Reinventing Law

Episode Notes

Transcript

Law Technology Now

Reinventing Law

07/08/2020

[Music]

Ralph Baxter: Welcome to Law Technology Now. I am Ralph Baxter and this is my ninth episode as co-host of the show. My guest today is Gillian Hadfield, who in my view is one of the world’s leading agents of change for redesigning our legal infrastructure to make it work better for everyone.

Gillian and I today will talk about what she calls Reinventing Law and how her ideas apply to our current regulatory system and to reforms currently underway in the United States.

We are recording this episode remotely of course, because we’re in a pandemic. Gillian is at her home in Toronto, Canada, and I’m in my home in Wheeling, West Virginia.

Before we get started I want to thank our sponsors.

Thanks to Acumass; patent and trademark renewal payments made easy. Find out how acumass.com can take the stress out of annuities and save you money on European patent validations today.

Thanks also to Logikcull; instant discovery software for modern legal teams. Logikcull offers perfectly predictable pricing at $250 per matter per month. Create your free account anytime at logikcull.com/ltn.

And thanks also to Headnote, helping law firms get paid 70% faster with their compliant e-payments and accounts receivables automation platform. Learn how to get paid quicker and more efficiently at headnote.com.

Gillian Hadfield is one of the genuine big thinkers in the world of law. She has a law degree of course, from Stanford University, but she also has a PHD in Economics also from Stanford. She’s currently a professor of Law and of Strategic Management at the University of Toronto where she is also the Inaugural Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society.

Gillian is an active member of the World Economic Forum where she’s been active in a number of the key committees, and I mentioned that because her approach and outlook on reinventing law isn’t born just of academics or of talking to lawyers, but of talking about these subjects with the great leaders of business, religion and government at the World Economic Forum.

And then finally, she has written a remarkable book called ‘Rules for a Flat World:  Why Humans Invented Law and How to Reinvent It for a Complex Global Economy’, that is an essential resource for anyone who really wants to understand what’s going on with law, the role of law in our society and how to make it work better.

But Gillian is not just a thinker, she is a doer. For at least 15 years she has been working on making law work better. As she teaches her students not just the substance of law, but she teaches them legal design and innovation so that when they become lawyers, they can do what they do better and more imaginatively.

She served as a member of the groundbreaking ABA Commission on the future of legal services in the United States from 2014 to 2016, which culminated in a very important report in August of 2016 that has paved the way for much of the reform being considered in the United States today. And then finally she is active with several United States states who are considering reforming the way they regulate law practice, including specifically the State of Utah, which we’ll talk about today.

So Gillian, welcome to Law Technology Now.

Gillian Hadfield: Thanks Ralph, it’s really great to be here.

Ralph Baxter: So let’s start with how you first became interested in changing the way law works?

Gillian Hadfield: So I was working on law and economics coming out of my joint degree, thinking about this relationship between contracting the way the economy works and law. In that context, doing a lot of research sort of the conventional kind, but at some point I got involved in the legal system myself, much like the doctor who gets sick as a family dispute, and had the experience of what it looks like on the inside, what it looks like to be somebody who has high stakes matters in the hands of this process, this complex process, this very, very expensive process.

And I think the fact that I was both a lawyer and an economist, I was well off, I had lots of resources and yet it was so difficult, so difficult to get to good outcomes in my family, so difficult to sort of manage the stress and the financial impact that I think it sort of put me in a position of saying, okay, I guess I have to start trying to think about how to fix this.

(00:05:08)

That’s got to be my job, because I have this capacity being on the inside too, so say, okay, what’s going on with this as an economic matter, what’s going on with this as a legal matter?

So I think that was where it started that I got very focused on thinking about how do our legal institutions work, how do our legal markets work, because I knew that since I was finding it so difficult, the vast majority of people who were trying to deal with the system must find it overwhelming.

