A Literature Review: Examining the literature on how to measure the ‘successful outcomes’: quality, effectiveness and efficiency of Legal Assistance Services

This paper examines research, studies, reports, reviews, and evaluations in Australia and internationally of legal assistance services evaluations on how to measure successful outcomes, quality, efficiencies, and effectiveness. The literature shows a lack of common language to describe evaluation outcomes, frameworks to capture them, and tools to measure success and good practice in community legal education. It specifically discusses the disadvantaged demographic in Australia and highlights the complexity of legal assistance work. The paper includes a table of the literature qualified by such characteristics as number of participants and methods and ranked by usefulness. The author concludes that a methodology for evaluating legal assistance services outcomes has to include an understanding of legal assistance services first before defining outcomes.