Merely phoning a legal-services provider and indicating a legal need does not constitute evidence that such a need exists. The studies failed to ask respondents whether they would have pursued a legal remedy if they had had sufficient resources to hire a private attorney. A legal need can be unmet not only because of financial considerations but also because the person registering the need does not consider it worth meeting. There was no determination in the CLNS or MLNS of whether respondents, if given the opportunity, would have preferred to meet other needs. Prevalence measures all the legal needs in existence, including unresolved legal need from previous years.
Incidence measures new legal needs arising during the course of a year.
Thus Equal Access counted as legal needs problems left over from previous years. These problems may have remained unresolved because they lacked merit in the first place. These questions cast doubt on the validity of the assertion in Equal Access that there are 225,000 unmet legal needs in Massachusetts. There is however, an even more fundamental problem. According to Equal Access, there were 336,871 Massachusetts households eligible for legal services in 1990, averaging 1.0 legal needs per household, for a total of 336,871 legal needs.