Access to justice can be achieved, says ‘Law Democratized’ author–but not without change

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles, and today I’m joined by Renee Knake Jefferson, author of the New book, Law Democratized a Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis. Renee, thanks so much for joining us.

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Thanks for having me. It’s great to be with you.

Lee Rawles:

So Renee, the first time I was made aware of your work is actually when the ABA Journal featured you as a legal rebel in 2013, and that almost mirrors the time period that you’re kind of looking at with this book. So I would love to first hear about what your work the last decade’s been about to let readers know what this book is all about.

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Yeah, you’re exactly right. So in 2013, I was named a legal rebel by the ABA Journal. It put me on the cover of their magazine. I have to say, back in 2013, I really thought we would be much farther along a decade later in the issues that I write about in this book, which is primarily focused on access to justice, very broadly speaking. So not just for folks who need legal aid and may or may not be able to get it, but especially for people who might not qualify for legal aid but can’t afford a lawyer for three figures or more an hour and still need legal help and might not even recognize that they have a legal problem. So that was work that got me recognition a decade ago, and as it turns out, 10 years later there’s been some progress but not nearly enough.

And that’s what inspired me to write this book. I felt it was really important for lawyers for sure, law students, absolutely. But really the public broadly, to understand why we still struggle to provide legal help to everyone who needs it and what we can do about it. And so this book is a compilation of lessons I’ve learned through my own research and trying to better understand why, especially in the United States where we on the one hand have an incredible judicial system, there are many people who are still shut out of it, and then efforts that have been made, successes, failures, what can we learn from them and what should we do next? And that’s what this book is all about.

Lee Rawles:

One phrase that you bring up and was the name of the laboratory that you helped launch at Michigan State for a while with Daniel Katz is Reinvent Law. I had to think about as a reader, I thought, okay, well 2010 to 2012, there were all of these movements in various countries that we kind of label Arabs spring, and there was a lot of hope, there was a lot of excitement, there was a lot of forward movement. And I do feel having been a legal journalist in 2013, there was that energy in that time. And looking back over the past 10 years, I agree with you, I thought that there would be more changes. Can you talk about what that atmosphere was like though 10 years ago when you felt this momentum within the profession that hey, maybe things are going to change?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Sure. And I guess I’ll take a step back and explain how a professor of legal ethics and judicial ethics found herself launching a law laboratory. As you mentioned, reinvent law. We called it at the time, it still housed at Michigan State, but now under a different name. And it’s because I was looking around me and in really 2008, 2009, 2010, and finding that students who I was trying to encourage to go out and find a rewarding, meaningful career in the law, that they were really struggling to find a job at all. And for those who wanted to maybe try to help people who needed legal services who hadn’t received them before, and to try to do it in new innovative ways, the ways that we had seen other professions disrupted like travel, for example, that the law just hadn’t gotten there. And so I wanted to do something more than just teach my students in the classroom.

And so that’s what helped motivate and inspire creating this concept of a law laboratory. And you mentioned the hashtag. So yes, we had a series of these reinvent law conferences across the country and in fact around the globe in the UAE and in London. And we found the concept of reinvent law trending on Twitter. And who would’ve thought that so many people would’ve cared both in terms of showing up in person for these events, but importantly this global conversation that we were having through social media. And I don’t want to diminish the massive progress that has been made. For example, many students who were in that program 10 years ago now hold jobs that didn’t exist at the time in terms of offering services through innovation and entrepreneurship in law firms, in businesses. The ABA has a center for innovation. One of my former students had worked there.

And so on the one hand there has been real measurable progress, but I guess I just thought it would be exponentially more 10 years later. And so for me, writing this book was an opportunity to reflect on my own journey in learning these things, but also to help anyone who wants to understand where the legal profession in the United States has been, why it’s regulated in the way it is, and what needs to be done in order to expand justice more fully rather than having to sort of navigate and wind their way and how I have, they can pick up the book and understand both the history and a path forward.

Lee Rawles:

And you mentioned your personal journey and you open your book with a passage that I think is really powerful and I’m going to ask you to read it in a second, but I think it also illustrates when we have access to justice conversations, often what we’re talking about is people in a state of extreme poverty, and that’s certainly part of it, but that’s not a reflection of the actual everyone who needs help and access to legal services. You have a statistic where you say 87% of households who are facing legal needs don’t necessarily even seek out legal help. But I would love for you to read that passage from your book because I think it’s so powerful and really shows how anyone can get into a state where they desperately need legal help and have no idea or way to access it.

