U.S. Department
of Justice
Executive Summary: Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable 2024 Report
Access to Justice through Data and Research: A People-Centered Approach to Evidence-Based Policymaking by the Federal Government
Every day, millions of people in the United States face problems that affect their basic needs and rights, including those related to healthcare, housing, public benefits, education, employment, family stability, and safety. These problems often implicate the law in some way—from getting evicted to struggling to negotiate child custody, falling victim to an online scam, or facing workplace discrimination or sexual harassment. Federal agencies play a critical role in advancing and protecting these rights through people-centered programs, priorities, and solutions.
Federal data are essential not only to develop and improve government activities to advance access to justice priorities, but also to empower the public and external stakeholders, including researchers, courts, state agencies, policymakers, advocates, community-based organizations, and Tribal leaders and organizations. The 2024 Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable (LAIR) Report highlights the importance of collecting, using, and sharing data in a people-centered way and provides a framework for data collection and use to advance access to justice.
The Report identifies key data challenges—understanding and accessing available federal government data, linking data across agencies, navigating privacy and data security concerns, and addressing resource constraints—and provides examples of how federal agencies are working to overcome these gaps and create new areas of data collection to advance their access to justice priorities. As outlined in the Report, federal agencies have developed exemplary approaches to collecting and using justice data to improve federal program design, implementation, and evaluation. The agency activities highlighted in the Report demonstrate that while data and evidence challenges remain, they are not intractable.
The priorities and strategies outlined in this Report reflect our nation’s ongoing commitment to advancing access to justice for all Americans. This Report emphasizes that high-quality, cross-disciplinary data relating to these topics can enable agencies to develop effective and targeted policies and details a Roadmap of key strategies and practices to assist agencies in strengthening and bringing a people-centered approach to their evidence-based policymaking:
- STEP 1: Develop priorities & learning agendas
- STEP 2: Build access to justice evidence
- STEP 3: Use data to advance priorities
Through this Report, LAIR aims to chart a path forward for agencies and other stakeholders seeking to utilize data and research to inform evidence-based access to justice policymaking.