If all you manage to do was read the headline from the ABA Journal online story today — “Self-represented litigants perceive bias and disadvantage in court process, report finds,” your reaction will likely be limited to “Duh.” But, there is much more that can be gleaned from this “Cases Without Counsel” study and report that the Institute for […]
Tag: Access to Justice
April 2016 has brought another iteration of a seemingly, endless, (yet kind of potentially pointless unless you think the politics of the situation will somehow play out differently from the past) debate: whether some entity within the ABA is attempting to usher into reality a world in which people other than lawyers will be allowed […]
This is going to be a short update offered on a Friday for any weekend reading needs you may be facing. A bit back (on Back to the Future day actually) I mentioned (almost as only an aside) the pilot project that the ABA was launching in cooperation with Rocket Lawyer to offer a limited-scope […]
Some time ago, I wrote a bit about how existing ethics rules make attempting to use Kickstarter to launch a law firm not a viable option. The primary problem with using crowdsourcing to raise funds to start a law practice is the prohibition in the ethics rules on nonlawyer ownership or investment in law firms. […]
Yesterday, the ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Professional Responsibility issued its latest ethics opinion, Formal Opinion 472, “Communication with Person Receiving Limited-Scope Legal Services.” On the whole, it isn’t a bad opinion. It is well-constructed, addresses multiple topics that seem ripe for discussion, and clearly is the product of a lot of thought and […]
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A little something to be thankful for
If you’re a lawyer, then many days you may find yourself either complaining that you are too busy or that you aren’t busy enough. Rare is the time for lawyers (in my experience) when they think their workload lands in a “just right” kind of spot. There actually can be such a thing as too […]
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Back to the Future … of Legal Services
So, yesterday was Back to the Future day. And that was fun. But today I want to go back to the future of legal services… as a topic for discussion. I’m on record as being a fan of The Law for Lawyers Today blog, but the way they close out a recent piece exploring whether […]
So, you likely have read about or stumbled into something on the web about the remarks offered by the founder of Avvo at the ABA Meeting. If you somehow missed having that hit your radar screen at all, you can read about it (and snippets of the remarks of the other folks who gave similar […]
Over the last few months, I have posted on several occasions about the petition pending before the Tennessee Supreme Court seeking some significant changes to the rules in Tennessee regarding admission of attorneys to practice in a variety of contexts. If you are new to the blog, you can get up to speed on this […]
Another post keeping up with the ongoing effort in the State of Washington to try to close the access-to-justice gap through an outside-the-mainstream effort of authorizing certain types of legal services to be provided to the public by those not licensed to practice law. I’ve previously written about this here and here. Now the news, reported first […]