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Sure. Here’s how I opened the book. A priest is here to perform Your last rites. A nurse whispered into my ear. What I really needed was a lawyer. At that moment, my temples pounded with the worst headache of my life. I struggled to adjust my arms and legs against tight nylon straps binding me to a metal gurney. My eyes squinted in the two bright light emergency room technicians and doctors spoke in code. The little few bits I could understand terrified me. She’s too young. University of Chicago graduate, a lawyer, so tragic neurosurgeon on standby. She has kids, couldn’t remember who’s president. There’s a space in the neuro ICU need to keep her at least a week. I was only 35 years old, the mother of two toddlers on the brink of entering the tenure track job market as a law professor. And blood was pooled in my brain.

The prognosis not good. My mind raised with questions about the eminent termination of my employment contract as a university lecturer. The recent conversations with my then spouse about divorce, the manufacturer whose drug made me faint and hit my head the will I had not yet prepared to protect my children. I faced multiple problems that required legal help and yet even as a lawyer myself, I did not know what to do. Most people hopefully never find themselves as I did bound to a gurney while declining a priest’s reading of their last rites. But my plight of facing multiple unmet legal needs alone is not unique. Studies show that at any given time, the majority of households in the United States face two to three legal problems without a lawyer or other assistants. Most do not even recognize that the problems could be solved through the justice system or legal tools.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you so much, Renee, and I’m glad you made it through. That was a very powerful way to start out the book and had me very concerned even though I knew you were still with us.

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Yes. And I’ve recovered fully, but thank you. I appreciate it.

Lee Rawles:

One thing that just really strikes me is you say I was a law professor, but I still just felt you felt so overwhelmed and you didn’t know how to get this particular legal help. And when you think that that’s the state of legal access, that’s terrifying. You had all of these kind of legs up when it came to knowing about the justice system and yet you still felt like there was not help available to you.

Renee Knake Jefferson:

And it makes me think a lot about what does it mean for someone who doesn’t have a lawyer in the family and isn’t thinking about these things at all. I’m a first generation lawyer, so I grew up with the law not being accessible to my family or me. I can look back at things that happened as a child growing up and thinking we really could have used some legal help along the way. And so this book is written both for those of us in the legal profession who really need a call to action, but it’s also chock-full of tools and ideas and ways that individuals can think about how they’re better prepared when they are facing challenges and how they can access legal help, not necessarily through a lawyer all the time. Sometimes it’s about being able to educate oneself or use increasingly emerging legal tools that are available to us where you don’t need a lawyer at all necessarily to solve that legal problem. But how we make that more accessible, available, and importantly widely adopted by the public is a major goal of this work.

Lee Rawles:

Well, we’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers and when we come back I’m going to ask you about a provocative sentence in the book. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here with Renee Knake Jefferson, author of Law democratized. So Renee, you said something before we took our break that pinged a quote for me from your book, which when I read it I stopped and I wrote it down. One important question to confront is whether a lawyer is needed for meaningful justice. Maybe that wouldn’t be so powerful for most readers, but to me I am so in the mindset of yes, access to justice is so important and so critical and we need to find ways to get everybody a lawyer. And this kind of opened up my mind a little bit, so let’s talk about it. What are some of the ways that research has shown we could be improving access by leaving out the lawyer part entirely?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Well, certainly we should expand already existing. Do-it-yourself legal tools. And most state bar associations have tools. The Legal Services Corporation is regularly encouraging, giving out grants to encourage people to use technology and thinking about how to help people solve basic legal problems that don’t necessarily need a lawyer. And in fact, the kind of thing that a lawyer who has a law practice billing at an hourly rate probably wouldn’t be able to afford to take on and help someone with. And so there’s a huge education gap. A big part of the book is devoted to education, both for how we train our lawyers of the future, but equally important. There’s a whole chapter on education for the public and in some cases it’s not even knowing that these tools exist in your communities. So sometimes the education isn’t on how to understand or used a lot, it’s just to know where to look for tools that already exist to help you do that.