Ralph Baxter: Thank you for sharing that. I think it’s very important to understand why people who are leading initiatives in the way that you are, why they’re doing that, what motivates them, how it starts; you used a word “outcome” as you described your experience and we will talk about because it’s one of the things that you focus on in reform, lawyers are often not adequately focused on the outcome from the perspective of the client. They focus on an outcome all right, and it’s a worthy outcome, but it’s not necessarily the one that the client has in mind. Well, thank you for sharing that.

Now we’re going to progressively go from the general to more specific issues here, but I want to start with a very general idea. You bring a perspective from your research and your — I’m sure from your economics background as well as law to the role of law in the world, in society. You describe it as the invisible platform on which virtually everything is built. Can you share with our audience an overview of that idea?

Gillian Hadfield: Yeah, so I think we’re used to thinking about law and it’s very complex, it’s the product of governments and in fact a lot of economists, again, I am part Economist, think of there’s markets, there’s economies and then law comes in as something out, external and we kind of layer it on top, but I think the thing that I think is really important to recognize is that in fact, everything humans do rests on, because we’re incredibly cooperative species, right, that’s why we enjoy everything that we enjoy it’s because we’re able to organize in complex relationships and groups and all of that depends on the existence basically of a set of rules, that we all say, well, okay, if you and I are going to work on something together, we understand that we will respect each other, that we will share in our, and the product of that in a way that we’ve agreed on, that we won’t be harmed and so on.

So that basic platform of rules is essential to just humans living together in our complex ways. And I think it’s really critical to think about that rule basis as — so that’s true in all societies, whether you have law or not. Law is just sort of the —  eventually we evolved systems of those kinds of rules that better achieve our goals, allow us to be even more complex and achieve even more is sort of from an economic and social perspective, and I really think it’s — so I use the language of infrastructure to talk about those rules, and I say like, yeah, the Invisible Platform because I think it’s important for us to recognize that that’s what we’re building on, and that’s why if we don’t get it right, if it’s not available, if it’s not well-adapted to the environment, everybody is walking on quicksand, everybody is walking on a broken platform. We can’t build the way we want to build.

So I think it’s critical to see the role of law at that very fundamental. It’s underneath everything we do, because I think we need to take it very seriously. We need to recognize what’s working and not working about and understand why it matters so much to test about everything we do, everybody on the planet, every activity we are trying to accomplish, we need to understand how this platform is working and how to make it work better.

Ralph Baxter: Right, and as you talk about in the book, there always have been rules and they were created informally in different settings through history. It’s like a lot of things about our modern world. We forget that communication work differently and rules work differently before we had a formal infrastructure.

Now, we have a formal infrastructure that we’ve created. It’s more and more in everybody’s life. There’s more law than ever before, more regulation, data makes it more complicated to comply with the law. There’s all of that, but then there’s a world ahead and we’ll come to a little bit later, but there’s a world ahead that’s going to get way more complicated and harder to understand, harder to manage and our infrastructure needs to deal with that as well.

So let’s turn now to applying some of your thinking to the actual world of the formal legal system, legal infrastructure that we have in the United States. I know that for your book you did a lot of research about how well law is working today, and I would like to ask you about three different dimensions of that.

(00:10:00)

The first is access to justice, the consumer, the ordinary person getting the legal service he or she needs; how’s that going?

Gillian Hadfield: It’s not going well. The basic answer there is that for the ordinary person even in affluent countries, like our own, doesn’t have access to very much of the platform of those rules.

So the statistics would tell us, there is not very careful statistics, but I think it’s a very safe estimate that it’s at least 80% of the population that effectively has no access to legal resources for advice about signing a lease agreement or trying to work out a family dispute or respond to an immigration challenge or eviction notice.

I suspect the numbers are, and for example in, I think there was a study in Utah in their courts, this is about representation in courts now. 93% of the matters that came through civil and family court had one, at least one party who was unrepresented the entire way through that matter.

Ralph Baxter: Right.

