focuses on why people do not take action on justice problems, based on lack of knowledge,
skills, or trust in the system. See Nigel J. Balmer et al., Knowledge, Capability and the
Experience of Rights Problems (2010), https://lawforlife.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/
05/knowledge-capability-and-the-experience-of-rights-problems-lsrc-may-2010-255.pdf; Hugh M.
McDonald & Julie People, Legal Capability and Inaction for Legal Problems: Knowledge,
Stress, and Cost, Updating J., June 2014; Lisa Wintersteiger, Law for Life: Legal Needs,
Legal Capability and the Role of Public Legal Education (2015); Kristina Brousalis,
CLEO Connect, Building an Understanding of Legal Capability: An Online Scan of
Legal Capability Research (2016), https://cleoconnect.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/
online-scan-legal-capability.September-2016.final_.pdf; Margaret Hagan & Kursat Ozenc,
A Design Space for Legal and Systems Capability: Interfaces for Self-Help in Complex
Systems, Design Issues, Summer 2020, at 61.
10
Nora Freeman Engstrom, Attorney Advertising and the Contingency Fee Cost Paradox, 65
Stan. L. Rev. 633, 649 (2013).
11
Id. at 653–54.

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 201

the use of lawyer advertising had shifted to focus primarily on personal injury needs
rather than routine legal services (like divorces, debt, and estate planning). By the
mid-1990s, the storefront legal clinic movement was extinct.12
More recently, awareness and capability efforts have centered on use of technol-
ogy. Websites like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer emerged to serve the needs that
storefront legal clinics had decades earlier, and these sites began to spend heavily in
traditional and online advertising to build people’s legal awareness.13 More public
interest organizations also began to build websites and apps, to make it easier for
people to find and use legal help.14 These sites have features intended to improve
people’s capability to engage with legal services, like referral engines to make it
easier to engage a lawyer, self-help guides to understand the law, chat functions to
get basic questions answered, and dispute resolution tools to generate agreements
with the other party.15 In recent years, new awareness-focused applications have
begun to use artificial intelligence to automatically spot justice problems in their
online posts, to diagnose what legal issue they might have.16
While justice problem-solving on the Internet remains a work in progress, all signs
are that improving internet-based tools will be a central component of any successful
effort to close the justice gap. This chapter presents a new approach to evaluating
legal help websites as one of these internet-based tools. It posits that the mere
existence of court and legal aid websites is not enough to close the justice gap.
Rather, there must be accountability and research as to whether people are able to
find and use these sites to build legal capability. This chapter presents one method
to assess the impact of legal help websites: measuring the supply of sites, the demand
for them, and the factors that may be impeding better matching of people with
online resources.

9.1 the need for research on legal help on the internet

As more service providers attempt to use the Internet to close the justice gap by
increasing legal awareness and capability of people, more people are going onto the
12
Id. at 657–59.
13
Debra Cassens Weiss, This Law Firm Will Spend More Than $25M in Legal Advertising This
Year, Report Says, A.B.A. J. (Oct. 28, 2015), https://www.abajournal.com/news/article/this_law_
firm_will_spend_more_than_25m_in_legal_advertising_this_year_repor; Sarah Knapp, Can
LegalZoom be the Answer to the Justice Gap? 26 Geo. J. Legal Ethics 821 (2013).
14
See case studies of many such efforts in the special volume of Colloquium, Using Technology
to Enhance Access to Justice, 26 Harv. J. L. Tech. 243 (2012).
15
See an inventory of technology tools for civil justice problems at Rebecca Love Kourlis &
Riyaz Samnani, Institute for Advancement Am. Legal Sys., Court Compass: Mapping
the Future of User Access through Technology (2017), https://iaals.du.edu/sites/default/
files/documents/publications/court_compass_mapping_the_future.pdf.
16
Bob Ambrogi, Stanford and Suffolk Create Game to Help Drive Access to Justice, LawSites
(Oct. 16, 2018), https://www.lawsitesblog.com/2018/10/stanford-suffolk-create-game-help-drive-
access-justice.html.

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 202 Margaret Hagan

Internet to find help for all kinds of problems (legal or not) that happen to them.17
Many of these “life problems” that people search about (for example, getting calls from
a debt collector, wondering if a past criminal record could be masked, dealing with a
landlord threatening eviction, worrying about medical bills, or trying to get school
services for a child with learning difficulties) are “justice problems.”18 In the past, people
might have turned first to family, neighbors, librarians, or professionals to seek assistance
for such life problems. People still might reach out through social connections, but
increasingly the Internet figures prominently in this search for help.19
Yet little is known about the role of the Internet in people’s problem-solving
around legal life events. Do online sites and tools increase people’s awareness and
capabilities around their legal rights? Do they empower people to take action to
resolve their justice problems? A handful of studies have surveyed people about
whether and how they see legal assistance online.20 This preliminary research, most
of it done as small surveys and lab experiments, has established some useful insights
and metrics as to how various internet intermediaries and resources may better serve
individuals seeking out help on their problems. Among the insights are what kinds of
search results, websites, and apps best improve people’s understanding of the law,
and which may best encourage people to take action on resolving their problem.
Even so, we still lack knowledge about how many people are seeking help for justice
problems on the Internet and how they behave when they do seek help online.
The limits of existing studies on justice problem-solving on the Internet stand in stark
contrast with the medical field. Public health researchers and medical practitioners
have developed data-driven techniques to understand people’s health assistance–
seeking behavior online, and what this means for how to better deliver services, predict
needs, and communicate with the public.21 Researchers gather data on what people are
searching for, what kinds of websites they are visiting, what stories they are sharing about
their health, and what actions they take in response to what they find online. This

17
Information Searches That Solve Problems, Pew Rsch. Ctr. (Dec. 30, 2007), https://www
.pewresearch.org/internet/2007/12/30/information-searches-that-solve-problems/.
18
Sandefur, Accessing Justice in the Contemporary USA. There is a distinction between
the “justice problem” (sometimes called the “justiciable problem”) and legal need. A justice
problem may cross over into being a legal need if the legal system is the best way
19
Erica Turner & Lee Rainie, Most Rely on Their Own Research in Making Big Life Decisions,
and It’s Often Online, Pew Rsch. Ctr. (Mar. 5, 2020), https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/
2020/03/05/most-americans-rely-on-their-own-research-to-make-big-decisions-and-that-often-
means-online-searches/.
20
Margaret Hagan, The User Experience of the Internet as a Legal Help Service: Defining
Standards for the Next Generation of User-Friendly Online Legal Services, 20 Va. J.L. Tech.
395 (2016); Catrina Denvir, Online and in the Know? Public Legal Education, Young People
and the Internet, 92–93 Computs. & Educ. 204 (2016); Ginnifer L. Mastarone & Susan
Feinberg, Access to Legal Services: Organizing Better Self-Help Systems, 2007 Inst. Elec. &
Elecs. Engineers Int’l Pro. Commc’n Conf. 1.
21
Gunther Eysenbach, Infodemiology and Infoveillance: Tracking Online Health Information and
Cyberbehavior for Public Health, 40 Am. J. Preventive Med. 154 (2011).