And in some instances, the education I think is really more of making it more normal and routine for someone to do their own legal checkup. Every year we go and we get a physical or we also doing the same sort of legal checkup in our own lives in terms of do we have our will in place? Does it need to be updated? Do we need to worry about boundary lines on our property? Things like that that don’t matter until there is a crisis. And one thing that I think is really important here too, when we’re asking this question to go back to where you opened this, when is the lawyer necessary or not, there’s also a role for education to play here to prevent preventive justice, to prevent the legal problem from happening at all. And that to me is a hundred percent an example of how we can better educate the public to handle legal problems before they ever need a lawyer. If on the front end, whether it’s through helping with creating basic contracts before you enter into different arrangements and tools like that, that really allow one to prevent or head off a legal problem before it ever starts so that you wouldn’t need a lawyer to help you solve it at all.

Lee Rawles:

So do you have an anecdote or a situation from the book that you think really could illustrate this idea of preventative justice?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Yeah, I do. I’ll actually borrow an example from down under, I lived almost a year in Melbourne, Australia, and while there I learned about an effort that was really, actually, it was trying to be preventive. And so I’ll give you this as an example, both of how preventive justice can work, but sometimes the innovation doesn’t go as intended and so you may have to revisit it in Australia in order to ride their trams similar to a subway or an L train or the like you hop on and you’re supposed to tap your card and in order to be more innovative and help the public, at least that’s what the lawmakers who put this new process in place thought. They decided to allow people, if they were issued a citation because they hadn’t popped off their card properly or they hadn’t tapped it, rather than having a ticket that they would have to go to court to challenge, they would have the ability to, if they were cited by an officer on the tram, they could pay it immediately, $75 on the spot, they could use a credit card.

Now in some ways that is maybe preventive. You can just pay that off and not have to worry about solving your problem by battling it out through court, missing court date, crossing more homes on the road, all of it. Yeah, all of the things. But it really became a two tier justice system, if you will, for those who had a credit card or could afford to pay the fine on the spot, they could just do it and go on their way. Some of them were paying it even though they would’ve had a valid legal challenge to dispute the citation if they’d gone to court. And then of course, if you don’t have a credit card or you don’t have that money at that moment in time that you can pay it, then you are really forced into a second tier kind of justice system. And so that actually triggered another effort at I would say a preventive solution but also an innovative solution.

A young lawyer named Sam Flynn was noticing this phenomenon happening in Melbourne. And so he used technology, basically a chatbot type website system that allowed people to challenge these citations and ultimately resulted in him launching Joseph Legal, which does chatbot legal tool solutions on a very broad scale now and also successfully closed down that program because for as much as it was intended to be preventive and helpful, it also was creating what I talked about, that sort of two tier justice system. And a big part of what this book does is look at stories like that where well-intended people think that they are deploying a tool that is going to expand access to legal help or to solve problems inadvertently perhaps creates more or doesn’t solve the problem in the way it should. And so lessons that we can learn and how we can think about the next phase, the next step, what more can be done in order to expand access to legal services more widely.

Lee Rawles:

And to be honest, that’s one of the things that I find very valuable about the book is that you are going back and not an exact chronicle of everything, that everyone tried to increase access to justice or reinvent the law over the past 10 years, but you are compiling some of these programs. One of the ones I found interesting, and I do think that it’s notable that the one that you just spoke about and the one I’m about to speak about, this isn’t happening in the United States, but it is the move in the UK to put in legal help kiosks in grocery stores like Tesco. And it is one of those ideas that’s thrown around like, oh, well, this will now finally middle class people who may be hesitant to look up a lawyer, go into a lawyer’s office, oh, it’ll be right there. They can write their wills, it’ll be great. And in practice things don’t always,

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Nobody wanted it. They do.

Lee Rawles:

No one wanted it. They were like,

Renee Knake Jefferson:

No, nobody wants their will while they’re getting a gallon of milk.

Lee Rawles:

I’m here to pick up groceries. I’m not actually here to write out my will and testament.

Renee Knake Jefferson:

No. Yeah. The one success in that vein is the co-op legal services in the uk, which put everything online. So as it turns out, people do want these tools maybe in the privacy of their home, but not when they are shopping for groceries or picking up a newspaper or getting up a cup of coffee, which were all different ways that over the past decade, people who are trying to bring legal services to those who need it. That was an initial thought and certainly a decade ago we were all thinking, yeah, that can make a lot of sense. Let’s bring the legal tools, so where people are doing their day-to-Day business, not dissimilar to how say Walmart’s across the country added banks for people who are unbanked or didn’t have checking accounts into where they were shopping and that worked. There was traction there, but not so much with legal services, at least not yet.