Gillian Hadfield: So the numbers are staggering and effectively that means that as you sort of described this what I called the Law Thick Environment, it’s all around us. Everything we are doing is shaped by a set of rules, increasingly complex rules, rules that you and I can read and may understand, maybe we would argue about what does this one mean and what does that one mean.

And I think it’s really important to connect with the fact that for the vast majority of the population, they don’t know what those rules are, they don’t know how to operate in these systems, they have to, they don’t have choice in many cases. So this is not about, hey, you know, we’re just going to litigate over the slip and fall in the grocery store. This is my entire life that’s structured by this, but I don’t have the capacity to ask somebody with expertise what will happen if I sign that, how do I see my kids? It’s staggering really the lack of access.

Ralph Baxter: The statistics are staggering and there is lots of different studies and we can debate exactly what the numbers are. But I think it’s fair to say, most normal citizens don’t have access to the legal service they need in our country, and it isn’t just the poorest, although the poorer you are the worse it is, and as you say, the challenge includes both, just even recognizing that there is a legal issue. It would be a mistake to think that the issue is only the access to justice.

So you did research with general counsel of major companies about their experience with legal service, and what did you find from that research?

Gillian Hadfield: Yeah. So I told you how I got into this with, sort of my own experience, but I didn’t want to write about myself. So even though I was sort of motivated by that, I actually did start just by saying, how are these — the economics that’s working and early on started talking to general counsel at some of our biggest most innovative companies. This is in the mid-2000s, this is before the crash, the financial crisis, so at Google and at Cisco and so on.

And the thing that was so striking there was that by and large they said they found the same thing. I didn’t talk about my family situation or my own personal experience, but I found that they were saying much the same thing. It’s too expensive. It’s not solving my problem, lawyers are not really helping me solve or get to where I need to get to and I would really like good legal guidance in a very, very complex environment. They were not saying, I don’t feel like I need lawyers, these were lawyers that I was speaking to, but they were saying I just can’t seem to find out there in the market, the type of legal help that I need, which is really quite stunning.

Ralph Baxter: Having spent 40 years in Biglaw I understand why it can be that way and you understand is what we’re about to talk about the role that the regulation plays in causing it to be so, what you found that the general counsel would say, I don’t have other alternatives even though the service that I’m getting measured by how I feel about it, isn’t satisfactory. They know the law, they can find the courthouse, they are really good at it.

I mean, before I go further, neither you nor I is involved in — has any interest in bashing lawyers. They’re very smart, they’re well-intentioned, they’re hard-working, they are not the problem, the problem is the system.

So we’re about 10 minutes in, let’s take our first break for a word from our sponsors and then we’ll continue.

[Music]

Advertiser: Trying to cut costs, you are not alone. In today’s climate a five-figure eDiscovery bill per month is steep. Don’t pay that. Use Logikcull to reduce expense and control your discovery process. Get started today for only $250 per matter and they will waive migration costs from competing platforms. For more information, visit logikcull.com/ltn.

(00:15:08)

[Music]

Ralph Baxter: Welcome back. We are here today with Gillian Hadfield talking about Reinventing Law.

So, Gillian, you used an expression that we need to reinvent law, what do you mean by that?

Gillian Hadfield: So, the reason that I sort of go back to the very core idea that there are — rules are at this basic platform and that they support everything that we do, is because we’ve come to define law as the way we do it, the way we do it now. Law is what governments produce, law is what lawyers do, law is lots of text, lots of language, contracts that look like this and so on.

And so what I wanted to do was to really say, look, there’s this fundamental function that law is performing, it’s critical. I think it’s basically — it undergirds everything else we do. And what’s happened is that the particular way in which we’ve produced law and priced law and developed legal expertise and built this legal infrastructure, that’s what’s grown out of touch with what we really need it to be doing.

So reinventing law for me is about saying, okay, it’s not about getting rid of law, it really is about figuring out how to get law to be more responsive to what it is we needed to do in a more complex, advanced world and even to be able to do things that as they say, the lack of access that the ordinary person has, that’s been with us for a very long time.

