With the goal of narrowing a growing justice gap in the state, an Arizona task force has called for fundamental changes in the regulation of legal services, including eliminating the ban on nonlawyer ownership of legal practices, loosening restrictions on lawyer advertising, and expanding the ability of nonlawyers to directly deliver legal advice and assistance.
But a dissenting member of the task force took issue with key recommendations, arguing that the solution to the access-to-justice problem is not to create “new industries that will continue to consume the public’s money,” but rather to create a court system that is “simpler and more efficient” for the average citizen.
In calling for elimination of the ban on non-lawyer ownership, the Arizona recommendations are similar to those made recently by a task force in Utah, where the Supreme Court approved the recommendations and ordered that steps be taken to implement a new regulatory structure to oversee alternative legal services providers.
Related: LawNext Episode 55: Utah’s Bold Experiment to Reimagine Legal Services.
A California task force has also called for such changes.
In its report issued Oct. 4, the Arizona Task Force on the Delivery of Legal Services made a series of recommendations intended to address the state’s gap in access to justice. The most significant would be elimination of the professional-conduct rules that prohibit lawyers and nonlawyers from co-owning businesses that engage in the practice of law.
The prohibition on partnering with nonlawyers “was not rooted in protecting the public but in economic protectionism,” said the report, which went on to say that there is no evidence that such partnerships harm the public.
“The legal profession cannot continue to pretend that lawyers operate in a vacuum, surrounded and aided only by other lawyers or that lawyers practice law in a hierarchy in which only
