Well worth a read
Here’s the introduction.
Almost exactly three years ago, when hardly anyone was talking about a pandemic, I wrote about the California State Bar’s brand new Access Through Innovation In Legal Services Task Force, of which I remarked:
The chances that California’s task force will result in fundamental reform to law firm ownership rules in the United States are higher than they’ve ever been. That doesn’t mean they’re particularly high. … It would be foolhardy to bet against the lawyers [opposing change] here. But if you were ever going to make that bet, this would be the time to do it.
Sixteen months ago, hours before the NBA cancelled its 2019-20 season and North Americans finally began to realize how much trouble we were in, I wrote about a plethora of legal regulation reform task forces, of which I said:
By end of day on March 31, ten American jurisdictions, three Canadian provinces, the ABA, and the US Conference of Chief Justices will have either launched task forces to examine legal regulation reform or have taken significant steps towards encouraging such reforms or actually implementing them. … This wasn’t so much a series of cause-and-effect occurrences as a tectonic shift in the subterranean landscape of the law, manifested in several locations in less than a year.
Today, as North Americans venture briefly out of lockdown (rest assured, we’ll be back wearing masks and socially distancing throughout the fall and winter), we’re seeing the results of these committees, task forces, and other reform efforts arrive, during one of the craziest periods of upheaval the legal profession has ever experienced. It seems like the right time to step back and consider the extraordinary shock-waved landscape of legal regulation change, and what it means for everyone.
This is a long read, folks. Settle in as we look at four different dimensions in which law firm ethics models, legal services regulation, and lawyer licensing and competence standards are all beginning a process of transformation.
1. Regulatory changes that affect lawyers’ businesses
The star of this show is the state of Arizona, which last August repealed rules forbidding lawyers from sharing fees with, or making equity ownership in law firms available to, people who aren’t lawyers.
The state Supreme Court opened the doors to non-traditional legal services providers, and by the following spring, had authorized three such providers to begin operations, all of which were essentially multi-disciplinary partnerships with lawyer owners. Nine other applications were reportedly pending as of May, including one from online legal services giant Rocket Lawyer, although the Supreme Court’s Committee on ABS has convened just once since then and has issued no new approvals.
Setting aside for the moment Arizona’s other reforms (further below), note that three professional services firms whose owners included lawyers were the first to take advantage of the removal of Rule 5.4’s restrictions on non-lawyer ownership. This is not the apocalyptic scenario prophesied by ABS opponents — unethical fly-by-night “non-lawyers” pouring into the market to swindle unsuspecting clients with ten-dollar wills and empty promises.
Read the full article at https://www.law21.ca/2021/07/the-legal-regulation-revolution/
