Lawyers: Are We Prepared to Practice and Serve (those in need)?

Earlier this month the American Bar Institute, the American Bar Association, and the Association for Continuing Legal Education published a final report from its October 2009 Critical Issues Summit entitled “Equipping Our Lawyers: Law School Education, Continuing Legal Education, and Legal Practice in the 21st Century.” It may be found at: http://www.equippingourlawyers.org/docs/final%20report.pdf. The purpose of the summit was for CLE professionals, law school deans and faculty members, law practitioners, bar leaders, judges, mandatory CLE administrators, and law firm educators to evaluate whether lawyers are provided the adequate resources necessary to address the legal needs of the society in which we work. Otherwise asked is the question of whether lawyers are adequately trained to address the legal needs of society. I was pleased to find that the final report contained a full section on increasing access, and the role of lawyers in making that happen. Specifically, it states that lawyers have a professional responsibility to serve the underserved, and to begin nurturing that obligation in law schools. Also important was that the report implored the local legal communities to collaborate to assist newly admitted lawyers to develop the skills that help them to provide effective legal services to underserved communities. This finding recognizes a crucial aspect of the disparity in legal assistance between wealthy communities and low-income communities. Wealthy individual and larger businesses are not getting better legal services solely because they have more money. It’s more complex. Because wealthy individuals have more money to spend on legal services, they create a marketplace. Thus, lawyers train themselves to develop expertise in the legal areas, not merely because they can serve wealthy individuals, but because they are more likely to have full time paying work if they specialize in areas where there are plenty of paying clients. For instance, lawyers can not develop a practice specializing in tenant rights or the rights to secure government services for low income persons unless they also know how to obtain grant money or a job with an organization knowledgeable at receiving grant money. Accordingly, because wealthy individuals and larger businesses can afford more legal attention, and thus provide a marketplace, law students and young lawyers are trained to meet that need. Thus, young lawyers find themselves without knowledge and training on areas of the law that affect low to moderate income people. Economists explain this phenomenon by the term “supply and demand.” Thus, focusing at the educational level assures that there is a supply of lawyers able to meet the demand for their legal services. It is worth noting another institutional aspect of the legal field that impacts why low to moderate income people are not usually served by the legal community. Law students are trained to, un-ideologically, serve their clients’ legal interests. They are trained to avoid, and in fact implored against, imparting their own values and ethics on their clients. Additionally, most professional responsibility curriculums discuss ethical advertising, but do not focus at all on using ethical considerations in determining which fields to service. In other words, for the most part, there is no place in the law school curriculum where the average student is asked to evaluate society’s legal services against society’s legal needs. In my experience and in the experiences of those with whom I have spoken, law school professors act as if it is a given that absent discrete pro bono obligations, one has responsibility towards their paying clients and has no professional obligation to lower their fee for those who cannot afford to pay a full fee. In other words, it is simply presumed that one works for those who pay, and one stops working when those who did pay, stop paying. Thus, law students often graduate without any sense that they have a professional responsibility to anyone other than the paying client. Therefore, the inclusion of training new and young lawyers, in the skills necessary to assist communities not being fully served, can drastically expand the options for service. It is a known fact that the legal community is not yet adequately addressing the legal needs of the larger community. In 2005, the Legal Services Corporation published a study, “Documenting the Justice Gap in America – the Current Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-Income Americans,” in which the Corporation reported that the Legal Services Corporation, due to needs and lack of resources, was turning away one eligible client for every one it helped. It also found that over 80% of the legal needs of low-income Americans were going unmet, as did the American Boar Association in a 1994 survey. The Legal Services Corporation survey found that the primary unmet legal needs fell in the following categories of topics: consumer, education, employment, family, juvenile, health, and housing. This problem is not limited to the poorest of households. In 1995, Mark D. Killian, in the Florida Bar News, wrote that 79.5% of all Florida households have no access to the legal system, noting that this is not limited to those individuals who are poor or moderate income. Many other states share similar problems, and have published their own statistics to prove it.