Somewhat bizarre – they write
In August, 2014 the American Bar Association appointed a commission to examine the reasons why meaningful access to legal services remained out of reach to the vast majority of Americans.
The Commission on the Future of Legal Services was further charged with developing recommendations, including the use of technology, to ensure that both lower and middle income people would have access to legal services in the years ahead.
This week, at the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco, the comission released their “Report on the Future Legal Services in the United States.”
What struck me reading the report was that none of the 28 members of the comission were technology entrepreneurs who founded, guided or participated in legal technology companies or startups focused on the delivery of legal services. Most of the members appeared to be legal professionals from law firms, law schools and courts.
Technology and innovation is being driven in this country by innovative companies the likes of Facebook, Uber, Google, Amazon, Salesforce, Tesla, and IBM. Imagine a world without the value and conveniences they have brought us.
Maybe legaltech does not have such roster, but what about Avvo, LegalZoom, Fastcase, Justia and Clio, to name a few. Through the use of technology, these companies and their executive teams have done an awful lot in making legal information and legal services more accessible. They are going to accomplish a lot more in the years ahead.
Like other technology companies, legaltech companies not only work with technology day in and day out, they also look at how alternative technologies are being used by others. These companies abhor inefficiencies and look to technology to bring efficient solutions so as to improve people’s lives.
Yet no one from a legaltech company on the commission.
The commission’s findings were sound, perhaps obvious:
- Despite sustained efforts to expand the public’s access to legal services, significant unmet needs persist.
- Advancements in technology and other innovations continue to change how legal services can be accessed and delivered.
- Public trust and confidence in obtaining justice and in accessing legal services is compromised by bias, discrimination, complexity, and lack of resources.
But among the eleven laudatory recommendations, there was only one reference to technology, that being that “All members of the legal profession should keep abreast of relevant technologies.”
Individuals should have regular legal checkups, the criminal justice should be reformed, the ABA should establish a Center for Innovation and resources should be vastly expanded were among other findings of the commission. But nothing specifically recommending the innovative use of technology and detailing how it could be done.