Lee Rawles:

I work for the ABA Journal, which is the flagship magazine for the ABA. If anyone doesn’t know that. And the American Bar Association certainly doesn’t speak with necessarily one voice because it’s a zillion different members. I’ve heard a lot of back and forth about legal services discussions happening within the Association, and you’ve certainly been part of that. You were part of the commission on the future of legal services back in 2014. Where have you seen the areas of the most pushback you get from attorneys when you try and present them with the suggestions for changing legal services? What are attorneys most afraid of when it comes to changing our current system?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

I think primary concern, at least on a surface level, is articulated in protecting professional independence of lawyers. And so here in the United States, most states there is a rule in place based on American Bar Association Rule 5.4 that prohibits outside ownership and investment in law practices. I say most because that is changing. DC has always had a little bit of an exception to that, and Arizona and Utah are the most vibrant examples of moving away from that entirely and allowing for innovation in terms of the business structure and business model for the delivered legal services. We can talk more about that in Texas. So I’m a law professor at the University of Houston. I am a part of a working group that has just issued a report recommending a little bit of movement targeting the legal services component, so not lifting the 5.4 restriction broadly for all legal services, but if based on really trying to solve the access to justice in a traditional legal services audience or target model, there’s some movement there.

And so I think the most resistance goes to professional independence of lawyers and concern that it would be impacted if you had someone who owned or invested in the legal services business model, who wasn’t also a lawyer who wasn’t also held to the same professional obligations a lawyer is. But I think that that argument’s going to have to increasingly give way, especially as we see, I think with the movement we’re seeing in Texas, we’re going to see more and more states, at least for say up to maybe 200% of the poverty level or so, being able to serve that group with law practice models that allow for outside ownership and investment and then seeing what’s happening in Utah and Arizona, I think it’s going to be harder and harder for the profession to say, no, we can’t do that because we’re worried about professional independence when we are seeing some success.

Lee Rawles:

Well, let’s talk about who some of the potential entities would be interested in owning a law firm or owning a branch that as part of it had legal services available. So who are we talking about? Is this venture capital firms speaking as a journalist, things didn’t go well when we invited venture capitalists into our industry who is interested in owning a firm or a branch that does legal services but who is not a lawyer and they’re not subject to or at the moment, they’re not subject to legal ethics.

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Well, I can tell you a little bit about the, I guess experiment if you will, in Utah and Arizona to give you a glimpse of who was interested when they had the opportunity to jump into this space. And so Arizona actually took down Rule 5.4 entirely. Utah created a regulatory sandbox, if you will, that allows for legal services providers to come in and receive approval to offer an innovative model that would allow for non-lawyer ownership and investment. So we’ll go back to November of 2022. So this is just over a year ago. The Utah Sandbox had received 90 applications. They had approved 45 of them that were actively operating. And to answer your question, it wasn’t just venture capitalists who had applied for the ability to come into this market and offer services. These included, the entities, included law practices, software companies, chatbot providers. They offered services ranging from startup counseling, immigration work, personal injury, life needs, like housing, employment and more. And so it’s a broad range. I mean, one of the entities is run by a group of nuns from Holy Cross Ministries training community health workers to provide bilingual legal advocacy for medical debt issues. Another was half owned by non-lawyers providing free and low cost legal services to help people in completing their court documents and offering some legal advice through chatbots. And so it’s really a whole range of different groups of people who are interested in serving the legal needs and a really sort of creative, and at least for me, sort of unexpected ways.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to take another quick break to hear from our advertisers when we return. I’ll be speaking to Renee about law democratized. Welcome back to this episode of the Modern Law Library. I’m here with Renee Knake Jefferson, author of Law democratized a Blueprint for Solving the Justice Crisis. I said the subtitle again, I want to talk about why you use the term blueprint in the title of your book. What makes this a blueprint?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

So it’s not to say that if we follow this blueprint and check every box and the appendix literally does have categories and checklists that suddenly all of the problems with accessing legal help in this country will be solved. That’s certainly not what I’m here to say, but the concept of a blueprint came to me because when you think about when you’re building a home or you’re building a new building, you need a blueprint to understand the foundation and how all of the components of this home are going to work together. When it’s built though, and people move in and they’re living in it, it’s not that the maintenance is done or the work is done, there’s constant repair. Any homeowner knows you’re going to have repairs, you’re going to have things that might not work right. You’re going to have to get it fixed. Sometimes it’s a fresh coat of paint.