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 203

research helps public health officials improve outreach and education, predict new
outbreaks of disease, and develop better services to engage people.
The justice sector can leverage what the health sector has already developed:
research protocols, data exchanges, and artificial intelligence aimed at improving
people’s access to the legal system via the Internet. The public health work on digital
epidemiology and infoveillance can guide those working on access to justice to new
knowledge on the volume and type of legal needs, people’s preferences and needs
for services, and opportunities for innovative technology that can improve people’s
knowledge that they can use the justice system to resolve their life problems, and
that can improve their capabilities to participate meaningfully in it.
To develop this research and practice around the Internet for legal help, there is a
need for dedicated, ongoing work on an ordinary person’s online legal help land-
scape. This overarching work can spotlight where new directions for justice system
outreach, services, and reform could be targeted.
1. What is the demand and supply for justice problem-solving on the
Internet?22
2. Who are the key intermediaries that are receiving people’s help requests
and matching them with resources?
3. And what are the datasets and research protocols that we can use to
make sense of internet activity, for use in access to justice services and
policy making?
The remainder of this chapter tackles one part of this needed research – namely, the
first question, on the supply and demand of legal help in the US on the Internet as of
2021. It does so, first, by canvassing past research on how people use the Internet to
deal with legal problems. Then it lays out three understudied research questions
about the supply-and-demand theme: What is the quantity of the supply and the
demand, what is the quality of the supply, and what harms do people experience
because of low quantity or low quality? Finally, it offers preliminary answers to these
questions by surveying hundreds of commercial and public interest websites that
aim to serve people with civil justice problems, calculating initial estimates of how
many people are visiting them, and then comparing these visit estimates with the
estimates of people’s justice problems, based on legal needs surveys.
By way of preview, this analysis shows that that millions of people each month are
coming to websites to seek out help for their problems, with many more visitors
going to commercial sites than public interest ones. The ecosystem of public interest
online resources is scattered among the states, rather than concentrated on national

22
See an earlier survey of the supply and demand of legal help for ordinary citizens at Gillian K.
Hadfield, Higher Demand, Lower Supply? A Comparative Assessment of the Legal Resource
Landscape for Ordinary Americans, 1 Fordham Urb. L.J. 129 (2010). Hadfield’s work was not
focused solely on internet-based help, but her work on assessing the legal market is useful for
this research.

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 204 Margaret Hagan

hubs. Some states’ public interest legal help portals are attracting a much higher
relative number of visitors than others, indicating that there are substantial oppor-
tunities to improve how they offer help to the millions of people coming online for
legal help each month.
This, of course, is only a start. Ideally, more researchers and practitioners will
tackle the larger research agenda laid out above to build our store of knowledge
about how courts, government agencies, legal aid groups, and justice technologists
can engage with the public to improve their access and capabilities. In particular,
there are many more data sources from internet intermediaries like search engines
and social media that can provide insights about where people are going to seek
help, whom they trust to help them, and what kinds of behavior they engage in to
deal with their problems. Legal policy makers, service providers, and researchers can
benefit from greater knowledge of what people are doing on the Internet, and how
to increase people’s access to the justice system online.

9.2 prior research on legal help on the internet

Many legal practitioners and scholars in the 2000s highlighted the potential for new
websites and internet-based tools to increase access to justice.23 These proposals
detailed how websites could increase the number of people who could find assist-
ance, lower the burdens of time and cost to access help, and improve people’s legal
capabilities.24 That “techno-optimism” about whether internet-based technology
can increase most people’s access to the civil justice system has been challenged
in recent years, as website and application development have hit hurdles in accom-
plishing their goals around user engagement and outcomes.25
A small number of researchers have begun investigating if and how the Internet is
improving access to justice. This research, primarily by Sandefur, Denvir, and
Hagan, examines how people seek out legal assistance on the Internet and what
kinds of tools are available for them to use.

9.2.1 A Growing Supply of Online Help, but Not Always User-Centered

Sandefur recently surveyed what digital legal help tools exist, and what forms of
assistance they offer to users trying to use technology for self-help.26 Her survey
found 322 digital legal tools specifically for nonlawyer users. This included legal
23
Ronald W. Staudt, All the Wild Possibilities: Technology That Attacks Barriers to Access to
Justice, 42 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 1117 (2008).
24
Engine Room, https://theengineroom.org.
25
Tanina Rostain, Techno-Optimism & Access to the Legal System, 148 Daedalus 93 (2019).
26
Rebecca L. Sandefur, Legal Tech for Non-Lawyers: Report of the Survey of US
Legal Technologies (2019), http://www.americanbarfoundation.org/uploads/cms/docu
ments/report_us_digital_legal_tech_for_nonlawyers.pdf.

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 205

help websites with guides and forms, legal dictionaries to clarify jargon, lawyer
referral service platforms, and then tools that provide almost end-to-end support
for a specific problem (including diagnosis of an issue, evidence gathering, process
guides, form assembly, filing, and follow-up). Sandefur observed a mismatch
between what the tools offer and the apparent justice needs desired by the public,
as well as the issue areas served.27 Many of the digital legal tools were focused on
providing information rather than facilitating user action. They also did not neces-
sarily match the most common user needs reported by people: household finances,
health and insurance, consumer problems, family problems, housing, and immigra-
tion. This study points to the need for more evaluation of the supply of online legal
help, and the development of measures that can encourage more supply that
matches the demands and preferences of people in need.

9.2.2 People Finding Inappropriate Resources on the Internet

Catrina Denvir has researched how different demographic groups, including young
adults and senior citizens in the UK, attempt to use online search to deal with life
and legal problems. Her research includes both simulation labs to analyze how
people search for help and website assessments to measure the quality of the help
people receive.28 Denvir’s work found some common patterns in people’s behavior
online. Many start with a search engine, type in short questions, and try to find pages
that could help them. She observed that young people tended to find and use
information with little regard to the importance of jurisdiction. Even as digital
natives, they often were unable to use the Internet to get correct information on
their problem. In some cases, the young people got distracted by irrelevant infor-
mation, trying to apply it to their situation, even if it was not legally correct to do so.
These lab studies confirm that more people are trying to use the Internet to find help
but raise concerns about people (including digital natives) finding “help” that in fact
has incorrect, out-of-jurisdiction, or anecdotal information that may lead
them astray.

9.2.3 Preferences for Clear, Authoritative, Open Access,

Comprehensive Resources
My own earlier research performed lab simulations, in which US adults were asked
how they might respond to a legal problem using the Internet.29 This study found
that respondents, as in Denvir’s studies, preferred to start with a search engine like
27
Id. at 10–11.
28
See Catrina Denvir, What Is the Net Worth? Young People, Civil Justice and the Internet
245–90 (May 2014) (PhD dissertation, University College London), https://pdfs.semanticscholar
.org/b584/c82bbc1baebd435a36ac1aa25001930344fa.pdf (providing website assessment tools).
29
Hagan, The User Experience of the Internet.

