Update 8/29/19: Utah Supreme Court Votes to Approve Pilot Allowing Non-Traditional Legal Services.
Faced with an ever-widening gap in access to legal services, a Utah task force has called for “profoundly reimagining the way legal services are regulated in order to harness the power of entrepreneurship, capital, and machine learning in the legal arena.”
Appointed by the Utah Supreme Court to study innovative approaches to increasing access to and affordability of legal services, the Utah Work Group on Regulatory Reform has proposed a new structure for the regulation of legal services that would provide for broad-based investment and participation in business entities that provide legal services, including non-lawyer investment in and ownership of these entities.
In a newly issued report, Narrowing the Access-to-Justice Gap by Reimagining Regulation, the work group recommended that regulatory reform occur in two ways:
Substantially loosening regulatory restrictions on the corporate practice of law, lawyer advertising, solicitation, and fee arrangements, including referrals and fee sharing. Simultaneously establishing a new regulatory body, under the supervision of the Supreme Court, to advance and implement a risk-based, empirically-grounded regulatory process for legal service entities.
This new regulatory body would solicit non-traditional sources of legal services, including non-lawyers and technology companies, and allow them to test innovative legal service models and delivery systems through a “regulatory sandbox,” an approach that would permit innovation in designated areas while addressing risk and generating data to inform the regulatory process.
This Utah report comes on the heels of recommendations by a State Bar of California task force to make sweeping changes in the lawyer regulatory structure in that state. These moves and others signal increasing recognition by bar officials in the U.S. that addressing the justice gap will require significant changes in the regulation of legal services.
The Utah Supreme Court created