Sometimes you need a whole new HVAC system, but if you have a good blueprint for your foundation, then you are able to build upon. And for me, I have felt what was really missing, at least in my own work, was a broad understanding of what so many different groups have been working toward for not just we’ve been talking about the decade of my work, but really more than a hundred years. I go back in the book and I lift quotes from ABA reports from the 1930s, and they literally could have been written about the state of the profession today. And so for me, this blueprint is both laying out the plans for a solid foundation, but also really collecting the history, learning from the history of what’s been done before by so many groups, by attorneys, by advocacy organizations, by bar organizations, bar associations, individual advocates, judges, law schools, the legal tech industry, legislators, research centers, all of them.

I bring all of them together under a handful of different themes in the blueprint, both to remind us all of the history and the lessons we’ve learned, but then also really a call to action for people to see this as not just a problem to be solved in an individual silo, but just like for a house to work, you need the blueprint that shows where the plumbing is, where the HVAC is, where each room is going to go. We really, I felt needed that for our justice system. And so that’s why I went with the idea of a blueprint for justice.

Lee Rawles:

Another way that to me kind of fits in is when much like how the ABA writes its model rules as just models as you can tweak this to conform to whatever your state constitution demands of the legal profession, et cetera, or what your needs are. One thing I really liked about the book was at the end of the chapters where you’ve outlined the problems, you’ve outlined some of the solutions, you end chapters by having recommendations. And to me, it’s a little bit like when you are selecting a home kit and they’re like, well, do you want to add a solarium? Do you want to have exactly an extended laundry room? Well, here’s a recommended a program that someone tried, and then you give people the footnotes to say, yep, this is how they did it. Can you talk a little bit about that structure for your chapters and why you include those recommendations at the back?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Absolutely. So first half of the book is diagnosing the problem. So for people who aren’t familiar with the reasons why we have the justice crisis in this country that we do, and I should also say is I focus on the civil side, we could write a similar book about our criminal justice system, but I’m really focused on civil legal needs here. And so the first half of the book is really a short history of why we are where we are. And then the second half is a cataloging of the efforts that I have seen over the years that some of them I have studied and researched. Some of them I have rolled up my sleeves and been directly involved in including the work that you mentioned earlier that I did as one of the reporters for the ABAs Commission on the future of Legal Services from 2014 to 2016.

But I really felt like in writing this, I draw a lot from more technical work and research that I have published in law reviews. And I wanted this to be something more, something really concrete, something tangible that someone who wants to write to their local representative can say, here’s what we need you to do legislator, or to help solve this problem. Someone who is volunteering as a lawyer to serve on a committee in their state that’s looking at access to justice issues can pick this up and say, here are some concrete things we can do. I really wanted this to be more than just an academic studying, examining and diagnosing, but I wanted it to be actionable and something that anyone could pick up. And there’s lots of checks for judges to check boxes too. We often don’t necessarily immediately think about judges as being innovators in solving legal access issues, but especially in state courts, and especially I think about the power of the chief justice of the highest court in each state.

I mean, that’s where we’ve seen tremendous reform in some states with more accessible court forms, for example, in plain English that you can easily use on your phone. And even something as simple as implementing a text message system to remind people of their court dates. Those are easy things that judges can do. And so the design for the second half of the book, which is really the, it’s a very long-winded blueprint in some ways, is both to show options, but then also identify specifically who would be responsible for implementing them so that readers who want to see some of these things brought to fruition aren’t just inspired by the ideas, but actually have a concrete plan to be able to say, okay, here’s who I need to go to advocate for this so that we can get it done.

Lee Rawles:

And not to be the person who brings up COVID-19 in all settings, but I really think the amount of change I’ve seen judges be willing to institute in courts since the pandemic, it’s encouraging in a lot of ways. I think that for some judges who maybe would’ve been more hesitant to implement technological changes, they’re more open to the idea because they’ve seen, oh, well, when we were forced to meet remotely, it turned out it was just fine and we could have these hearings remotely and we didn’t need everyone to come into the courthouse. Do you think that that has opened up some possibilities when it comes to getting people more on board with changing how we’ve always done things?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

I do think that’s right. There’s certainly sort of two components to this. The first is everyone had to adapt. And so our lived experience as a country, as a world, having gone through COVID-19, is that all of us lived through having to adapt the way we interact in our personal and professional lives. And absolutely our courts weren’t spared for that. So from that, so when one goes through something personally understands that personally, I think that that is a really important moment that someone like me can now capitalize on and say, and now here are some other changes that you can embrace. And then also even for people who resisted it, the fact is, as you said, a lot of it worked. And so there was, I think we’ve seen more adoption of especially remote technology than we ever would have. It probably would’ve been another decade plus.

