The United States, like other jurisdictions, faces an "access to justice crisis" in multiple civil domains. The onus for redress of these problems usually falls to the people experiencing them; accordingly, "know-your-rights” campaigns and legal self-help are predicated on the assumption that knowledge will lead to power. But whether, and to what extent, legal knowledge is enough to spur legal action is an open question. We leverage an original, nationally representative dataset of over three thousand Americans, using the context of worker misclassification to experimentally test how legal knowledge shapes the actions that people say they would take to solve a problem. Although legal knowledge does increase legal action, only one in four respondents considered pursuing legal help. Yet legal knowledge catalyzes problem-solving in an unexpected way: it empowers people to consider more external solutions to worker misclassification. Specifically, it does so by reducing two key cognitive and affective barriers to action: self-blame and futility. The talk will also briefly touch on two proposed projects that will test how people attempt to make rights actionable.