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 206 Margaret Hagan

Google to find help for their civil justice problem. And as with Denvir’s respondents,
they often ignored the importance of jurisdiction, and they sought out peer-to-peer
anecdotes on forums. The study also had respondents evaluate different commercial
and public interest legal help websites and express their reasons and preferences for
the ideal online assistance. Most all respondents wanted a tool that met the
following criteria:30
• Authoritative, if not directly from the government, then closely affiliated
with it;
• Open Access, without paywalls, advertisements, or upselling – ideally
being offered by a public interest actor rather than a commercial one;
• Modern Design and Technical Capabilities, that offer mobile-friendly,
intuitive, and interactive resources, and that are accessible to people with
disabilities;
• Comprehensive, with resources not just for initial understanding of a
problem area, but also for taking action to respond to a problem.
These preferences echo Sandefur’s concerns that current digital tools are not
comprehensive enough (providing only information rather than tools to take action).
The user preferences also suggest categories for a standard evaluation metric, which
researchers could use to measure if sites are sufficiently meeting people’s needs for
usability, accessibility, and trustworthiness.

9.2.4 Open Questions for Further Research

Research studies so far on the Internet’s role in access to justice have been relatively
small, with surveys, simulation tasks, and user interviews of small groups of people.
What is missing is a broader examination of how people use the Internet to seek help
for justice problems. The early research has laid the groundwork: More people are
going online to seek help, and there are more sites, tools, and apps being built to
serve them. But what do we actually know about the supply and demand of legal
help online?
Public health data-driven research can provide legal researchers with models for
evaluating the Internet’s use for access to a public good. The rise of digital epidemi-
ology, infoveillance, and infodemiology31 in the public health field offers lessons for
legal researchers exploring how people are seeking and finding help for justice
problems, on a population level. Digital epidemiology and infoveillance involve
drawing upon digital sources of data where people share information about
30
Denvir, What Is the Net Worth?
31
These three terms are used by various research groups, but often connote the same essential
type of research: harnessing digital datasets, internet behavior, and other online resources to
track diseases, spot health assistance-seeking, and identifying other trends of interest to public
health practitioners.

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 207

themselves, like on search engines, social media sites, and other platforms. This data
can then be analyzed through techniques like natural language processing to
identify patterns, intents, and possible problems. Digital epidemiology has been
used to analyze internet datasets to identify possible influenza outbreaks based on
patterns of user searches, mental health risks based on online forum posts, and risk of
being infected with HIV based on tweets.32 These techniques have identified
patterns of people’s medical needs, their preferences for assistance, and the coming
outbreak of a crisis – though they may be problematic if relied upon as the sole
evidence for where to deploy resources or make policy.33
Legal researchers might employ techniques akin to digital epidemiology in order
to establish broader, population-level understandings of access to justice on the
Internet. Returning to the core research questions introduced previously, but with
a richer sense of the state of the field, new research might ask:
1. What is the quantity of demand and supply for legal help on the Internet?
What is the volume of assistance being sought out? Does the supply
match the demand? Are there “online legal help deserts,” with minimal
resources for certain issue areas? These can help make better agendas of
where resources should be spent in creating more online help.
2. What is the quality of the supply of legal help, and the matching of people
to this help? Are the websites and tools online providing resources that
people want to use, are able to use, and that get them to good outcomes?
And are intermediary platforms directing people to higher-quality help,
or to lower-quality help? Research around quality of supply and quality
of intermediary’s matching can help set better policy about what kinds of
online tools should be funded, and what internet platforms like search
engines and social media ought to prioritize in their algorithms.
3. Are there harms occurring when people seek help on the Internet? Are
people finding malicious or unintentional misinformation about their
legal options, processes, and outcomes online? This may be because of
their own misunderstanding of jurisdiction, their reliance on anecdotal
advice, frauds and scams, or intentional misinformation campaigns. As
with public health concerns over misinformation and over harms of

32
See, e.g., Han Chin Shing et al., Expert, Crowdsourced, and Machine Assessment of Suicide
Risk via Online Postings, 5 Proc. Workshop on Computational Linguistics & Clinical
Psych.: From Keyboard to Clinic 25 (2018).
33
Google Trends data indices on common searches was trumpeted as an effective way to identify
flu outbreaks; in 2013 studies revealed that its ability to track the flu did not correspond to the
official public health agency’s (the CDC) data – in part because of news reports about the flu
leading the search engine to overestimate people actually experiencing symptoms. See Declan
Butler, When Google Got Flu Wrong, 494 Nature 155 (2013). Researchers acknowledge that
internet-based surveillance techniques (based on Google Search query data, Twitter posts, or
self-reporting on crowd intelligence sites) had substantial limits and should not be the main
source of policy making around services or resources for health.

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 208 Margaret Hagan

medical advice being given over the Internet, legal practitioners and
policy makers could benefit from more research on whether and how
people are finding misinformation about their justice problems online,
and what harms these may cause. This could lead to more intentional
strategies by service providers, policy makers, and internet platforms to
address misinformation and support quality sources of assistance.
This chapter, as already noted, tackles the first of these questions, about the quantity
of supply and demand for legal help online. It provides initial data sources, tech-
niques, and findings that can offer some insight into how the Internet is functioning
in people’s access to justice.

9.3 what is the quantity of supply and demand

for legal help online?
How many people are coming to the Internet to find help for their justice problems?
And how many resources are there to assist them with these problems? There is no
perfect source of data on the demand or the supply for legal help on the Internet.
But there are surveys and proxy data sources that can help us to estimate what is
happening online. This section presents the data sources and methods to quantify
the supply and demand of legal help online: the sites that are supplying help (either
as intermediaries or as providers of legal help) and the numbers of people that are
seeking help.
The Internet has billions of websites.34 How many of these count as “supplying”
legal help for people seeking help for justice problems? First, we must distinguish
between two types of help websites: intermediaries and providers. Intermediary sites
let people express their problem or story, and then discover links, people, or answers
to their problem. Some of the primary legal help intermediary platforms in the US
are search engines, social media platforms, and forums. Providers’ sites, on the other
hand, provide content for a person to deal with their justice problem (rather than
just referrals to other sites).

9.3.1 Intermediary Platforms Used for Justice Problem-Solving

The main intermediaries for justice problems are likely to be the same as general
problem-solving intermediaries: search engines, voice assistants, and social
media platforms.
Search engines are platforms in which people present words, phrases, or sen-
tences for the intermediary to then interpret and respond with sites (or direct

34
Martin Armstrong, How Many Websites Are There? Statista (Aug. 6, 2021), www-statista-com
.stanford.idm.oclc.org/chart/19058/number-of-websites-online/.

