by Prof. Nigel Balmer, Research Director
It’s one year since the launch of the Legal Services Research Centre. On 21 August 2025, at the iconic State Library of Victoria, we celebrated the launch of the Legal Services Research Centre (LSRC) and the release of our first publication Report of the Pilot Victorian Legal Understanding and Lawyer Use (V-LULU) Survey.
Since then, it has been a hive of activity.
We’re now into our second year of the Lawyer Census — our annual, profession-wide survey of Victorian lawyers. This project is an opportunity to understand and respond to systemic issues affecting the profession.
This year’s instrument covered demographics, professional boundaries, wellbeing, sexual harassment (including an experimental component which explored whether people identify and label behaviours as sexual harassment), tailoring services to clients needs/capabilities, and artificial intelligence.
You can find reports from the 2025 survey on Sexual Harassment, Uncivil Behaviour, AI, Wellbeing and Competency on our website.
We are excited to have recently closed fieldwork on the 2026 wave of our continuous Legal Understanding and Lawyer Use (LULU) Survey. This project provides a window into how the public interact with law, experience legal issues and use legal services, now and over time.
Over the next four years (2026-2029), we will be surveying 7,500 respondents annually. This is one of the largest sustained legal needs survey programs internationally, and only the second ever conducted in a longitudinal (year on year) format, allowing us to track findings over consecutive years. Over its lifetime it will generate a uniquely detailed picture of how Victorians experience and resolve legal problems. You can read more about the reports from the pilot surveys conducted in 2024 on our website.
We’ve also been busy bringing data to life with our Small Area Modelling project. This project draws on the Victoria Law Foundation’s Public Understanding of Law Survey (PULS) to model the prevalence of civil legal problems at small geographic scales across Victoria.
View the interactive map here. We also have a handy guide for using the map.
What’s next?
We’re proud of the work we’ve undertaken this past year, and heading into our second year, we plan on continuing the momentum. We will be releasing reports on the modules of the 2026 Lawyer Census, findings from the LULU survey and adding data to the small area modelling interactive map to enrich the tool.
Keep up to date with our work and sign up to our newsletter.