Our record

Good Law Project uses the law to hold power to account, protect the environment and ensure no one is left behind. We use the law to tackle important issues of unlawfulness, wrongdoing and disadvantage and we recognise there are many ways of winning.

Sometimes the pressure generated by our campaigning, backed by the force of the law, creates the positive change we want to see before a case gets to a hearing. Sometimes, we write a legal letter explaining the problems with a decision, and publicly bring attention to the damage it will do, and decision-makers alter their plans or address our concerns before we begin a formal legal action. We keep our cases and campaigns under constant review, assessing the impact that our work is likely to achieve and balancing that against the high cost of fighting.

When our opponents do change course, we can’t know whether their decisions are motivated by the threat of losing in Court, or the wider public awareness and scrutiny of those decisions, or exactly how much of that public pressure came through our campaigning work. We can’t compare that to an alternative world where we didn’t campaign or sue. We can know that it happened – but not whether we were in the room when it did.

We want to be open and transparent about our record. It’s important we are careful with the money you give us. And part of that means being frank about where our cases are successful, and where we don’t achieve the outcomes we were hoping for.

You can click through to see a record of all the legal cases we have fundraised for or brought here.

There is an element of subjectivity to assessing an outcome as a win, mixed or a loss, or one which we can’t truthfully describe as any of those. Legal outcomes are not always clear-cut and that is even more true of campaigning outcomes. Our assessment is that of our legal outcomes, 44% are wins, 23% are mixed, and 33% are losses. As to campaigning outcomes, we think 59% have delivered a win, and 21% have achieved at least some element of success.

If having impressive numbers was our priority, we could work only on cases which seemed to be “sure bets” – but that’s not what we are here for. We exist to make meaningful change – not make ourselves look better.

We have undertaken to update the statistics quarterly.