Don’t sleep on Arizona

We’ve (in that creepy royal “we” sort of way) now dedicated two posts to discussing the ATILS proposal coming out of California, but California is certainly not the only state working on reform. In fact, while it may be the biggest, it is not the state offering the boldest reforms, and it also isn’t the fastest in the race by far.

While I did not manage to make my travel work to stay in California for the public hearing on the ATILS proposals, one thing I did learn (along with others in an audience) about it is that before California actually does anything with respect to rule changes there would have to be a second task force put together that would actually craft rule proposals and other specifics.

The state that – at the moment at least – appears to be proposing the boldest reforms when it comes to the future of legal ethics and is doing so at a much quicker pace is Arizona. The Arizona Supreme Court has created its own Task Force on Delivery of Legal Services. You can review as much or as little of the happenings to date of this Task Force by spending some time perusing what is available at this link.

That task force meets again on August 14, 2019 but a review of the minutes of some of their prior meetings will tell you that the Task Force has already approved two revisions that it would be a bit of an understatement to simply call bold:

• Included within a series of changes to the Arizona advertising rules spurred to some extent by the original APRL proposal for advertising reform and the recent ABA Model Rules revisions, the Arizona Task Force has approved the deletion of RPC 7.2 in its entirety.
• The Task Force also appears to have approved the deletion of RPC 5.4 altogether (what the various minutes refer to as “Option 3”) so as to open wide the doors to partnerships between lawyers and nonlawyers and financial investment in law firms. In order to make certain that the requirements for lawyers to maintain professional independence are not lost, however, revisions are being made to other rules including comments to RPC 1.7 to highlight the issues.

The Task Force is also moving forward with a proposal to allow nonlawyers to provide certain limited legal services in a fashion that is similar to the concept of LLLTs adopted in a few other jurisdictions.

The Arizona Task Force is also working on evaluating what form of entity regulation may be required or desirable to address the fact that the regulators with jurisdiction to preside over complaints against lawyers and enforce the ethics rules against lawyers would not otherwise have authority over those not licensed to practice law.

So, at the pace Arizona is moving along, it is quite possible that, by as soon as early 2020, there could be a state out there in which there are no limitations on financial investment in law firms (or solo lawyer shops), no limits on what can be accomplished through lawyers partnering with people from other disciplines and backgrounds, and no restrictions on the ability of a lawyer to share compensation received from a client with someone who assisted in delivering that client to that lawyer so that the lawyer could serve the client’s legal needs.