So it’s not just about, hey, it’s a much more technologically advanced world. So the reinventing of law is to say what is it law needs to do fundamentally? What are other ways we could do that?

Ralph Baxter: Right. And this is one of the ways in which your book is so helpful, because when you read the history of law on the way that it has emerged over time and its application in different settings and so on, it’s easier to see the big picture that we need to solve and it’s easier to liberate yourself from the focus on the rules as we know them.

So I’ve heard you outline four different things that we need to do to reinvent law, my version. So one is to think big and that’s I think where you were starting, just to think about — well do tell me, what does that mean in this context, think big?

Gillian Hadfield: Yeah, well, I think it’s think big in the sense of — first of all, take law very, very seriously and then also be willing to reinvent from the ground up. To let go of whatever it is we do as law must look the way we do it now. All we can do is refine that particular model.

So I think the think big is and this is sort of just a — this is a classic technique for innovation, which is, at least explore what are some very, very different ways in which we could accomplish the same objectives?

So, yeah, be willing to throw it out. Now, you’re probably going to put stuff back in, but at least start off by really willing to say, what do we need it to do, what are the other ways we could do that?

Ralph Baxter: Right. I find myself saying a lot. We don’t need change around the edges, we need fundamental change and we’ve got to see the big picture.

Second you say, we need diversity. Now, in most of the time when we are talking about law and law firms we think about diversity in the very worthy context of more people of color, more women and so on and those are very worthy and necessary objectives, but you’re talking about diversity beyond that. What do you mean by “diversity” here?

Gillian Hadfield: So what I mean by “diversity” in this context is diversity of ways of thinking about our problems and possible solutions and I think one of the reasons that our legal systems have really failed to innovate in response to the needs of the people who use them. So that’s whether it’s in that ordinary person context and it’s too expensive or it’s the big corporate context and it’s, hey, I need help in a different way than you are providing it, because the world looks very different.

What you’re seeing there is a system that’s not being responsive. I am an economist to its market, it’s not responding to demand. I think the core reason for that is we have a very, very close system, we have a very homogeneous system. Everybody — we’ve set it up — so that everybody who’s involved in delivering legal services, writing legislation, judging cases, et cetera we’ve all been educated in the same way. We’ve all probably read the first same cases. We did read the same cases in first year contract law, which I teach. We use the same frameworks. We pass the same type of exams.

(00:20:02)

And so that’s a tremendous lack of diversity in ways of thinking, that’s the — and diversity of thinking is just critical to innovation. You need somebody who comes in and says well, I never thought about this before, but I have got this other little bit of expertise and how come we haven’t thought about it this way, why haven’t we tried that, and I think that’s been a core reason for the lack of innovation in law.

Ralph Baxter: Right. And this applies both to innovation in the regulations, innovation in thinking about the big picture, but it’s applicable every day of the week in solving particular issues of our clients, whether it’s in a big law firm or it’s in public interest law firm or someplace else.

All right, third is feedback.

Gillian Hadfield: Yeah. So this is like — so anybody who has worked in a startup or in any kind of inventive environment, what you are really trying to do is get feedback from your user or from your customer about what’s working for you, what’s not working for you. If you are cut off from that feedback, if you never learn how well is my product or service working for you, you can’t figure out better ways to do it.

And again, because we have been a very closed environment, we don’t get a lot of feedback from the end user who is both the client, but also the public and those who are affected by what we are doing in the legal system more generally, we just don’t get that kind of feedback, and what you need is feedback with clout. It’s not just the survey result, it’s I am taking my business elsewhere because you are not solving my problem.

So go to the general counsel that I spoke to, obviously have huge legal budgets and the capacity to hire the best of the best. So when they say to me I can’t hire what I need, what they are finding is not that they can’t go from excellent law firm A to excellent law firm B, which of course they can and lawyers experience it as highly competitive at that level, what they are saying is I can’t go to the entirely different approach to this problem that wasn’t trained with a JD and in the law school and takes the bar exam, that basically the product or service they are getting from even our best, best, best lawyers kind of all looks the same. So that’s that lack of feedback where it says — they don’t have a good threat that says sorry, I am taking my problem to the engineers, I am taking it to the graphic designers, I am taking it to the organizational psychologist instead to solve.

