Lawyers’ Role in the Making and Undoing of the A2J Crisis

Episode Notes

Transcript

Nora Freeman Engstrom:

The access to justice crisis doesn’t just happen. This fact that in 75% of cases, at least one side is self-represented. The fact the vast majority of Americans who suffer illegal wrong do not seek to vindicate their rights. This is not just the way things are. This is what the profession created.

Announcer:

Equal access to justice is a core American value. In each episode of Talk Justice, an An LSC Podcast will explore ways to expand access to justice and illustrate why it is important to the legal community, business government, and the general public. Talk Justice is sponsored by the Leaders’ Council of the Legal Services Corporation.

Cat Moon:

Hello and welcome to Talk Justice. I’m Cat Moon, your host for this episode. As a legal educator, my work explores the intersection of technology and access to justice. As do my conversations on this podcast today, I’m joined by two people who are truly trailblazers when it’s comes to thinking creatively and intentionally about how we can redesign existing systems to expand access to justice. Nora Freeman Engstrom is the Ernest w McFarland professor of law at Stanford Law School. She is a nationally recognized expert in both tort law and legal ethics. Her recent work focuses on access to justice, including how to make the civil justice system easier for both represented and self-represented individuals to navigate. David Freeman Engstrom is the LSVF Professor and Law at Stanford, and his current work focuses on access to justice in the millions of low dollar but highly consequential cases including debt collection, eviction, foreclosure and child support actions that shape the lives of Americans. Each year together, the inks interims are co-directors of the Deborah l Rodie Center on the Legal Profession, which is a premier academic center working to shape the future of legal services and access to the legal system. Welcome Nora and David to Talk. Justice. It is great to have you guys here. Thank you for joining me.

Nora Freeman Engstrom:

It’s wonderful to be here.

Cat Moon:

Yay. Yay. I’m so glad that this worked out. And I will say on the front end, there is way too much for us to cover than we can in this one episode, but we’re going to do our darnedest to cover as many bases as we can because you all are just doing such interesting and important work. So I’m just going to pick a place to kick off, and this is a very current project. You guys have just launched it in fact. So your center, along with Stanford’s Legal Design Lab has just launched a partnership with the LA County Courts and it is centered on, and I’m quoting here, I wanted to get this precise researching, designing and implementing innovative evidence-based approaches to reduce barriers to participation in the judicial process into improve access to justice for all court users. So please tell us more about this project and how it is that it is happening now at this point in time.

David Freeman Engstrom:

Great. Well thanks Cat. So this project, it’s a really exciting project. We like to think of it as a first of its kind collaboration between a major court system on the one hand, so the LA Superior Court, which is by the way, the largest trial court in the country and a university research team, which as you noted is made up of folks from our roadie center on the legal profession, which nor and I co-Direct and then also Margaret Hagen’s Legal Design Lab here at Stanford. And it’s first of its kind because there’s really just a wide open portfolio here to improve the court’s operations, especially its digital pathways serving self-represented litigants, but that’s not all we’re doing with the court. So it’s really exciting as to why now. I think the project is happening now because of the visionary leadership of the court, and that includes presiding judge Esner soon to be presiding Judge Tapia and then court CEO, David Slaton.

And they really want to continue LA Superior’s tradition of leadership in this space. I’d been working with David for a couple of years on various projects when he was CEO of the courts in Texas. He was part of a group of states that we gathered together for something called the Filing Fairness Project. And so I got started working with him there. He’s also an advisor on the A LI project I’m leading. And then I met Presiding Judge Ner giving a speech at the California Judges Association on courts and ai. And within a couple of weeks my team from the ROADIE Center and Margaret were down in LA hatching the collaboration.

Cat Moon:

That is so exciting to hear about. There are so many threads in there. I would love to pull through one just to point out, leadership makes all the difference, right? When you have folks in a position of leadership who really see the opportunity and the potential you can make things like this happen. So that is phenomenal. I’m curious to know what are the ideal outcomes that you see coming from this project? How would you describe those if you’re going to kind of idealize that and then work back to make sure that happens?

