The following are the relative statistics of the Foundation. (Note: Data for Taipei, Taichung, Tainan, Kaohsiung and Hualien branch offices reflect the period of July 1, 2004 – June 30, 2005 whereas for Taoyuan, Hsinchu, Changhua, Yilan and Taitung branch offices, the period was for January 1, 2005 – June 30, 2005)：

During the period of July 1, 2005 through June 30, 2005, the Foundation undertook 17,889 application cases.After examination, about 7,640 cases (fully aided plus partially aided) were reviewed by the legal aid lawyers and 4,272 cases were for consultation aid services.As of the first year, more than 11,000 cases benefited from aid provided for by the Foundation.The results can be divided into the following:

• 32 cases a day were aided by Legal Aid Foundation.
• A case was aided by Legal Aid Foundation every 45 minutes.

Table 1: Statistics of total cases (July 1, 2004-June 30, 2005)

There were 7,640 cases approved for aid by the Foundation whereas 4,773 cases were refused. Without including the legal consultation cases, more than 60% of the applicants were aided by the Foundation. This illustrates that it is not difficult to be aided by the Foundation. (Please refer to the attached Table 7 of this section for further details)

Table 2: Ratio of cases approved for aid

As of today, the Foundation has issued 161 affidavits with a guarantee amount of NT$76,529,498 representing an average NT$475,338 of guarantee for each affidavit.The total seizure amount reached as high as NT$298,615,786 (please refer to the attached Table 3 for further details) representing an average NT$1,854,756 of seizure amount for each affidavit.The total amount was unbelievable even to the Foundation.

pplicants having financial difficulty may acquire the affidavits issued by the Foundation prior to prosecution to file provisional seizure or preliminary injunction to the court against the debtor’s properties.In other words, due to the establishment of the affidavit system, the financially disadvantaged applicants may be protected from the failure of being compensated if they win the litigation.On the other hand, due to the establishment of provisional seizure system, applicants may use provisional property seizure and preliminary injunction in advance to force defendants for settlement without evasion.Nevertheless, as per the attached Table 3 for the number of affidavits issued by the Foundation’s branches, some branches had not yet issued any affidavits; and except for Taipei and Hualien branches, other branches had a very low usage rate of the affidavit system.For the coming year, each branch shall issue affidavits without hesitation for cases with possibilities of winning, so the applicants may acquire compensation if they win the litigations. This can ensure a the proper usage of the affidavit system to its full extent.

Table 3 Statistics for the guarantee amounts of the affidavits issued by the Foundation and the provisional seizure amounts

As per the list of the ratios of applicants’ occupations, about 70% were applicants who were unemployed (47.93%) and/or labor workers (21.45%)(Please refer to attached Table 4 for further details).For the approved cases, 50.18% of them were unemployed, followed by labor workers at 23.31%.This illustrates that a majority of the legal aid cases approved by the Foundation are applied by the umemployed or labor workers. (Please refer to the attached Table 5 for further details)

he ratios of the approved aid cases in different occupations are between 51% (for civil servants + teaching faculties) to 66.93% (for labor).The approval rate for labor occupation (66.93%) is about 5% higher than the average approval rate at 61.5%.According to the data analysis, the aid cases applied by labor workers seem to pass the examination with more ease (please refer to attached Table 6 for further details)

Attached Table 4 : Ratios of applicants’ occupations.

Table 5 : Ratios of the occupations of the legal aid recipients

Table 6: Approval rate of the cases applied according to applicant’s occupation

1. The case approval rate varies from branch to branch
   A total of 17,889 cases were received by all branches during the period of July 1, 2004 through June 30, 2005.The average case approval rate was 61.5%; Kaohsiung branch had a 73.9% of approval rate (12% higher than the average rate) and Tainan branch got a 47.9% (lower than average rate).It requires further investigation to find out if the difference is caused by the difference of regional conditions or the inconsistent examining criteria used by each branch. (Please refer to attached Table 7 for further details)
2. Reasons for refusal of cases: “Insufficient reason” took the majority followed by “financial ineligibility”
   

   In terms of the reasons for the refusal of cases, “insufficient reason” according to the facts submitted by the applicants took the majority at 35.16%, followed by the reason of “failure to meet financial eligibility” at 23.72% (Please refer to attached Table 9).By investigating the ratio of the refused cases under the ground of financial ineligibility from the total cases refused by branches, Yilan branch had the highest ratio on “financial ineligibility” whereas Taitung branch had lowest ratio at 10.34%.In regards to other branches, they generally maintained a level of 20%.There appears to be no distinction between each of the branches in regards to the definition of an applicant’s financial ineligibility,. (Please refer to attached Table 9 for further details)

