Absolutely. I can speak from my experience as a lawyer. I often end up fixing cases that come to me from people who prepared them on their own, often because they couldn't find counsel or they didn't even know that they could access legal aid. That's another issue.
The reality is that refugee determination in Canada is not straightforward. There seems to be a sense that when it comes to refugees, we know one when we see one. If it were that simple, there wouldn't be a backlog at the board, because there wouldn't be the complex suite of legal questions that have to be addressed.
When a person prepares the initial claim, they're not just telling their story. They have to be telling that story within the matrix of legal questions that a determination under the refugee convention requires.