A2J Gap and New Legal Professionals: Yes, Law Schools Need to Get More Involved
Two important and seasoned legal education pros, Kellye Testy (AALS) and Chris Chapman (Access Lex) offer a concise summary here of why closing the A2J gap requires opening up the legal services field to para-professionals and why law schools can step up and help train the next generation of allied professionals to help close the gap. Three cheers for the op-ed. Let’s fill this insight out in some more depth and detail.
As to the obstacles, one key impediment is the current regulatory ecosystem. The authors highlight experiments underway in Alaska, Utah, and Arizona, but a look at the U.S. map tells me that these are three out of fifty states, and fairly small ones after all. True, we see a few more states steadily removing some of the barriers to allow non-lawyer para-professionals to provide direct legal services or, to take the more modest approach reflected in Alaska’s scheme (presently being considered by California, importantly), legal work under the supervision of lawyers. But, boy oh boy, we have a loooong way to go to see a sea change of the sort that health care has experienced in the last few decades. Lawyers remain a formidable interest group, protectionist on their worse days and overly cautious on most days. The ecosystem of legal services is slow to change; and the persistent commitment to self-regulation (under the “inherent powers” doctrine) presents some sturdy obstacles to the kind of omnibus, cross-state reform that would truly open up the marketplace to new service providers. It is no flaw in the Testy-Chapman essay to say that they don’t discuss the regulatory ecosystem and these serious obstacles in any real depth; but any analysis, polemical or otherwise, that connects the dots between the A2J gap and the salutary effects of widening the field to non-lawyer professionals needs to temper optimism with realism, and prepare us to the continuing battles between We the People and They the Lawyers.
What this essay rightly highlights is how law schools can be part of these efforts at access-widening. Historically, law schools have been almost entirely in the business of training future lawyers. The JD is at the core of the educational and business model; other programs, such as LLM or SJD degrees, supplement the core, but they exist alongside the fundamental mission. Of late, many law schools have developed “master degree” programs, some more ambitious than others. These programs aim to educate interested individuals in law. There are basically two models of such programs, and they have now reached a level of maturity where we can see more clearly the two models and, further, better evaluate the ROI of these models against a discernible and useful set of criteria and benchmarks. One model views these degrees as more or less democratizing the study of law. Principally, the law schools use excess capacity in their normal classes to bring in folks interested in legal study and willing to fork over dollars for that enterprise. Whether and to what extent there are measurably valuable employment outcomes for these graduates remains elusive; but impacting their professional goals is not the real ambition (which, to be clear, is not just another way of saying that law schools don’t care about the future of these students); nor is the ambition to change legal practice or the landscape of A2J in any serious way. Indeed, it could not truly be the goal of such programs, because the student body is simply too eclectic and the curriculum ultimately too generic to ground ambitions to change masters’ graduates career trajectory or change the world.
The second model ties the degree (including its pattern of student recruitment and its curriculum) to specific professional agendas. I won’t speak of all or most programs here, but I will say a word about the program I know best, and helped develop when I was dean of the law school, and that is the MSL program at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law. Here we bring in students with STEM backgrounds to learn content at the intersection of law, business, and technology. The medium-size ambition of the program is to equip students with skills that enable them to prosper in existing or new careers, careers where a multidisciplinary and very practical understanding of law and legal institutions benefits from such upskilling. The large ambition is to help bring into the world a cadre of folks who might destabilize the status quo. They would be this next cadre of tiered legal professionals, to borrow the phrase offered by Testy & Chapman in their essay. And the training that the MSL (and similar programs in this model) provides aims to give students an excellent grounding in, inter alia, the provision of legal services to those who are in need of such services, at least for those who would be aided by professionals who bring to the equation not only legal expertise, but expertise in business and technology.
Educating students who come to us with backgrounds in science and technology is the secret sauce in all this. Legal services are being affected greatly by revolutions in technology. Generative AI is one big part of this; likewise, other developments in technology promise to change law and legal services. Not mentioned in the Testy-Chapman essay, but relevant to this discussion, is the possibility that B-to-C technologies might in some cases not only supplement lawyer advice but might actually supplant the lawyer entirely. The goal, after all, is to provide effective, low-cost legal services. If that can be done through, say, a tailored chatbot, that’s a win. However, it might be more balanced to simply say that the use of technology is a part of the tool set of not only credentialed lawyers, but of allied para-professionals who would go into the world and assist needy consumers with legal services, whether through advice, through representation, or some combination of both.
Law schools are at the fulcrum of the legal services ecosystem, in that they are about training folks in how to use their skills and, where appropriate, develop and deploy technology to improve access to justice. Training a new cadre of legal professionals who have preparation and skills in business and technology can be a promising part of this larger reform enterprise. More careful consideration within our law schools about the “why” and the “how” is necessary, indeed overdue.