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The
greatest challenge facing our profession is the delivery of civil
legal services to low- and middle-income persons.
It seems to be an intractable problem and we have no clear
sense of whether we are making progress.
It is our profession’s Achilles heel.
If we do not meet the challenge, we will continue to be seen
as serving high-end legal needs and leaving others without the help
they need. We need to make
the problem of delivery of legal services to low-and middle-income
individuals our profession’s problem and we all need to be personally
involved in finding the solutions that will be part of an ideal system. For
some this is a problem to be addressed by contributing more money
to our staffed legal services and judicare
providers. I believe in those programs as an important
part of an ideal system and in the need for additional funding for
them, but continued efforts to increase funding are not nearly enough. We have worked very hard at increasing the resources
for legal services with only moderate success. Moreover, raising funds for the services to
be provided by others makes civil legal services our charity and charity
will not be enough. Pro
bono legal service, which I have advocated throughout this year,
is another very important part of an ideal system.
We need to bring to bear the resources of the 20,000-plus attorneys
who live and practice in Minnesota who could step forward — helping
people in court with, for example, family law problems and landlord-tenant
disputes, but also helping the thousands of small businesses that
start without legal assistance whose success would strengthen our
community and helping the small nonprofits that are important in our
community. Funding pro bono
programs that match clients that need these services with lawyers
who are able to provide those services is also a critical part of
an ideal system. But
those together would not be enough.
There is an “elephant in the room.”
That elephant is that to a large degree we are also not deliv Thus,
an ideal system of delivery of legal services has a large component
of “privatization,” — ways in which market services can be provided
for fees the clients can afford and from which the attorneys make
a decent living. We need innovative ways to make services available
from private attorneys — from “unbundled legal services” to remote
services provided via the Internet and other innovative methods of
delivery. If we can help develop
a system that brings more services to the middle class through private
attorneys, that would help create the political constituencies (the
middle class and lawyers generally) we need to support an ideal system
that includes a mix of publicly funded and privately funded services.
Law
reform is another important component.
We need “delegalization,” — more problems solved without the need of
formal legal proceedings. We
need to clarify and simplify our substantive laws and our procedures
so that people can help themselves, or need less legal services,
and can afford to pay for legal services they really need. We especially need to solve the problem of family
breakup, marriage dissolution, and child custody by reducing conflict
and moving toward a system that needs less lawyer help. It is these cases, which are so often not handled
by lawyers, which are lined up at the doors of legal services and
pro bono programs and threaten our existing system.
Will
these together bring us to our goal?
“Unmet legal need” is an amorphous concept.
The most comprehensive legal needs study, which I was privileged
to review and critique in early draft form, was published by the American
Bar Association in 1993. It
taught me that there is a lot of “gray” as to what is a “legal need,”
and to which needs we might expect our society
to devote resources to reach an acceptable level of justice.
Our
traditional (and accurate) message that we meet no more than 20 percent
of legal needs of the poor is in some ways self-defeating because
it makes the goal seem unattainable.
I think that when we recognize the variety of levels of legal
needs and apply all of the methods described above, we can reach a
goal of delivery of legal services to both low-and middle-income people
— and get much closer to an ideal system. The solutions are coming together from various
directions. We are getting
close to being able to imagine and articulate an ideal system that
is achievable. The
greatest satisfaction for me as a bar leader is association with the
hundreds of lawyers who do recognize these needs and, without personal
agendas, are working together building programs, refining the law,
and providing the services. I greatly enjoy the association with those leaders,
as well as the many other bar leaders who
are addressing the other important needs of our members, the profession,
and the public. To all of you,
thank you for the privilege of associating with you this year. JIM
BAILLIE is president of the Minnesota State Bar Association. A shareholder in the firm of Fredrikson & Byron, P.A., he concentrates his practice
in business bankruptcy and insolvency law and related litigation and
business transactions. |