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 209

answers). Google Search is by far the most widely used search engine. For search
engines from US desktop computers in 2021, Google received 86.64 percent of
search queries, Microsoft’s Bing search engine had 6.79 percent, and Yahoo,
2.75.35 For mobile searches, the companies are in a similar order – but with
Google with an even higher share. Of mobile searches in the US in 2021,
Google has 93.4 percent market share, Yahoo has 2.02, Bing has 1.87, and
DuckDuckGo has 2.3.36
Voice assistants, in the form of mobile phone–smart device assistant or voice-
enabled speakers, are another rising type of intermediary. Voice assistants are
increasingly used, in particular on one’s smartphone, car, tablet, television, or
computer. Over 63 percent of Americans used a voice assistant as of 2020, and
51 percent use a voice assistant on their smartphone.37 In 2020, an estimated
128 million US residents used a voice assistant at least once a month.38 Searching
the Internet is the most frequent use cases for voice assistants.39 For voice assistants
specifically in home speakers, Amazon’s Alexa brand (as of 2021, relying primarily on
the Bing search engine) is the leading voice-enabled speaker with 69.7 percent of
US market share in 2020, with Google’s Home devices (using Google Search) at 31.7
percent, and others at 18.4 percent.40
Social media platforms are another key intermediary. The most popular platforms
among US adults as of 2021 were YouTube (81 percent use it), Facebook (69
percent), Instagram (40 percent), Pinterest (31 percent), LinkedIn (28 percent),
Snapchat (25 percent), Twitter (23 percent), WhatsApp (23 percent), TikTok (21
percent), Reddit (18 percent), and Nextdoor (13 percent).41

35
Joseph Johnson, Worldwide Desktop Market Share of Leading Search Engines from January
2010 to September 2021, Statista (Mar. 1, 2022), https://www-statista-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/
statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/.
36
Joseph Johnson, U.S. Mobile Search Share 2021, Statista (Mar. 1, 2022), https://www-statista-
com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/statistics/511358/market-share-mobile-search-usa/.
37
Lionel Sujay Vailshery, Share of Voice Assistant Users in the U.S. 2020 by Device, Statista
(Mar. 15, 2022), https://www-statista-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/statistics/1171363/share-of-voice-
assistant-users-in-the-us-by-device/; Nat’l Pub. Media, The Smart Audio Report (2020),
https://www.nationalpublicmedia.com/insights/reports/smart-audio-report/#download.
38
Shanhong Liu, Number of Voice Assistant Users in the United States, 2017–2022, Statista
(Mar. 18, 2022), www-statista-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/statistics/1029573/us-voice-assistant-
users/.
39
Alexander Kunst, Usage of Google Assistant’s Functions in the U.S. 2019, Statista (Nov. 26,
2019), www-statista-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/forecasts/1038131/usage-of-google-assistant-s-func
tions-in-the-us; Nicolas Loose, Virtual Assistants in the U.S., 2019, Statista (Feb. 2019),
https://www-statista-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/study/60113/virtual-assistants-in-the-us/.
40
Federica Laricchia, Voice-Enabled Speaker User Share by Brand in the United States,
2017–2021, Statista (Feb. 14, 2022), https://www-statista-com.stanford.idm.oclc.org/statistics/
720066/us-voice-enabled-speaker-user-share/.
41
Brooke Auxier & Monica Anderson, Social Media Use in 2021, Pew Rsch. Ctr. (Apr. 7, 2021),
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2021/04/07/social-media-use-in-2021/.

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 210 Margaret Hagan

We can assume that the general popularity of these search engines, voice assist-
ants, and social media sites carries over to justice problem help-seeking. These
intermediaries provide opportunities for research on internet problem solving. Just
like in public health research, we can use them to observe what people are searching
for, how they frame their problems, what they click on, and how they behave. That
said, research using these intermediaries is difficult, because they do not make their
data about users’ searches, clicks, and other behavior open to researchers.

9.3.2 Provider Websites That Offer Legal Help

Apart from these intermediaries of online legal help, there are the provider
websites, which offer assistance to people seeking help on a justice problem.
Within the provider group, there is another division, between commercial pro-
viders and public interest providers. Commercial providers have a for-profit busi-
ness model and are giving help, information, and tools in order to either upsell the
user to other services or to get advertisement or referral fees from them. Public
interest providers have a nonprofit business model and are trying to get assistance
to the user in order to improve their outcomes. Some may aim to generate revenue
through paid services, but most public interest sites are funded through grants or
government funds.

9.3.3 Commercial Legal Help Supply

I surveyed the Internet for commercial websites that offered legal assistance for civil
justice problems and identified over seventy sites that have over approximately 5,000
visitors per month. Some of the most prominent general commercial legal help
websites are Nolo.com, Avvo.com, Findlaw.com, Legalmatch.com, AllLaw.com,
and LawShelf.com. These sites offer resources for a wide variety of legal issue areas.
There is another layer down of commercial legal help suppliers: those that focus
on particular areas of legal needs. Some focus on creating legal documents for estate
planning, businesses, and contracts.42 Other providers aim exclusively at business
formation legal needs.43 Another cluster of commercial providers focuses on family
law needs, like divorce and child custody.44 There is another cluster around
bankruptcy, debt, and credit repair problems,45 another around disability benefits

42
See examples of these sites at the full list of commercial legal help websites compiled at
Stanford Legal Design Lab, Commercial Legal Help Websites, Legal Help Dashboard,
https://legalhelpdashboard.org/websites/commercial-legal-help-websites/.
43
Id. (such as ZenBusiness and Northwest Registered Agent within the business category).
44
Id. (such as Its Over Easy or Custody Xchange in the family category).
45
Id. (such as Debt.org, Debt.com, or Consolidatedcredit.org).

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 211

claims and navigating resources for people with special needs,46 and another around
personal injuries and torts.47
In addition to sites whose mission is exclusively around providing legal help, there
are also commercial sites in other, nonlegal domains that try to attract users with
justice problems. In this parallel commercial group, there are sites that offer financial
literacy and other professional services, such as Nerdwallet.com, Credit.com,
Creditcards.com, Consumerhelpcentral.com, Studentloanhero.com, or Angieslist.
com. These sites’ resources often overlap with legal help resources, especially for life
problems that have both legal and financial dimensions, like debt collection, home-
ownership, and landlord-tenant scenarios. The other parallel commercial group are
news outlets. Sites like Usnews.com, Wusa9.com, WashingtonPost.com, and Cnbc.
org offer articles that provide basic overviews of legal situations, with short articles
aimed at giving general discussions of various life, legal, and financial problems.
I compiled a list of the most popular commercial legal websites, using search
engine optimization (SEO) tools Ahrefs and Similarweb, which list the most
popular websites for common keywords. By searching for sites that appear frequently
for keywords around law, legal help, legal aid, legal answers, and related issues,
I identified approximately seventy commercial legal help sites. This research
focused on civil justice problems (so excluding criminal and immigration law
keywords). Also excluded were commercial provider websites that appear to have
fewer than 5,000 visits per month.

9.3.4 Public Interest Legal Help Websites

Apart from the commercial providers, there is a robust ecosystem of public interest
legal help websites. They provide similar kinds of content as the commercial ones do
articles, step-by-step guides, frequently asked questions, and form-filling tools. They
also tend to have contact information for legal aid attorneys, free chat with law
librarians, and other on-ramps to free services.
Unlike the commercial provider sites, public interest legal help websites are
almost all at the state or local region level. It is notable that there is not a single
national legal aid or public interest legal help portal that gives national guidance on
civil justice problems. Rather, it has been state or local actors that have created legal
help portals for their region, giving guides and contacts for people looking to address
their justice problems.48
There are some national public interest websites around specific issue areas or
demographic groups. For example, there are national public interest sites for sexual

46
Id. (such as Disabilitysecrets.com or Specialneedsanswers.com).
47
Id. (such as Forthepeople.com, Injuryclaimcoach.com, or EnJuris.com).
48
For a full list of these statewide legal help portals, see Law Help Interactive, https://
lawhelpinteractive.org/.

