Apparently, when you are the Tennessee Supreme Court that might just be something you are powerful enough to do.
For a variety of reasons over the years, I have refrained from writing anything here about the Tennessee Lawyers Assistance Program. During the course of my career, there have been times I have been a huge fan of it and even one of its bigger cheerleaders. However, during the last few years, I have heard more and more reports (some first-hand, some second-hand) of situations in which the powers of TLAP are being weaponized against lawyers and law school graduates. Almost all of those stories involve clients or prospective clients I have interacted with so I cannot offer any details.
But having heard variations on a common theme from multiple sources, my attention was naturally drawn to the story of the Department of Justice undertaking an investigation of TLAP and the Board of Law Examiners regarding the treatment of multiple applicants for licensure in Tennessee. That investigation ultimately culminated in a very thorough letter from the DOJ detailing its conclusions and findings that the BLE and TLAP had violated the civil rights of the two applicants in question. You can read the full DOJ letter here.
The scenarios set out in the two cases examined by the Justice Department were admittedly quite different than the stories to which I had been exposed. Yet, the overriding themes of a state regulatory entity (whether the BLE or the Board of Professional Responsibility) providing nearly total deference to what TLAP had to say and TLAP demanding that individuals who had found workable solutions that they could afford to their issues expand vast sums of money on different approaches involving much more burdensome requirements resonated.
The DOJ report was, on its face, so damning in fact that lawyers in other jurisdictions have pointed to it to request reform of their own version of TLAP. You can read the call for action co-authored by a friend and fellow APRL member, Brian Tannebaum, here.
For a brief moment or two, I had hopes that the Tennessee Supreme Court would use this inflection point as an opportunity to have an outside entity take a close look at how TLAP is operating in this post-pandemic world. Hope of course is the stuff with wings, and springs eternal, but also is the thing that kills you.
Yesterday, our Court responded to the thorough DOJ letter. You can read the short statement in full here. But you probably don’t have to spend the time doing so because it pretty much simply says: “Nuh uh.”
I do not have any hope that the Tennessee Supreme Court cares about my opinion or is an entity over which I can hold any sway, but, there is still time for it to follow up this statement with meaningful action to figure out how TLAP could be reformed to make it, once again, the kind of resource that lawyers like me would be happy to resume a role as cheerleader.