But that’s sort of one thing that we can take away from the pandemic. But my hope is that now that we have, I think, emerged from that mostly, although I know it’s still with us for some that we don’t become comfortable or just so easily forget. And so that’s another reason why it seemed urgent for me to share this information in this form, in this book. And in fact, I started writing it in the midst of the pandemic and thinking about what I wanted to focus on next. And part of me didn’t want to write this book at all because I had been thinking about these issues and writing about these issues and advocating for these issues for, as you said at the outset, more than a decade. So I, in many ways was ready to move on to something else, and I realized, but just because I’ve been thinking about them and writing about them doesn’t mean that everyone else has. And we have this moment where collectively, we’ve all gone through massive change and adopted some, not all, but some of the things that I and others have been championing for years for the profession to embrace. And so perhaps this was the exact right moment to collect the things that had been done to share them in this blueprint form and hopefully capitalize on this opportunity where everyone had to be a little bit innovative to push them to innovate even more.

Lee Rawles:

And speaking of areas of the profession that you want to see innovation in, we got to talk about law schools. So you’ve been in academia, you’ve been in and around law schools for a very long time. What I find interesting about asking law schools to change is that a lot of people actually blame law schools, at least in part for this access to justice crisis. They say it’s too expensive to get a law degree, and that’s one of the things that’s choking off access to the profession in general. There’s a lot of criticism of law schools, but I think there also would be pushback for law schools to do things like what you recommend, which is offer more law related education to the general public, which I love as an idea. And see there’re being pushback. What are you hoping law schools can do to promote innovation to perhaps change themselves? I would just love to hear your take on law schools and their place in reform.

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Yeah. Law schools absolutely have an important role to play in reform because they are preparing the future of the profession. And so I in the book have law schools get a whole chapter for themselves to think really broadly about this. And there’s not going to be a one size fits all for every school, but I think every school can be doing a number of things. And many of them are, when I, in 2012, was working to bring courses about law and technology and entrepreneurship and innovation to students at Michigan State where I was teaching at the time, that was unusual. It was controversial. It was sufficiently controversial that the ABA Journal made me a legal rebel. That was a rebellious thing to do. I don’t think it is now. I think that most law schools offer a little bit of curriculum in this space. I would like to see much more, I always try to bring in ideas of innovation in the practice of law and the delivery of legal services when I’m teaching professional responsibility and legal ethics, which of course is a required course in the curriculum.

And some people might scratch their head a little bit and say, what are you doing talking about innovation when you’re supposed to be teaching the model rules of professional conduct? And I do both, but I would like to see more law schools find places in their required curriculum to expose students to technology that needs to be used in the delivery of legal services. Most states have now adopted as a part of the duty of competence, which is found in model Rule 1.1, that there is an obligation to keep abreast of changes in technology for lawyers. I think that that means law students should all have basic training in technology tools for the delivery of legal services, and that we should be infusing entrepreneurship and innovation throughout the law school curriculum. I also think that when we were reflecting on a legal profession that is going to be focused in the future on solving the access to justice problem that I confront in this book, it involves a lot more than just technology and innovation too.

We need to be developing meaningful pipelines for a profession that reflects the diversity of the public it serves. Now, on the one hand, law schools have done a really good job of that in terms of opening their doors to students who reflect the diversity of the public that we serve. But the networking that happens even beyond law school though, is coming up short because when you look at leadership roles in the legal profession, it does not reflect that diversity of who’s being educated. And law schools can’t do everything. But I do think that there is an obligation for law schools to be involved in the pipelining and training that happens even once their students leave the law school. And that goes to how we are training lawyers who didn’t benefit from coming through law school in the last five to 10 years, for example, not only in terms of technology tools, but also in thinking about implicit bias training and leadership development and cultural competency. And so that’s both for law schools now, but also to be thinking about how they support their law graduates in this, in many ways, very changing market for legal services. So those are ways that I think that law schools can step up and to your point, explain their value.