Ralph Baxter: And it’s a different idea than the conventional idea that lawyers operate with normally, which as you say is like a survey, a casual conversation about how is it going, that doesn’t ask these really big questions and that leaves clients dissatisfied in the way you were with the experience you had as an individual years ago and in the way the different GCs that you interviewed were dissatisfied in the way that they would respond to you in the context of your conversation, but they wouldn’t share that with the law firms because the law firms can’t do it.

The last issue is investment, which I think is the most important, just talk a little bit about why it’s important to have investment at all levels.

Gillian Hadfield: Right. So these are hard problems, understanding how to help more people. So let’s think about the COVID situation right now, I mean if you want to think about an absolute avalanche of — it’s one thing to pass laws that say you are entitled to this eviction relief or income support, but it’s another to figure out how to get that help to people. That’s a hard problem, right? What’s the best solution to that? What’s the best solution to giving the GC who is getting off the plane in China or Indonesia and says I need to negotiate this big deal, I need a quick answer on how does this — how these different proposals work for me. Those are hard problems. Those are what I say the — you need as much innovation in how to solve those problems as you do in the underlying economic and social relationships.

And when you need new solutions you have to have investment, what I like to say risk capital there to explore and realize that if we knew what the answer was, then we would just build it. What does investment do for us? Investment, especially from — risk investment, it supports the cost of exploring new solutions and going out and saying well, let’s try something different. Let’s see what might work. Let’s see how well this works.

(00:24:49)

I think this is something that sort of in my conversations about innovation in legal, I think this is the thing that even the people who are the biggest supporters of the idea that we need to do things differently, they had a very hard time seeing why do we need investment and risk capital in law, it’s labor intensive. And I was saying because you need somebody to keep the lights on while you are trying version 1 and version 2 and version 3 and version 4 until you get to the one that really works well. If it was a short path, you don’t care, but we are a long path and you need a lot of — you need investment to support that.

Ralph Baxter: A word that fits to this is experiment. You need to try different things, just as you said, and every entrepreneur knows that you are going to fail a fair amount of the time. In fact, more often than not you are going to fail, not fail the client, not leave the client in the lurch, but fail in the wherewithal that you are building in order to serve a client better. And you are exactly right about the misunderstanding people have about capital and investment in law.

It’s time here to take our second break, we will take it quickly and then we will return.

[Music]

Advertiser: Increase productivity and profitability through acumass.com. Acumass provides cost-effective and reliable annuities management while keeping customer satisfaction at the helm of the action. With 40 years of excellence in the field of IP renewals, Acumass understands how quickly annuities can become burdensome for clients who would prefer their focus elsewhere. Contact [email protected] or visit acumass.com to discover how you can benefit from a management solution tailored to your needs.

[Music]

Ralph Baxter: So we are back with Gillian Hadfield, and as I said at the beginning, I would like for Gillian to talk with us about the regulatory reform that is underway in Utah and other states, but at Utah is the farthest advanced. So I am going to skip through something that if we had more time we could talk about, but Gillian having studied the way law works and the regulations work has concluded and I agree with her that the way we regulate law in the United States causes some of the problems.

So I just want to ask her one question, how does the current regulatory format contribute to the shortcomings of the legal infrastructure today?

Gillian Hadfield: Yeah. So let’s think about the key reasons that we don’t see a lot of innovation in law; a lack of diversity in thinking, a lack of feedback from the customer who can actually walk away and say I need a better solution and a lack of investment and risk capital there, all of those are a consequence of a regulatory environment that says look, anybody who wants to provide any form of legal goods and services has to have this — has to be a member of a bar in the state in which those services are provided and in Canada, where I now live, it’s on a provincial basis, but the same model.

