Interesting report on Law.com that could really shake up the USA legal sector.
They write
The ABA’s House of Delegates will consider a proposal on industry innovation at its February meeting. But some reformers say they question the group’s appetite for change.
The American Bar Association is entering the burgeoning conversation over tearing down restrictions on outside ownership of law firms.
The ABA’s Center for Innovation has released a resolution that, if adopted by the organization’s House of Delegates, would encourage jurisdictions across the U.S. to experiment with new regulatory models aimed at increasing access to legal services.
Center for Innovation chairman Daniel Rodriguez, the Harold Washington professor at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law, said Tuesday that the group is agnostic about what form these experiments take.
“It’s really an effort to encourage states to take a good hard look at their structure of legal regulation and legal service delivery, with an eye to access to justice,” he explained. “That will give us the ability to look at the data and run what scientists call ‘natural experiments.’”
Several states are ahead of the pack here. Bar groups and courts in California, Utah and Arizona have all launched proposals that take various paths toward allowing fee sharing with nonlawyers and permitting outside investment in law firms. The Chicago Bar Association has more recently formed its own task force to consider changes in Illinois.
Read more at https://www.law.com/americanlawyer/2019/12/03/aba-could-encourage-states-to-allow-outside-ownership-of-law-firms/