As many of you know, I regularly participate in Bob Ambrogi’s LegalTech Week journalist roundtable on Fridays. This past week, we actually did the roundtable live and in person at Relativity Fest. I raised two articles/developments during the roundtable. The first one had to do with the settlement by DoNotPay with the FTC, which Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer analyzed in a recent article. DoNotPay and its owner, Josh Browder, were fined for offering legal services to consumers that they could not deliver.
The second was the announcement that Rocket Lawyer had been granted approval by the Arizona Supreme Court to operate as an alternative business structure. This approval paves the way for nonlawyer law firm ownership. Rocket Lawyer has previously secured similar permissions in Utah and the UK. I usually don’t post what I talk about during the roundtable since that would be a little redundant But the two articles raise some access to justice (A2J) issues that merit additional consideration and thought.
Nonlawyer ownership must be coupled with better use of AI to bring down the cost of legal services before there can be any dent in the A2J problem.
Nonlawyer Ownership Is Not a Panacea
One of the excellent points Tromans makes in his article is that merely allowing nonlawyer ownership of firms will not in and of itself impact access to justice for anyone. Tromans argued that the FTC should focus not only on DoNotPay’s alleged misrepresentations. It needs to look more broadly at bar associations that doggedly resist nonlawyer ownership to solve the seemingly intractable A2J problems we face. But he says nonlawyer ownership must be coupled with better use of AI to bring down the cost of legal services before there can be any dent in the A2J problem.
Tromans is right. Nonlawyer ownership is not a panacea and, in fact, may make the A2J problem