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Food for thought:

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-k ... ts_be.html

"A basic summary of the results: an offer of free legal representation by an elite cadre of Harvard Law Students does not increase the probability that a client will prevail in his or her claim. (There was a .04 increase in probability of prevailing, not statistically significant.) What the offer of free legal representation does do, however, is increase the delay that clients experience in the adjudication. (The mean time to adjudication for the treated population was 53.1 days versus 37.3 days for the control group, a statistically significant sixteen-day difference.)"

Interesting, and surprising to me, particularly given the rapidly growing popularity of clinics, particularly of the legal aid variety.

My Civil Procedure professor did this research; I've talked to him a good amount about it.

Personally, I think there is a good deal of selection bias: the individuals that are more likely to seek student-provided legal aid are most likely the ones that need the most help, and therefore most likely to seek assistance for hearings rather than adjudicating on their own. This may also explain the increase in time necessary to finish adjudication.