• Child or young person requiring documents for exams, enrollment, etc. • Eligible under temporary law with imminent cut-off date • Detention or deportation cases •R  isk of child being separated from parents, e.g. due to poverty and absence of integration as a result of a parent’s marginalized status. Greatest impact Projects naturally want to give priority to the cases where they expect to have the greatest impact. Some criteria that can help determine impact include: • Cases with a high level of urgency and vulnerability factors • Cases likely to create real change • Cases that are too complicated for community members to help with • Clients who face particular difficulty seeking documentation, such as those who are illiterate or cannot afford fees CASE STUDY Anyone who comes to the Lawyers for Human Rights clinic in South Africa receives advice, and anyone who is stateless or at risk of statelessness will be interviewed and receive an appointment for follow-up. If the client has a disability, the organization will always try to assist on the same day so the client need not return a second time for an interview. • Clients in distant or inaccessible locations Alignment with strategic litigation themes Section 10.9 has additional information about strategic litigation. A project that is devoting considerable time to strategic litigation may prioritize cases that can be pursued through strategic litigation, where clients consent to be involved in such cases. Balance Projects may wish to serve clients according to how common their issue is among the client community. For example, if 25% of the clients they screen need help with a death certificate, they may seek to make sure 25% of the people they help have that issue. This is a way to avoid bias. This might be done by counting the number of cases in each category of case you log, or it can be done through more sophisticated randomized evaluations. RELATED RESOURCE See UNHCR’s Handbook on protection of stateless persons for further guidance. Strength of case Some projects prioritize the cases they feel are the most likely to succeed. If your project prioritizes easy cases, evaluations of its success rate should take this into account. Increasing the number of cases you take may decrease your success rate if you have been focusing on easy cases. Also keep in mind that in order to generate the understanding of how the system works in practice to support evidence-based advocacy, paralegals should not only take simple or easy cases; consider instead a focus on where your project can have the largest potential impact on moving difficult cases forward. A C O M M U N I T Y- B A S E D P R A C T I T I O N E R ’ S G U I D E : D O C U M E N T I N G C I T I Z E N S H I P A N D OT H E R F O R M S O F L E G A L I D E N T I T Y | 95