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 212 Margaret Hagan

assault and domestic violence,49 women’s law issues,50 landlord-tenant issues,51

immigration issues,52 and bankruptcy and debt issues.53 There are also some
national legal help websites that provide specific tools or resources, like a legal
dictionaries and reference materials.54
I identified approximately 340 civil help websites that provided free information
and tools to people in the fifty states, as well as DC and Puerto Rico. I did not
include local bar associations, law library, or county court websites, because the
majority of them do not have substantial self-help material (though this may change
in the future, and these sites might be added into future research).
Most public interest legal websites operate at the state or regional level. Within
each state, frequently there is a local ecosystem of four kinds of public interest legal
help websites:
1. A statewide legal help portal, which provides an overview of civil justice
guides, contacts, FAQs, and tools.
2. A legal aid organizational website (or sites), which provides contact
information, hotline numbers, clinic details, and a limited number of
articles or guides on legal issues. (Some states have many regional legal
aid groups, each with its own website, while others have a single main
legal aid group serving the entire state.)
3. A court self-help website, which offers court-focused guides, tools, forms,
and service hours to self-represented litigants who have an issue in civil,
family, or traffic court. (Some local county courts may have their own
self-help, but typically this is run by the statewide judicial council or
administrative office of the courts.)
4. A free online brief advice clinic for low-income people, run through the
ABA Free Legal Answers project. Not every state has a Free Legal
Answers clinic, but more than thirty do.55
Some states, like California, Florida, and New Jersey, have many legal aid organiza-
tions and so have a large number of public interest websites. Other states, like
Wyoming, North Dakota, Georgia, Wisconsin, or New Hampshire, do not have
49
See examples like Rainn.org and TheHotlineorg at the master list of public interest legal help
websites, Stanford Legal Design Lab, Public Interest Legal Help Websites, Legal Help
Dashboard, https://legalhelpdashboard.org/websites/public-sites/.
50
Id. (providing examples such as the National Women’s Law Center and the Women’s Law
Project).
51
Id. (providing examples such as Legal Help FAQ).
52
Id. (providing examples such as Immigration Law Help and Immi).
53
Id. (providing examples such as Upsolve.org, Incharge.org, and ConsumerFinance.gov’s
national resources).
54
Id. (providing examples such as Cornell’s Legal Information Institute and LegalDictionary).
55
See the full list at American Bar Association Standing Committee on Pro Bono & Public
Service, ABA Free Legal Answers, https://www.americanbar.org/groups/probono_public_ser
vice/projects_awards/free-legal-answers/.

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 213

statewide legal help portals and may only have one or two public interest legal
help sites.

9.4 what is the demand for legal help online?

There is no public data source that represents exactly how many people are
searching for justice problems. Google and other search engines do not release
their data on exact numbers of search volumes for different queries. But there are
other proxies that make possible some estimates of how many people are seeking
legal help online.

9.4.1 Estimates of Demand from Legal Needs Surveys

One way to estimate how many people might be coming online to find help is to
look at estimations of how many people experience justice problems in the US.
Legal needs surveys ask adults about how often they have experienced justice
problems, like situations of wage theft, eviction, debt collection, bankruptcy, domes-
tic violence, foreclosure, access to medical treatment, and the care and custody of
children and dependent adults.56 Sandefur’s study of a representative sample of US
adults in 2013 found that two-thirds of them experienced at least one civil justice
problem in the past eighteen months, with the average number of justice problems
being 2.1 problems in eighteen months. Of the two-thirds of adults who reported
having a problem, they averaged 3.3 needs in eighteen months.57
These rates of justice problems allow us to estimate how much demand there
might be for legal help. By using this estimated rate of each adult experiencing 2.1
problems in eighteen months, we can use states’ adult populations to estimate how
many people are experiencing justice problems in a month. This estimation is likely
to overestimate the number of people coming to the Internet to seek help for a
justice problem. Surveys have found that 16 percent of US adults take no action
(including reaching out for assistance or searching for help) when they experience a
justice problem.58 Accordingly, we can assume that a significant proportion of adults
with a justice problem, akin to this 16 percent figure, may not come online to find
help. There are not yet surveys that document the rate at which people experiencing
a justice problem go onto the Internet to seek help.
56
Rebecca L. Sandefur, Access to What? 148 Daedalus 49 (2019).
57
Sandefur, Accessing Justice in the Contemporary USA.
58
See the discussion about inaction after experiencing a justice problem at Rebecca L. Sandefur,
What We Know and Need to Know about the Legal Needs of the Public, 67 S.C. Law Rev. 443,
448 (2016). Studies of torts and claim-making further explore why so few people are able to
“name” their situation as legal, or why they decide against making a claim. David M. Engel,
The Myth of the Litigious Society (1st ed. 2016); Nora Freeman Engstrom, ISO the
Missing Plaintiff, Torts JOTWELL (Apr. 12, 2017), https://torts.jotwell.com/iso-the-missing-
plaintiff/.

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 214 Margaret Hagan

I calculated each state’s expected number of justice problems per month, and the
expected number of problems for which people seek help.59 For example, we might
assume that each month in California there are around 3,572,000 justice problems,
and that people might take action on approximately 3 million of them. Or in
Alabama, there may be around 445,000 problems per month, and people will seek
help for around 374,000 problems. In total, we can assume that the whole US
population has around 25 million acted-upon justice problems per month (with
acted-upon meaning that the adult takes action to try to address it). These estimates
provide a rough expectation of how many adults might be seeking help online.
Using these estimates of acted-upon justice problems per state, we can approxi-
mate if supply is matching demand. Are people in a state visiting legal aid, court, and
public interest websites at the rate we may expect them to? Are there 3 million visits
to California legal help websites each month – or is the number substantially higher
or lower? How well is the supply of public interest websites matching the demand
for legal help?

9.4.2 Tracking Demand through Analytics and SEO Traffic Estimators

Aside from estimates based on surveys, another strategy to measure demand is to
count the visitors to legal help websites. There is a clear gap in this strategy: Not all
people searching for help with a justice problem online will in fact find their way to
a legal help website. Website visit counts will not capture demand from people who
might have framed their online queries in terms that may have led them to other
sites – or who looked at search results and decided not to click anything. Still, the
visitor counts can help us see if the expected demand matches the actual demand,
and if that matches the number of people using public interest sites.
Site analytics. Sites that have an analytics tool installed can track the numbers of
people who come to visit, what search terms or other sites have referred them to this
site, and what pages on the site they visit. These analytics numbers are useful
because they are closest to being exact counts of visitors. They are not completely
accurate. Often they will undercount visitors, because of the use of ad blockers,
cookie blockers, and JavaScript disablers by visitors. When a person has these
blockers in place on their browser, they can prevent Google Analytics from tracking
their behavior – and thus stop the site from registering their visit. Researchers can
use Analytics, from websites’ administrators that have given them access or reports to
their sites. These numbers will likely underestimate actual visits.
SEO platforms have developed tools to estimate the traffic to websites, even
without access to websites’ administrative backends. These SEO research platforms
do not offer exact numbers of how many visitors come to a specific website in a
59
Stanford Legal Design Lab, Justice Problem Estimates per State, Legal Help Dashboard,
https://legalhelpdashboard.org/rank/#need.

