Survey: 7 in 10 low-income Americans have needed legal assistance but couldn’t afford it
By Julia Shumway
BridgeTower Media Newswires
PHOENIX, AZ — Loosening rules on who can provide legal advice and who can own law practices could make it easier for people who need legal services but can’t afford them to navigate the court system, according to a report produced for the Arizona Supreme Court this week.
A task force appointed by former Arizona Supreme Court Chief Justice Scott Bales late last year spent months researching how to better provide legal services, particularly to low-income Arizonans.
It comes in the wake of a 2017 study from the University of Chicago that found that nationwide seven in 10 low-income Americans have needed legal assistance to help with issues including evictions, child custody cases, and debt collection, but the vast majority receive either no help or inadequate help. Efforts to make court procedures clearer for those who cannot afford representation haven’t succeeded, the task force concluded.
“[D]espite these efforts, the justice gap has grown between those who can afford to pay for legal services and those who cannot do so,” the group wrote. “Clearly, merely assisting litigants to navigate the justice system alone is insufficient to ensure that Arizonans have meaningful access to our courts to resolve legal issues.”
One method the task force suggested to improve access is to create a new tier of workers who aren’t attorneys but can provide limited legal services. The task force doesn’t explicitly lay out what those non-attorney legal practitioners should be able to do or what education and training they would need, instead recommending that the Supreme Court appoint a future committee to work out details.
Washington, Utah and Ontario, Canada, already have programs that allow non-lawyers to provide some legal services, while several other states are considering similar changes to their ethical rules for attorneys.
The group also recommended eliminating an ethical rule that prohibits anyone but a practicing attorney from owning or co-owning a law firm.
One issue it cites in providing legal services for low-income people is that lawyers working solo practices and smaller firms, which may be more likely to provide legal services to human clients rather than big corporations, have to spend time that could be used as billable hours doing administrative work instead and looking for future clients.
The task force argues that changing ethical rules to allow lawyers to partner with non-lawyers could help, including by allowing a non-lawyer to have an ownership interest, provide non-legal services such as accounting or serve as a firm’s chief financial officer.
Lawyers and accountants were interested in such a rule change during the Great Recession, the report notes, because clients could have benefited from having the same firm help with the legal and financial aspects of handling something like foreclosure.
“The legal profession cannot continue to pretend that lawyers operate in a vacuum, surrounded and aided only by other lawyers or that lawyers practice law in a hierarchy in which only lawyers should be owners,” the report states.
But critics, including task force member and chief judge of the Arizona Court of Appeals Division I Peter B. Swann, warned that removing or weakening ethical rules in the interest of providing more widespread access to legal guidance could backfire.
Swann, in an opposition statement, warned that allowing a non-lawyer to co-own a law firm poses a serious threat to the long-term health of the justice system by enabling disbarred attorneys, venture capitalists and large corporations to benefit from owning legal practices without feeling the loyalty to clients that attorneys have.
“Such a proposal would make Arizona unique in the nation, and a leader in the race to the bottom of legal ethics,” Swann wrote.
The task force’s recommendations will be reviewed by the Arizona Judicial Council before heading to the Supreme Court for final approval.
