By Nigel Balmer, Research Director, Legal Services Research Centre
Big news at the LSRC! Our continuous Legal Understanding and Lawyer Use (LULU) survey is about to go into the field, and it marks a significant step forward in how Australia (and the world) understands the public's experience of law. We are not just excited about getting it out into the world, but because of what it is, a legal needs survey at the global cutting edge, methodologically and substantively, and one that will generate an evolving evidence base to help policymakers, regulators and service providers deliver more effective and equitable justice.
LULU is not a snapshot
Built on the LULU pilot surveys, PULS and decades of trial (and some error), the programme will initially run for four years (2026–2029), surveying 7,500 Australians each year with the Social Research Centre. That repeated annual (or longitudinal panel) design makes it groundbreaking. Traditional legal needs surveys have told us a great deal about how many people experience legal problems and what kinds, but they have always struggled to answer the harder question of what happens next? By following people across years, LULU can track how justiciable issues emerge, develop, transform, cascade into other problems, resolve… or don’t. It will capture the dynamics of legal need in ways we have not seen.
LULU is deep
LULU also goes deeper than its predecessors in important ways. First, legal capability sits at the heart of the survey, since the evidence increasingly shows that internal capabilities are consequential for what people do when faced with a legal problem, why, and with what success.
People-centred justice hinges on effective tailoring, which requires consequential criteria to inform fit. Better understanding legal capability, where it matters and through what mechanisms, can help to convert people-centred justice from aspiration to practice.
Second, we do not know nearly enough about service use: the forms and intensities of help people want and receive, how they combine different sources, how new technologies are reshaping pathways, and how all this interacts with legal capability.
LULU addresses this with a new level of detail and specificity.
But wait, there is more!
It’s not just us: this work sits alongside and complements a major new initiative from our friends at the Law and Justice Foundation of NSW. Their LAW+ survey will collect data from 20,000 people across Australia from July 2026. It will provide a broad population-wide picture of problem prevalence across diverse communities and problem types, including rarer issues that require large samples to capture reliably.
Together the two programmes give Australia something it has not had before: a genuinely multi-dimensional evidence base, both broad and deep, cross-sectional and longitudinal. It puts Australia at the forefront of legal needs research internationally.
A final LULU note
Getting to this point genuinely does make you want to shout, though for me, the survey brings to mind a different musical LULU. Like Berg’s opera it is complex, it will reward careful attention and will keep giving long into the future. There may well be some atonal parts, there will inevitably be some confronting material and more than a few jagged edges. But we also anticipate moments of unexpected clarity, and even beauty, alongside findings that point to where change might be needed and how we might bring it about. We look forward to sharing the findings with you!