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 215

month. But they provide useful estimations of how many visitors are coming from
search engines to a site.60
SEO traffic estimator by search keywords. One type of SEO traffic estimation tool,
like that from provider Ahrefs, makes these estimates by tracking billions of keywords
that people tend to search for, and then seeing how many people are searching for
them each month, which sites appear for them, and which sites people click on.61
This permits estimates of the average monthly visitors coming from search engines
to a given site. The SEO traffic estimation tools will most often underestimate actual
visitors to a website because of several inbuilt constraints. First, some SEO tools (like
Ahrefs) track only visitors who are coming from search engines, and not from other
pathways (like those directly typing in the website URL or coming from another
non-search website). Second, they do not track every single keyword (or search
query) that a person might type into a search engine. Though a tool like Ahrefs
Traffic Estimator follows over 6.1 billion keywords, visitors might use “long-tail”
searches (like, “show me a legal aid group that can help me with an eviction notice
please Google”) that it does not track.
SEO traffic estimator by behavior tracking. Another SEO estimation tool,
Similarweb, takes a different approach. It gathers data about users’ online activities
from internet service providers, a panel of monitored devices, and shared web
analytics accounts.62 They use their behavioral tracking data, analytics access, and
other public data sources to estimate how many people are visiting a given website.
Other SEO tools have found Similarweb to provide the most accurate estimates of
total visitors to a site, though they tend to overestimate visitors.63
To assess which estimation tool might be useful, I used a website that I maintain
with my team at Stanford Legal Design Lab. In May 2020, our team launched a
national non-profit website for housing law information, Legal Help FAQ. We have
Google Analytics tracking visitors to the website and keeping counts of users and
visits. According to Google Analytics, in the month of January 2021, the site had
13,520 users and 30,623 page views. Similarweb estimated that the site had 18,126
users and 31,877 visits. They overestimated visitors by 34 percent (4,606 users), and
visits by 4 percent (1,254 visits). Ahref estimated total traffic from Google Search to
LegalHelpFAQ to be 42 visitors in January 2021. Google Analytics indicated that we
had 4,385 visitors from Google Search in January 2021. This was a substantial

60
See an overview of these SEO research tools for website traffic estimation at Tyler Horvath, 8
Most Accurate Website Traffic Estimators, Ninja Reps., https://www.ninjareports.com/website-
traffic-estimators/.
61
See a full explanation of how Ahrefs’ search traffic estimation works at What Is Organic Traffic
in Ahrefs and How Do We Calculate It? Ahrefs Help Ctr., https://help.ahrefs.com/en/
articles/1863206-what-is-organic-traffic-in-ahrefs-and-how-do-we-calculate-it.
62
See Similarweb’s data strategy for estimating web traffic at How We Measure the Digital World,
SimilarWeb, https://www.Similarweb.com/corp/ourdata/.
63
Joshua Hardwick, Find Out How Much Traffic a Website Gets: 3 Ways Compared, Ahrefs
Blog (Aug. 16, 2018), https://ahrefs.com/blog/website-traffic/.

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 216 Margaret Hagan

table 9.1 Comparison of different estimations of visitors to legal help websites

Similarweb Difference between

Google Analytics reported estimation of visits per site Analytics and
visitors per month (likely to month (likely to Similarweb’s
Site underestimate) overestimate) estimate
Legalhelpfaq. 13,520 18,126 34 percent over,
org by 4,606
Wisconsin 30,100 36,461 21 percent over,
State Law by 6,361
Library
Michigan 180,049 166,689 7 percent under,
Legal Help by 13,360
Texas Law 318,232 378,050 18 percent over
Help by 59,818

underestimation of search traffic to our site, with a difference of 4,343 visitors. I then
proceeded to measure Similarweb’s estimates against other sites, whose adminis-
trators shared their Google Analytics reports with me (see Table 9.1).
Google Analytics tends to underestimate the number of visitors, though it is not
clear by how much. Similarweb seems to overestimate the number of users visiting
the site, differing from the Analytics by as much as 34 percent. Similarweb’s
numbers are substantially closer to the Analytics’ numbers than the Ahrefs tool.
With those caveats on the tools’ limitations to produce exact numbers,
Similarweb does provide us with rough estimates of most legal help websites’ traffic.
Its ballpark estimates should not be relied upon for exact measures, but they can be
approximate counts to help service providers and policy makers compare how
different kinds of sites are performing and how they change over time.

9.4.3 Legal Help Site Visits as Proxy for Demand

By looking at rough estimates of visits to various types of legal help websites, we can
see what kinds of justice problem-solving behavior is happening online. These
numbers are estimates from Similarweb, so they may overestimate actual visitors.
They are also for a single month, January 2021, which occurred during the COVID-
19 pandemic, and so may be different than a typical month (without a public health
emergency) (see Table 9.2).
These monthly estimates of visits to commercial legal help websites indicate that
tens of millions of people come online to seek assistance and information about the
law each month. Compared to our earlier estimate from legal need surveys that
the US adult population has approximately 25 million justice problems per month,
the visits to commercial websites almost double this estimate. This high number of
visits may include “multiple visit” scenarios, in which a person with a single justice

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 217

table 9.2 Estimated visitors to commercial legal help websites in a month

Type of commercial legal Estimated monthly number of visits to this site in

help website Jan. 2021, from Similarweb
All types of commercial legal help sites 50,909,394
General legal help websites 31,539,004
Legal forms sites 7,702,137
Immigration 3,312,554
Public benefits sites 2,050,050
Family law websites 1,857,023
Small business sites 1,765,107
Debt, credit, and bankruptcy sites 1,439,497
Personal injury sites 1,244,022

problem visits more than one website in order to find assistance. These website visits
may also include visits from people outside the US, who found the resource online.
Some visits may also come from legal professionals or researchers, using these
websites in their own work. We cannot take each visit to a website as indication of
a unique justice problem; these numbers of website visits are not direct proxies for
legal need counts.
These caveats aside, this estimated traffic of over 50 million visits to US commer-
cial legal help sites in one month strongly suggests that there is a substantial demand
for legal information and assistance online. This survey also shows that there are
active ecosystems of websites supplying assistance for certain legal issue areas,
including immigration, public benefits and disabilities, family law, small business,
bankruptcy, and personal injury.

9.4.4 Visits to Public Interest Legal Help Websites

As mentioned earlier, most public interest sites are local rather than national. There
are approximately twenty public interest national sites, most of which focus on
particular legal issues or provide national coverage with legal dictionaries or sets of
forms.64 The total estimated number of visitors in January 2021 to only the national
public interest websites was around 6,290,000 visitors.
This 6.2 million visitor count must be adjusted downward, though 4.49 million of
those visitors were to Cornell’s Legal Information Institute (LII), which provides a
legal dictionary and open access to legislation and other laws. Many users of LII are

64
See this the full list of US public interest legal help websites at Stanford Legal Design Lab,
Public Interest Legal Help Websites, Legal Help Dashboard, https://legalhelpdashboard.org/
websites/#public.

