There has always been a methodological problem in estimating the costs of access to justice. While the needs studies give us a count of how many people are in need of access services, we never know how much they need. The method of multiplying current average cost of counsel with number in need is profoundly inadequate because many of the needs could surely be met with a less costly service, anything from an unbundled service to a reference to a web tool.
So here is the idea for getting a much better number, at least for the litigation portion of the system.
Take a court and give everyone who comes a free unbundled consultation on their situation and on what they need to resolve it.
This consultation would be under the privilege, and take, say, half an hour. The litigant would explain the issue they faced, and the attorney would probe and explore and ultimately make recommendations, give advice, and offer referrals. While this would not be the same as a right to counsel, it would surely increase access to justice.
The research part of the project would be that the attorney would then complete a report form that would give certain data about the litigant and case, and identify what the litigant would need to obtain access to justice, including in the case of need for an attorney, the amount of time.
This would lead easily to a cost estimate for the case, and thus to a tool that could be used to estimate the total costs of a court’s caseload based on objective demographic data.
Obviously the attorneys performing the assessment would have to be carefully trained and assessment validation performed.
This would be a relatively cheap project, and would yield very useful data for the future. It is even possible that it could be conducted by pro bono attorneys, or those waiting for their delayed jobs at law firms.
Richard Zorza's Access to Justice Blog 
Richard,
Interesting idea in estimating costs for those who are starting or about to start litigation and go to the court first or for those who are engaged in litigation.
This pilot would not count or include resources needed to assist the majority of people who need legal services before they are in litigation. Because the project would start at the court house those cases will have a higher need of resources than cases where the person needs guidance and help before needing to go to court.
In other words, starting in the court house will lead to higher estimates than starting outside of the court house. Just like routine medical care is most expensive in an emergency room, even for simple conditions that can be managed outside of the ER (diabetis or asthma), the same may apply in legal cases.
So, it would be helpful to include the equivalent of a community health care clinic (legal aid and legal non profits in the area) and include those costs and services to see if those who use the comunity healht care clinic equivalent (legal aid or legal hotline and other tools) use the ER (court) less frequently and consume less court resources when in court.
Then, when looking at the full delivery system we may get closer to understanding how underfunding local legal non profits leads to vamped up demand in the most expensive place (court room) and what the relationship is between court pent up demand and increasing or decreasing access to low cost legal services.
One minor point also, is that to evaluate the amount of time a case may take requires more than 1/2 hour and lots of legal experience in that area of law. From my experience, once a case is reviewed for placement and acceptance, it takes over 2 hours of researchingthe case depending on how many issues there may be, reviewing documents and files and supporting documentation, figuring out what is missing and talking with the client and with OP’s counsel before an internal litigation plan that estimates the hours and costs of a case can be created with some degree of certainty.
I don’t think that a newly minted attorney could come up with an accurate plan in 1/2 hour if you want to come up with a plan/costs and keep a low rate of error. So, I would also compare the original estimates with the final outcomes in the case to see if the estimates were on the mark and to learn what where the factors commonly underestimated or overestimated.
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