So that’s what generates the lack of diversity. Everybody has the same — it’s all lawyers, lawyers everywhere, with the same training and the same mindset. I mean I always say look, my main job as a law professor is to train people so that they can always predict what the other lawyer is going to say, because the thing that we all — that’s what we do is we think the same way and that’s what we are — that’s a very helpful thing in some ways, because if we are doing dispute resolution, we can predict what is the other side thinking and resolve, but it does produce this homogeneous environment. So our regulatory environment has everybody providing any kind of legal help has to be trained in this way.

But then what we say in addition with our legal regulation is they not only have to be trained in the same way, they also have to operate and provide their services with a particular business model and that business model is they have to provide it only in partnership; now we can have sort of limited liability corporations, but effectively partnerships with other members of the same profession. They can’t take any investment from anybody who is not a lawyer. They can’t — now, what lawyers call this, the legal regulations call this share fees, but in the rest of the economy we just call those incentive contracts, you share profits and revenues, you can’t have any of those kinds of contracts with any other types of providers of services or technology. And all of that says we are stuck in this business model that simply we don’t see in many other places in the economy and that it’s just simply not able to scale, to take advantage of technology and just does not lead to innovation.

And so this is why I think the absolutely most critical thing we can do to open up our legal system so that we can get innovation and we can get legal services and goods in ways that serve the needs of clients from the ordinary individual straight through to the global corporation much better is by opening up that business model.

(00:30:09)

Ralph Baxter: So you have been involved with a state that has decided it agrees. Now, not all of our listeners will understand, but the rules in the United States are not federal, they are not national, they are state by state. In the States almost always it’s the State Supreme Court, not the legislature that sets the rules. So in Utah, with very forward-thinking leadership and partnership of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court and the President of the Utah Bar, they worked with you and others and came to a creative solution that they are putting in practice as we speak. So could you describe what Utah has decided to do?

Gillian Hadfield: Yes. So Utah is building a new regulator and this is — so as everybody knows, so ostensibly the regulator is the State Supreme Court. As a practical matter it’s Bar Associations that are doing that regulation. And so first of all notice that our existing regulatory regimes, they license lawyers and therefore there is absolutely no way for an entity that isn’t a lawyer, like a tech company or a bank or a church or an union or a civic group to be a provider of — they can’t become a licensed provider of legal services.

So the key message that I conveyed to a group of judges in the, gosh, I think it was the spring of 2018 was okay, so we have been through about 20 years of trying to change the rules governing lawyers to say let lawyers share fees or let them take outside investment, I said that’s really not the main issue. The main issue is we need a regulatory regime so that entities and organizations other than individual lawyers can be licensed to provide services. So I said look, let’s just build that regulator.

And to my surprise Justice Deno Himonas and John Lund, who was then President of the Bar Association said you know, we are ready to start talking about this and they were really serious. So that’s what we set out to do is just to say what would it look like to build that regulator.

And so the regulator is now set as an Office of the State Supreme Court. It’s actually been put into effect a little early to try and provide some COVID related response, but we are still in the process of — and so what’s going to happen with that regulator is it’s getting described as a sandbox, but it’s really — it’s a sandbox for the regulator. The idea is to — they have created a regulatory regime, where providers other than conventional JD trained Bar-admitted lawyers can be licensed to provide legal services in the state.

And a key piece of that, so I say the sandbox part of it is there is a two year period over which the new regulator will be figuring out how to effectively regulate, and a key piece of that regulatory approach is to say, so why do we regulate. We regulate to protect consumers. And what are we trying to do? We are trying to make sure that the services that people purchase through these new providers make them better off than they are now.

So like the first line of the regulatory model is when somebody applies to be a licensed provider in a sandbox, what will somebody get if they don’t have this service. If this is not allowed to operate, how likely are they to get the right answer when they read their own eviction notice? Does this make them better off than that? Then if so, then that’s the basis on what you should be approved and that’s really the big move.

