By Professor Nigel Balmer, Research Director, Legal Services Research Centre

I’ve been writing about legal needs and access to justice from the perspective of the public since 2001, and for some time, the (oversimplified) story about how age affects people’s experience has been: 

• that justiciable problems are most prevalent in middle age, as stages of life leave you susceptible to a broader range of issues (e.g., as you make more and rash purchases, or do other rash things like get married and have children), and  
• some age groups (e.g. young people, and particularly when they leave home or are not in education, employment or training, faced distinct challenges around service use, meaning that tailored approaches are required to meet their needs. 

In reports from large-scale legal needs surveys, older people often formed only a small part of the narrative, with problem prevalence tending to decline as age increased, that service use tended to increase, and there was little evidence of particularly different (or worse) outcomes than other groups.  

How the story has changed: older people more affected

But things change, and as services started moving away from traditional forms of provision to digital by default, older people were among the most affected. Catrina Denvir, Pascoe Pleasence and I talked about some of these issues from a legal need perspective in 2014, however our recent Victorian Legal Understanding and Lawyer Use (LULU) survey really brings the issue into sharp relief.   

As the Figure below shows, older Victorians were less likely to seek and less likely to obtain help online. They were also less adept at combining online and offline sources (pointing to a less flexible use of technology) and they were far more likely to get no help at all (that’s the bit of the bars that is missing on the right of the figure). This is not how things used to be! 

Figure 1 – Channel of obtaining help for justiciable problems by age 

Older people describe their problem experience  

Addressing the situation means listening to older people. There are many ways to achieve this, including through research, and I have recently been enjoying this work from Yaira Obstbaum and colleagues in Finland.  
 

Credit: LifeBalanceFilm

They invited older people to share stories about legal problems, in their own words. The participants described issues relating to care, health, housing, autonomy, end-of-life decisions, family, money and elder abuse. They also highlighted significant barriers to resolving issues around lack of money or resources, difficulty accessing information, and lack of (or eroded) trust in institutions.  

Significantly, they pointed to digital issues as both a barrier to accessing justice, but also as the source of justiciable problems, or catalyst in their creation. They also spoke of being ‘confronted with a faceless “system” of service providers, authorities, and bureaucracy, which is sometimes rife with digital barriers.’  

Expecting everyone to adapt not the solution 

At a time of significant technological change, we can’t just expect everyone to turn and face the changes they may find alienating. A technologically prescriptive justice system that fails to listen to and respond to the needs of older people means an increasingly ageist one.  

Read more about people’s use and experience of legal issues and legal services in Victoria in the LULU report.