THROUGHOUT THIS BOOK, multiple reasons have been offered for the legal immunity of human service actors from legal action, from a practical and a legal standpoint. However, these overviews of legal cases and commentaries on complaints and investigation bodies provoke a nagging question – why did one situation or actor provoke a legal action or external complaint, while another that was similar or even worse did not? It is something of a mystery why law has a prominent place following only some adverse human services events. This question warrants attention because it accentuates the contextual factors that are so critical in determining the outcomes of unlawful or other suboptimal performance. It also challenges the simplistic notion (often held by human service actors) that legal risk derives only from law breaking. In fact, legal risk depends on the types of legal breaches or performance failures, when, how and under what circumstances they occur, and who is involved.

The discussion on barriers to legal action in earlier chapters introduced the idea that breaches of law are not synonymous with legal consequences. The material on complaints and investigation bodies exposed the flip side of this proposition, which is that scrutiny and legally based consequences can flow from behaviour that is not technically unlawful. This appositely numbered Chapter 13 thus briefly examines the conjunction of forces that bring some but not all unlawful or unsatisfactory human service activity to public attention (and perhaps to law courts) while other often more troubling events fail to germinate.