Lee Rawles:

And to circle back to the law related education, I really was just struck by this idea of law schools offering more to the community. I’ve been fortunate enough to spend, I guess, all my life working or living near various college towns. And I love taking extension courses in things like art and the idea that law schools might be able to offer courses directly to the community for explaining the legal system or civics in a way that would be engaging and useful. That just really struck a chord with me. Do you know of any schools that are doing this at the moment, or this just was a recommendation that you had?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

So both a recommendation, but in part inspired by when I joined the faculty at the University of Houston. So the People’s Law School by Richard Alderman was operated for many years, and now he has moved that online. But it was actually a convening of it was free to people in the Houston community could come and learn about basic legal rights and entitlements. And that’s exactly what I see. Law schools having an important role to play in the idea of both a public education campaign about legal problems and how to solve them, but also more broadly about civics and the rule of law. I do think that we are at a unique time right now in this country where the public is appreciating more fully the role of lawyers in the preservation of our democracy, and also why it is important to understand how our government works and what legal rights and entitlements individuals have.

And so I would like to see law schools step into that space more boldly and to think about educating not just the students who fill our seats, but also educating the public that we hope our graduates will serve. And in a couple of ways, both to help individuals know about their own legal rights and entitlements, and perhaps to be able to help themselves, but also frankly to know when they do need to hire one of our law students who has graduated to become a lawyer and how they navigate that. And so I think that there is a place for law schools to think more broadly about their role in educating the public.

Lee Rawles:

And finally, I cannot have a professional responsibility expert on my show and not dive into one of the, I would say, more recent and controversial areas, which is the use of artificial intelligence. You in the book say that you see a real space for AI technology to be used ethically to help people solve their access to justice issues. And I know that there are a bunch of people who are very nervous about artificial intelligence. I would just love to hear what your thoughts are as we end 2023 begin 2024. Where are you seeing the real promises for artificial intelligence use in the legal profession?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

So the real promise is to be able to, for lawyers offer services they always have, but to be able to do it faster, more affordably by leveraging the AI tools for the public to be able to create basic legal documents and pleadings and things that they might need to be able to do that on their own. That’s the promise to do it fast and affordably. And of course, we know all the risks, right? I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines. I don’t understand why this keeps happening, but lawyers seem to keep thinking that they can go to chat GPT and ask it to write a brief, and they don’t double check to make sure that the cases that are being cited in that brief actually exist.

Lee Rawles:

And it’s been multiple times, I can’t tell you we’re know. That’s why

Renee Knake Jefferson:

This keeps happening. So I think those are the risks, right? Not being able to necessarily trust the ai. And so as a legal ethicist, I would say two things about that. One, I don’t know that we need a lot of new professional conduct rules to govern how we use ai. I mean, as a lawyer, you can never make up a case and cite that in your brief and submit that to the court, whether chat GPT did it or G PT four did it, or whether you just did it in your own mind. The ethics rules all would prohibit that. So on the one hand, I don’t think we necessarily need new professional conduct rules to govern how lawyers are using AI and their work. But I also think, and I appreciate that ABA President Mary Smith is one of her initiatives this year, a commission that is focusing on the use of AI and law practice, because we do need parameters to understand how we can trust the information and the information that emerges from AI is only as good as what’s going into it and so on that I think that to me is where the real risk lies.

And also where we do need smart people thinking very deeply about how we engage in sort of quality control and cross-checking to make sure that if information that is biased going in is not being turned out, replicating or expanding on that bias. And really important how as these tools are used by people who have not been trained as lawyers, how they can recognize what can be trusted and what can’t.

Lee Rawles:

Well, Renee, thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If people are interested in picking up law democratized or in finding more of your work, where could they do that?

Renee Knake Jefferson:

Well, one great place is to head over to my substack. It’s called the Legal Ethics Roundup, and it’s a weekly newsletter. It drops Mondays. It’s free, and it’s chockfull of all kinds of things like what we just talked about now. But also, I rip from the headlines, whatever legal and judicial ethics issues have occurred. I include ethics, moments in history. There’s always a pop culture reference or two in it in many themes from this book are there. And then you can find law democratize wherever you like to buy your book. So whether that’s on Amazon or your local bookstore, you will find law democratize waiting for you.

Lee Rawles:

And thank you to you, my listeners, for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate review and subscribe to the Modern Law Library in your favorite podcast listening app. If you want to get in touch with me to recommend a book or make a comment on this episode, you always can do that at books at ABA Journal com.

Continue Reading