In contemplating the prospects for serious change in the legal services ecosystem, those of us in the U.S. face a massive institutional impediment—really, a wicked problem—that we seldom discuss: Regulation of lawyers and legal services is principally a state-by-state endeavor.
In the United States, we operate in
Most lawyers have probably seen by now the announcement that Arizona has become the first state to permit law firms to have owners that are not lawyers. See, e.g., Bob Ambrogi, “Arizona Is First State To Eliminate Ban On Nonlawyer Ownership Of Law Firms,” Lawsites, Aug. 31, 2020. While much of the early commentary has focused on whether this will permit the Big Four accounting firms to encroach further into the lawyers’ protected realm of practice, this new rule is a big deal for the little guy.
Continue Reading “Everyday Low Price” for Legal Services in Arizona? (198)
“The profession has a responsibility to assure that its regulations are conceived in the public interest and not in furtherance of parochial or self-interested concerns of the bar.” This above sentence comes from ¶12 of the Preamble of the Rules of Professional Conduct.
As states increasingly
With each passing week, it’s becoming clearer that many state bars and supreme courts are getting serious about regulatory reform. One of the many fruits in this effort is the above presentation, which I encourage readers to review and download.
The presentation was prepared by Alice Mine and
Imagine a legal sector neatly divided into two groups: the Rule Makers and the Risk Takers. With evidence piling up that the legal market is not working for ordinary citizens, the Rule Makers come together to evaluate possible changes. After the new rules are enacted, the burden shifts
Regulatory reform efforts are underway in Arizona, see Ambrogi, “Arizona Task Force Calls for Wide-Ranging Practice Reforms, Including Eliminating Ban on Nonlawyer Ownership,” LawSites, Oct. 15, 2019, and Utah, Ambrogi, “Utah Task Force Calls for ‘Profoundly Reimagining the Way Legal Services Are Regulated’,” LawSites, Aug. 27, 2019, with emerging movements in California, Illinois, and elsewhere proceeding apace, see Jayne Reardon, “Re-regulating Lawyers for the 21st Century,” 2Civility, July 18, 2019 (summarizing various state reform efforts).
Continue Reading Limited Practice Experiments: The Educational Piece of the Puzzle (136)
The above graphic is a map of the human capital needed to create “one-to-many” legal solutions (Human Capital Map). It’s a dense graphic on a complex topic. To explain its structure and the key insights it provides, I’ll cover the following topics:
Continue Reading Human capital for one-to-many legal solutions (126)
Everyday, when I am paying attention, the world is nudging me to let go of something wrong and unhelpful. A friend of mine calls it “dropping the rock.” The rock is an assumption about how the world operates that can’t be reconciled with an honest evaluation of facts and experience.
Continue Reading Dropping the Rock: three examples (112)
In this post, I tell an old Michael Lewis story that bears on the law. Remarkably, most of the insights come from a 15-year-old boy named Marcus Arnold, pictured above with Lewis circa 2001. I then review the U.K.’s journey to market liberalization, including the repeal of the British version of Model Rule 5.4.
Continue Reading Pyramids, Pancakes, and Rule 5.4 (106)
The State Bar of California recently commissioned me to write a landscape report on the changing legal market. That report is now posted on the State Bar website. On Friday, I gave a presentation based on the report to the Board of Trustees (webcast here).
The State Bar of California recently underwent a