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 218 Margaret Hagan

table 9.3 Estimated visitors to national public interest legal help websites in a month

Type of national public Estimated monthly number of visits to this site in Jan. 2021,
interest legal help website from Similarweb
All types of national public 6,291,274 (or 1,798,274 without LII)
interest legal help sites
General legal help websites 4,800,403 (of which, 4,493,000 to LII)
Debt and bankruptcy 569,366
Domestic violence 444,591
Women’s law 388,478
Immigration 56,559
Housing 31,877

legal professionals and students using its legal reference resources. It’s impossible to
discern how many of LII’s 4.49 million visitors are legal professionals versus people
seeking help on their justice problem. The monthly number of laypersons seeking
help on the national public interest legal sites likely lies between 1.79 and 6.29
million (see Table 9.3).
The estimated traffic to national public interest sites is substantially lower than
that to national commercial help sites, by at least 44 million visits per month. The
coverage of issues is also quite different. National public interest websites focus
more on debt, domestic violence, and women’s law issues, and less so on family
law, small business, immigration, public benefits, or housing. In some cases, such
as family, benefits, and housing, the shortfall is likely because regional public
interest sites are expected to serve this need. But the lack of a national public
interest hub for these issues is noticeable, particularly given apparent high demand
for these issues.
How do local public interest legal help websites (for instance, those of a local
legal aid group or court self-help center) fare, in terms of estimated monthly traffic?
Unfortunately, it is difficult to measure most courts’ self-help sites, because of the
nature of their websites. Most court help pages are located as a subpage of the main
court website (like https://www.azcourts.gov/selfservicecenter or https://mdcourts
.gov/legalhelp). This prevents estimation of their traffic, because the Similarweb
estimation tool works on only the main domain and not the subpages. I was also
unable to estimate many legal aid sites’ visitors, because they apparently have fewer
than 5,000 visits per month, and the Similarweb estimation tool could not reliably
predict their visit count.
These limits result in a restricted measure of local public interest site visits. I ran
visitor estimations for each state’s statewide legal help portal. Not every state has a
dedicated “Law Help” portal. In some cases, such as Delaware or Wisconsin, it is a
legal aid group’s site that functions as a de facto statewide resource. But most of the
states do have something akin to Alaska Law Help, Law Help Hawaii, or

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 219

table 9.4 Estimated visitors to statewide legal help portals, including most highly
visited sites

Estimated monthly number of visits to this site in

Statewide legal help portal Jan. 2021, from Similarweb
All statewide legal help portals 3,453,921
Texas Law Help 578,563
Massachusetts Legal Help 424,324
Illinois Legal Aid Online 369,715
Connecticut Law Help 312,095
Michigan Legal Help 248,960
Washington Law Help 218,663
LSNJLaw 174,994
The People’s Law Library of Maryland 152,816
Pennsylvania Law Help 100,665
Law Help New York 80,832
Legal Aid Oklahoma 77,806
Arizona Law Help 71,560

Massachusetts Legal Help. The estimated visitor counts to these statewide law-help
portals is a first attempt to measure people’s visits to local public interest sites.
The total estimated visitors to the statewide legal help portals were approximately
3,454,000 per month. Nine of the portals had over 100,000 estimated visitors per
month, mostly from high-population states like Texas, Massachusetts, and Illinois.
But the numbers of visitors did not necessarily correspond to population numbers or
projected levels of justice problems (see Table 9.4).

9.5 discussion of online legal help trends

When we compare the expected number of justice problems in each state to the
visits to the statewide legal help portal, some sites have visitor numbers that are a
much higher proportion of the estimated demand than others. For example,
Connecticut’s portal visitor estimates reach almost 95 percent of the estimated
justice problems occurring in its adult population. For Massachusetts, this percent-
age is around 65 percent, Illinois is around 32 percent, and Washington at 31
percent. At the other end of the spectrum, the statewide legal help portals of
California, Florida, and North Carolina seem to be getting visits for only around
2 percent of estimated problems in the state (see Table 9.5).65
The high proportion of visits to portals in Connecticut and Massachusetts may
not mean that nearly every person in these states who experiences a justice problem
65
See the full list of portals’ estimated traffic and percentages of expected problems to visits at
Stanford Legal Design Lab, Rankings of Legal Help Websites, Legal Help Dashboard,
https://legalhelpdashboard.org/rank/.

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 220 Margaret Hagan

table 9.5 Proportion of estimated acted-upon justice problems to statewide portal visits

Expected Estimated visits Difference Proportion of

number of acted- on state legal between expected
upon justice help portal for estimated problems
problems per this jurisdiction problems + showing up as
Jurisdiction month per month web visits portal visits
Connecticut 331,082 312,095 −18,987 0.9426516694
Massachusetts 646,299 424,324 −221,975 0.6565444167
Illinois 1,149,627 369,715 −779,912 0.3215956132
Washington 694,380 218,663 −475,717 0.3149039431
Maryland 549,616 152,816 −396,800 0.2780413962
Michigan 915,008 248,960 −666,048 0.2720850528

is coming online and finding their statewide public interest resource. These portal
websites may have content and technical strategies that attract visitors from outside
their jurisdiction. Their relatively high number of visits does indicate that these
states are effective at making public legal help accessible and discoverable online.

9.5.1 State Portals as an Underdeveloped Resource

For those states whose portals get relatively few visits, this may be because there is
another public interest site in their jurisdiction that has a high-traffic site. For
example, in California the statewide legal help portal gets far fewer visitors than
the court’s statewide Self-Help center website. In this state (unlike most others), the
state court is the leader in online legal help.
Still, the estimates of monthly visitors to public interest legal help websites show
that there is a broad section of the public that is not finding these free, non-profit
resources when they are searching for their justice problems online. The estimated
visitors to commercial websites indicate that there are tens of millions of people
seeking information on legal topics on the Internet each month. A handful of public
interest websites have been able to attract relatively high proportions of their
potential audience. But most state portals seem to be getting visits from fewer than
20 percent of people in their state experiencing justice problems.
These findings indicate a gap that policy makers and service providers must
prioritize. The supply of public interest legal help sites might be improved with
more content, improved technical and design updates, and outreach strategies. The
sites may be able to reach more of the people seeking legal help online if they
improve their performance so that more people can find them, and more internet
intermediaries are likely to place them high on search results.
How does a site improve its offerings and placement by intermediaries? One
answer is investment in better content that matches what people are searching for

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 221

and websites that engage visitors so that they do not click away quickly. It also
involves improving the technical and design performance of the sites, so that search
engines favor them. More work needs to be done with public interest sites to master
these SEO techniques and content development work that many of the commercial
sites have done, in order to engage the millions of people coming onto the Internet
in search of help.

9.5.2 Technology Companies’ Role in Directing People to Commercial

or Public Interest Sites
Another area of policy concern is the dominance of commercial legal help websites
in visitor patterns over public interest websites. To be sure, commercial legal help
websites are not inherently bad. For-profit entities have high-powered incentives to
offer user-friendly designs, responsive technology, and content and services that
match the needs of the public. Their business models, however, tend to steer people
away from free legal assistance and give only basic beginning information about a
legal issue rather than a full protocol of steps and process.
A standard approach is to offer short descriptive articles about a problem like
eviction or debt collection, rather than a full step-by-step guide like those that might
be found at public interest websites.66 One type of commercial model relies on
attracting people to click on the site, in order to show them advertisements. These
sites present short, generic articles framed around FAQs like “How Do I Stop an
Eviction?” which give people descriptions about the law and options of what they
can do while showing multiple advertisements for nonlegal content. These generic
articles do not provide information about jurisdiction, defenses, laws, or free services
a person can use.67 Another for-profit model provides short summaries of substantial,
local legal information for free, but then with a paywall around actionable help. For
example, on Nolo’s website about non-payment of rent and eviction, the site
provides a summary of local legal requirements and defenses. If a visitor wants to
understand how to make use of these laws, the site advertises that they should buy
the website’s books, forms, and templates, or that they should hire a lawyer affiliated

