Washington state’s limited license legal technician (LLLT) program—though delayed—is gearing up to roll out this Spring. But legal professionals still aren’t sure what to expect.
The program, adopted in 2012 by the Supreme Court of Washington, allows those that qualify to practice law in limited ways despite not being a lawyer. After taking a year of classes and an exam, and apprenticing under a lawyer for 3,000 hours, non-lawyers in Washington would be allowed to practice in family-law issues (although Washington administrators have indicated they’re open to eventually expanding the program). Coming in at around $10,000 for certification it’s an appealing alternative to the $50,000 price tag that comes with a private law school degree.
The goal of the program is to revolutionize the legal industry and “bridge the gap” to justice, particularly for low-income people with civil legal problems.
As many already know, the state is required to appoint representation in criminal cases, but civil cases (a wide definition, from employment to consumer issues to real estate to family law) do not require any representation, and as many as nine out of ten low-income families with legal problems never receive help from a lawyer. Which is exactly where LLLT services would step in, the Washington Post writes:
Columbia law professor Risa Kaufman has called this a “human rights crisis.” And it’s fueled by the sky-high price of legal help. In 2014, even lawyers with less than three years’ experience billed an average of $255 an hour (though, of course, rates vary widely). Most younger lawyers, saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in law school debt, can’t charge more affordable rates. And legal aid offices, meant to fill the gap, are shedding funding and services at an alarming rate.
Washington state’s answer is a new class of legal professionals called “limited license legal technicians.” They are the nurse practitioners of the legal world. [Once they’re certified] they can help clients prepare court documents and perform legal research, just as lawyers do.
…“We need to take a leaf from the medical profession, which has long recognized that people with health problems can be helped by a range of assistance providers with far less training than licensed physicians,” New York Court of Appeals Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman said in his 2014 state of the judiciary report. “We all accept that. Why not the same in the law?”
LLLTs aren’t the first of their kind; in the United Kingdom, law firms have been allowed to have non-lawyer partners since 2007 and it seems to be going well. New York has its own brand of non-lawyer “navigators” assist unprecedented litigants with housing and consumer debt cases.
The goal of the program is to step in where a person might not be able to afford or even require a full lawyer.
Still, not everyone is on board. There’s a whole plethora of opposition that’s afraid of just what supporters are in favor of: access to jobs. Many worry that with LLLTs taking their “bread and butter work,” along with access to mentors and law firms, recent law student grads (only 84.5 percent of whom are employed) would find themselves with nowhere to go. As Sam Wright wrote in a post for Above the Law, it’s an interesting idea but it’s not without potential setbacks:
Indeed, it seems like the sort of work that LLLTs would be doing is precisely the sort that employment-needy recent grads could do in a pinch.
And it’s also easy to see how programs like Washington’s could do a poor job closing the access-to-justice gap. There aren’t many barriers to entry for LLLTs, and ease of entry increases the potential that many LLLTs will give very, very bad advice and counsel that could do real harm. Plenty of associate’s-degree holders are plenty smart and capable of providing sound legal advice, but then again, I’d bet that plenty aren’t. And while plenty of lawyers are inept too, they must nevertheless possess some degree of intelligence and legal reasoning not to have been weeded out by law school and the bar exam.
But Merrilyn Astin Tariton of Attorney at Work isn’t so sure that’s the case:
If at first glance this feels like taking food out of the mouths of hungry lawyers, consider the possibility that in certain quarters it could be a real boon to the bottom line. Your firm might hire a handful of these licensed technicians to handle commodity work that, while necessary, has been a problem for you to handle at a lawyer’s hourly rates. A real estate practice may find that creation of a collections unit — effectively priced and efficiently managed — could turn a handsome profit.
If approached as a new positive resource to be applied in a way that delivers affordable services in a profitable way, rather than the new competition in town, this just might be a pretty good thing.
The future of legal services is already in a huge state of flux, what with the growing amount of technology available to firms and the decreasing number of students enrolling in law school. Whether or not Washington’s program is part of the answer to the access to justice program that lawyers and those they serve have been waiting for only time will tell. But with more states expressing interest, it’s likely that this idea is here to stay—in one form or another.