Roughly 40 percent of eligible legal-services clients failed to keep scheduled appointments.

Evidence

In one legal services program approximately 40 percent of eligible clients who received an appointment with a lawyer for the following week did not keep the appointment. 22 This may have been because the problem dissolved during the intervening time, or because merely talking to the intake worker provided a degree of comfort. However, it is equally likely that clients who did not keep their appointments could not keep them but were afraid to say so, were not organized enough to show up at the appointed time, or faced their legal problems without professional advice. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 698

Categorization

• QUESTION: Lipsky offers multiple competing explanations without resolving them — worth chasing whether non-attendance is client withdrawal or agency signaling.