Ralph Baxter: And it’s a very big move and what you were just getting into, the principles that Utah outlined for this Innovation Commission, the new regulator to take into account include comparing what the outcome would be for a consumer under the proposal in front of them to what the outcome is today, knowing that today 75%, 80%, some number are not going to have anything and then assessing how much risk does this idea, does this process, does this set of people, whatever it is, how much risk does that create, let’s evaluate that and then license them if we think that it all adds up to a manageable responsible idea, experiment, see how it goes for a period of time and if it works well and safely throughout everything it’s designed to be safe for the consumer, then it will be licensed to go on permanently and if not it won’t.

(00:34:58)

Gillian Hadfield: Yes, right. And I think the key thing here is — a couple of things is — a point to emphasize is that, I think when we have looked at the possibility of providing alternative types of services, lawyers I think quite naturally will compare it to, but that won’t be as good as having a lawyer do it, and in many cases that’s exactly right, but that isn’t a good answer, because that’s like saying well, this fancy BMW with the self-driving components and the lane checker and all of that, the auto parking, that’s so much better for everybody. It’s like everybody should have that. Well, maybe everybody should, but we can’t afford to do that.

And given the expense of our structures we know that people aren’t getting anything. So as you say it, we want to make sure people are reasonably safe and so you are not going to allow this in domains where there is — we are not putting this at the death penalty cases, we are not putting this into those high stake cases, but we are going to make somebody better off if they are showing up in court regardless alone on a child custody or a child support matter, on an eviction matter, an employment matter, they are trying to make sure that they resolve differences or difficulties in their small businesses better. We just need to make sure that they are reasonably safe relative to what’s going to happen without that, which is for most people they are going to have to muddle through on their own.

Ralph Baxter: Right. And the genius of this plan that has been developed with your assistance and the assistance of Lucy Ricca and a number of other really dedicated people is that it can accommodate facts and respond to a solution. So there are as you say some things you really do need a lawyer and solutions can be created that give you the lawyering that you need and not more than you need. You have a cost that fits to the stakes of the client, what the client can afford and so on.

So we are just about to run out of time. Let me just say about Utah, all of the information about what Utah is doing is available online. It’s very clear and very well presented by the Utah Supreme Court and there is a report that Gillian helped write that sets up the case for the reforms.

One other reference I want to give the listeners before we leave, on the whole question of regulatory reform and regulation of law in the United States, Gillian and Deborah Rhode wrote an article for the Hastings Law Journal in 2016, which is another wonderful resource for anyone interested in regulation, because it helps you understand all the different models that one might pursue if one wants to engage in reform and it has a lengthy discussion of how what England has done and how that is faring.

Gillian, this went by like a rocket. I wish we had more time. Thank you so much for joining us. I hope you can come back again soon. There are so many other things I would like our listeners to hear from you. But this podcast is dedicated to exploring how law works and how to make it work better and I can’t think of a better guest and discussion than the one we just had. Thank you for joining us.

Gillian Hadfield: Thanks Ralph, it’s been terrific.

Ralph Baxter: And thank all of you for listening.

If you liked what you heard, please rate us on Google, Apple, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts, and while you are at it you can recommend us to your friends, especially those who aren’t lawyers, because we are trying to reach an audience that goes beyond the usual suspects and talk to people for whom law matters, but who themselves are not lawyers.

And until next time, this is Ralph Baxter for Law Technology Now,

[Music]

Outro: If you would like more information about what you have heard today, please visit legaltalknetwork.com. Subscribe via iTunes and RSS. Find us on Twitter and Facebook or download our free Legal Talk Network app in Google Play and iTunes.

The views expressed by the participants of this program are their own and do not represent the views of, nor are they endorsed by Legal Talk Network, its officers, directors, employees, agents, representatives, shareholders and subsidiaries. None of the content should be considered legal advice. As always, consult a lawyer.

[Music]