   Cases that were refused by the Foundation with “insufficient reason” took 35.16% of total cases (Please refer to attached Table 10 for detail).However, after perusing the branches’ data, it appeared that Changhua branch had only 27.13% of total cases being refused due to “insufficient reason” whereas Taitung branch had a high ratio of 55.17% taking more than half of its total cases.The Foundation needs to compile more cases under the category of “insufficient reasons” to concretely define this category, for it is doubtful that all cases should be refused under these grounds of “insufficient reason”.It is crucial for the Foundation to unify the examining standards of each branch.

Table 8 Ratios for the reasons of refusal

Table 9 The ratios of “financial ineligibility?in total refused cases

Table 10 Ratio of “insufficient reason?in total refused cases

1. The majority of manners of legal aid took the form of litigation representation or advocacy (79% of total aid cases) whilemediation or settlement only took 2%:
   For the approved cases, 50% of them were assigned with lawyers by the Foundation as the litigation or advocacy representative.The cases requested for mediation or settlement only took 1.47%.The remainder cases were legal consultation and the drafting of legal documents (Please refer to attached Table 11 for detail).Without including legal consultation, the cases assigned by the Foundation with lawyers as the litigation or advocacy representatives took 78.55%.This shows that litigation representation is still the mainstream in the cases taken by the Foundation (Please refer to attached Table 12).
   ediation or settlement cases (175 cases) only represented 1.47% out of the total aid cases.By deducting legal consultation cases, it was still merely 2.29%, a very low ratio.By referring to the attached Table 35 for “the ratios of the results of closed civil cases’, it can be seen that the success of mediation/settlement took 22.15% of total civil closed cases.It shows that the assignment of legal aid lawyers still has its effect to facilitate the mediation/settlement..
2. The ratio of legal consultation cases varies considerably from branch to branch:
   In order to maximize usage of limited legal resources for the most people, the Foundation usually refers most of the legal consultation cases to other institutes where free legal services are offered (such as bar associations, litigation guidance section in courthouses, etd).At the same time, the Foundation will also inform the applicants if there is a need for them to have a lawyer represent them or draft a litigation in the future, they may reapply to the Foundation for legal aid.However, if the applicants do not clearly express their requests for legal consultation in the first place, based on the Foundation’s conviction for offering convenience to the public, it will still provide brief legal consultation service to the applicants for their questions.Taking into consideration the gap between cities and counties for the availability of judicial resources, legal consultation services will still be provided in Hualien and Taitung branches as well as Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu branches established on July 1, 2005.
   total of 4,272 legal consultation cases have been taken up by the Foundation in its first year of launch, taking up 35.86% of total cases since opening day (please refer to attached Table 11 for further details).As per the list (attached Table 13) for the ratios of legal aid categories, Hualien branch had the highest ratio for legal consultation service at 75.91% whereas Taoyuan had merely 12.33%, the lowest ratio among the branches.Amongst the 357 legal consultation cases taken by Hsinchu branch, 50 of them were the study-type legal consultation cases which included lawyers’ involvement (When the cases can not be settled by simply oral consultation, the foundation will assign a lawyer to help applicants study the legal problems).(Please refer to attached Table 13 for further details).
3. The way to handle litigation representation or draft legal documents also varies from branch to branch:
   As per attached Table 12 for the ratio of aid categories (excluding legal consultation), 78.55% of the cases were the ones for the service of litigation representation or advocacy whereas the service for legal document drafting only took 19.16%.However, by referring to the statistics in above Tables, the data still vary considerably from branch to branch.For instance, 88.89% of cases taken by Taitung branch were for litigation representation or advocacy service, whereas Taichung branch had 56.59%.Taichung branch had a very high ratio at 43.41% in their service for legal document drafting.This illustrates that the focus made by the examining members for the extent of the services in each branch is different (Please refer to attached Table 14 for detail).Some may think of assisting applicants with litigation representation while others may feel it would be sufficient to help applicants with legal document drafting.

Table 12 Ratios of the categories of approved cases (excluding legal consultation)

Table 13 Ratios of the categories of the legal aid cases at each branch (including legal consultation)

Tale 14 Ratio of the categories of the legal aid cases at each branch (excluding legal consultation)

Table 15 Ratios of study-type legal consultation cases in total legal consultation case