66
See for example the public interest court site on evictions in California, The Eviction Process for
Tenants, Cal. Ct. Self-Help Guide, https://www.courts.ca.gov/27798.htm, which provides
all the details, forms, timelines, and rules for tenants to defend themselves, versus the commer-
cial Nolo site, How Evictions Work: What Renters Need to Know, Nolo, https://www.nolo.com/
legal-encyclopedia/evictions-renters-tenants-rights-29824.html, which provides a short summary
before recommending the purchase of a book or hiring of a lawyer through a referral service.
67
For example, see the SFGate article “How to Catch Up on Rent So You’re Not Evicted” that
provides a five-step set of advice, but without mention of legal aid, mediators, emergency rent
programs, or other laws or services that can help people. Jenna Marie, How to Catch Up on
Rent So You’re Not Evicted, SFGate, https://homeguides.sfgate.com/catch-up-rent-not-evicted-
42577.html.

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 222 Margaret Hagan

with the site.68 By contrast, public interest sites tend to give visitors a menu of free
assistance, including do-it-yourself guides, form-filling tools, free legal navigators,
legal aid representation, and holistic social services assistance.
Commercial websites may be getting so much traffic vis-à-vis public interest ones
because they have deployed more search engine optimization strategies: producing
more content that matches people’s search keywords, creating sites that people stay
on for longer amounts of times, having technically capable websites, and taking
other actions that make it more likely for Google and other search engines to place
them higher on search results pages. Public interest organizations may, as men-
tioned before, improve the content and technical performance of their sites to be
more competitive.
Still another factor that shapes comparative use rates is the search engine com-
panies’ policies themselves. As with other sectors, the search engine companies
could alter their ranking algorithm to prioritize court, legal aid, and other public
interest legal help providers above commercial providers. Google, for example, has
altered how it responds to its users’ searches around health problems or voting and
elections to provide information that is sourced from vetted public interest actors
rather than commercial websites. In 2015, Google partnered with the Mayo Clinic
and medical doctors hired by their company to curate medical knowledge panels to
show in response to people’s health searches.69 In 2016, Google worked with a
university and foundation-supported Voting Information Project to present know-
ledge panels on where to vote, requirements to vote, and who is on the ballot in
local elections.70 Could such an initiative be possible for users’ queries around
evictions, foreclosures, wage theft, divorce, custody, debt collections, and domestic
violence protection? Technology companies play a substantial intermediary role,
directing people to resources that can answer their questions and conferring author-
ity to those that place high in their search results. Public interest organizations may
partner with these search engine intermediaries to create knowledge panels and
search rank algorithms that convey key local legal help information to people
searching online that would appear before the normal search results from a mix of
commercial and public interest providers.
More thinking remains to be done on how best to harness the capacities,
resources, and profit-seeking motivation of the commercial sector alongside the

68
An example is a California eviction help page from Nolo. Beth Dillman, Eviction Notices for
Nonpayment of Rent in California, Nolo, https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/eviction-
notices-nonpayment-rent-california.html.
69
See Prem Ramaswami, A Remedy for Your Health-Related Questions: Health Info in the
Knowledge Graph, Google: Keyword Blog (Feb. 10, 2015), https://blog.google/products/
search/health-info-knowledge-graph/.
70
E.g., VIP Projects, Voting Info. Project, https://www.votinginfoproject.org/projects; Shashi
Thakur, Google and YouTube Can Help Keep You Informed on Election Day, Google: The
Keyword Blog (Nov. 7, 2016), https://blog.google/products/search/google-and-youtube-can-
help-keep-you-informed-election-day/.

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 The Supply and Demand of Legal Help on the Internet 223

public-interest orientation and ethical approach of non-profit and legal aid groups,
whether public or private. The empirical analysis presented above aims to spur some
of that thinking.

9.6 conclusion
This chapter raises many questions for future research about the role of the Internet
in access to justice. Is it an effective on-ramp into the justice system for people who
come online to find help? Or is it confusing, misleading, or harmful – possibly
directing people to incorrect or unhelpful resources, or overwhelming them so that
they disengage, or offering them too-limited resources that don’t empower them to
take action to resolve a problem?
Future research can build off the initial data collection, methods, and analysis in
this chapter. The documentation of the legal supply – the intermediaries, commer-
cial providers, and non-profit providers – can be built upon, with greater evaluation
of their traffic, their quality, and people’s outcomes when using different kinds of
online sites. The initial estimates of demand for online legal help might be refined
in future work, with better information about the rates at which people go online for
justice problems and the rate of different kinds of legal issues.
This chapter was not able to tackle many other important questions about the
Internet’s role in access to justice. In particular, what is the quality of the supply of
legal help online? Are people able to discover the highest quality help, or are they
being directed toward lower-quality or incorrect help by intermediaries? This type of
quality evaluation can be done through a standardized scorecard of legal help sites,
building off of earlier research on user preferences and effectiveness of legal
technology. Building off of Sandefur, Hagan, and Denvir’s earlier assessments of
legal help tools’ quality, some key measurements of quality are: (1) content quality
(accuracy, relevancy, and actionability); (2) human-centered design (accessibility,
amount of administrative burden, and engagement of user); (3) technical perform-
ance (speed, lack of bugs, responsiveness); and (4) discoverability (search engine
placement, social media referrals, backlinks to trustworthy sources).
In addition, legal researchers can build from public health researchers’ digital
epidemiology and infoveillance techniques to track legal needs through search
engines and social media data sources. Researchers could pool legal aid groups’
Google Analytics, or use SEO traffic estimators, along with Google Trends and
other intermediaries’ APIs in order to track people’s online expressions of justice
problems and legal needs longitudinally. This research on legal needs can provide
useful population-level knowledge about what kinds of justice problems people are
experiencing, what seasonal patterns exist, and what outbreaks of needs may neces-
sitate new emergency services or outreach.
The final priority area going forward should be documenting and measuring
harms people may be experiencing when seeking assistance online. Are there

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 224 Margaret Hagan

situations akin to antivaccine misinformation in law? How often are search engines
directing people to legal help resources from the wrong jurisdiction, leading people
to rely on incorrect law, file incorrect forms, or use a defense they don’t
actually have?
Finally, in addition to more research-focused work, policy makers and justice
stakeholders should focus on online strategies to address the justice gap. There are
two main avenues. First are efforts to increase the prominence of public interest
legal help online. This work could aim to reform existing state help portals, legal aid
websites, and free tools, to have content that better matches people’s searches,
design that is more user-friendly, and technology that is more responsive and fast-
loading. All of these factors can increase public interest websites’ prominence in
search results and numbers of visitors. The second reform avenue is for court and
legal aid leaders to engage technology companies to change how search algorithms
treat people’s searches for justice problems. There is the potential for a public-
private partnership, to develop more reliable, quality content for Google, Siri, and
other search engines to feature when someone goes online to search “help I’m being
evicted” or “how do I get a restraining order?” The Internet holds great promise in
developing people’s awareness of their rights and their capability to take action on
justice problems, but there is still substantial work to be done to deliver on this
potential.

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