David Freeman Engstrom:

So we just finished what you could think of as a diagnostic phase of the project to really try to understand in a granular way what’s working and what isn’t at the court across all their high volume dockets. But we’ve paid particular attention to UD, to unlawful detainer and eviction. And so we’ve collected tons of data. We think we have the richest data set ever assembled on eviction law, including sources of legal help upstream down to features of cases, procedures used in cases and case outcomes. We’ve also collected a lot of qualitative data. We’ve done all sorts of focus groups with legal aid leaders and with court staff and with law librarians. We’ve interviewed tons of court users, maybe I just mentioned that, but so we’ve collected just tons and tons of data. The diagnostic phase, I guess is now over and now we’re really thinking about, okay, so what outcomes do we want to focus on and how do we want to focus on them?

How are we going to try to move the dial and make this system more accessible and work better for everyone? And so I can roll through some of the outcomes that I think we’re going to be focused on. I mean, one of the obvious ones is we want to try to boost meaningful participation among self-represented litigants. This is a part of the civil justice system where adversarial is, which is one of the real pillars of American law has just so thoroughly broken down. And so I think that means reducing default judgment rates above all else, which are just sky high. We want to try to make the court more effective. I don’t love the word efficient. Usually when I talk about this, we want to make it more effective, better able to achieve the outcomes the court wants to achieve. And that means reducing staff time while increasing the accuracy of the various tasks that are performed.

We want to build the court’s data analytic capacity. LA Superior may be one of the best in the land on data, and yet they’re still way behind a lot of certainly private sector institutions, but even plenty of public sector institutions. And so we’re trying to work with the court to do that. And then maybe as important as all of them is we want to try to rationalize what is a really caleal services marketplace in la and we want to try to find better ways to get self-represented, litigants connected to appropriate legal help pathways. So how do you do that? Then what do we actually now that we’re stepping out of that diagnostic phase and turning to discussion of actual interventions that we might try to mount together with the court? Currently we’re talking to the courts leadership around six possibilities. Some are pretty straightforward like trying to improve a bunch of litigant facing documents within the system.

So that includes the courtesy notice that goes out to every tenant who receives an eviction notice. It includes a better stipulated judgment form than is currently in use, but many of the others align with the various forms of automation that I think some of the more innovative courts around the country are starting to think about and starting to develop. And so we’ve started to think through what we think of as a compliance tool that can perform in an automated way, what some courts including LA are starting to do manually by hand with human staff, which are sometimes called document prove ups to ensure that default judgment is legally appropriate before it’s entered against a no-show defendant. We think that process, which takes human stuff about 30 minutes per case, can be done in an automated way and more accurately. And we want to try to do that.

We’re working on what we’re calling a triage referral tool. That’s something that would sit on the court’s website and also be made available in lots of other places, including maybe a QR code for instance, on a courtesy notice. And what it would do is it would elicit preferences from self-represented litigants about what types of legal help, what types of legal services they might want, and it allows them to self sortt into different pathways based on that. So it’s not a court making explicit referrals that would violate UPL type restrictions, but it helps those litigants to self sortt more appropriately into the types of help they think they want based on their own judgment about their technical or other capacities. Finally, we’re working on what we think of as a generative AI based courthouse front door where a self-represented litigant can come and enter a plain language description of a civil legal problem they’re having, or a plain language description of what they need to do in a case that’s already going and get back actionable information, access to needed services such as form filling and form filing tools, help with thinking about trial that might be approaching whatever it might be.

And so this is a really exciting suite of things. Again, we’re still very much in conversation with the senior leadership as to which of these we’re going to do and which we’re going to do first. But it is really exciting and it kind of runs the gamut in terms of the ways that courts are thinking about right now, how they can better serve self-represented litigants.

Cat Moon:

As you were listing all of that, I thought it’s a really comprehensive list that really starts with very bread and butter and then all the way to the other end of the spectrum, how can you leverage generative ai? I had a feeling that was going to come up and we might circle back around that. So just in listening to you in the past couple of minutes, I have confirmed that we will have a follow-up conversation about this project and only this project and probably multiple conversations because there’s just so much there and I hope we can follow along with you all on this journey and learn from it. But you mentioned a few letters that I want to pull out from there. The letters UPL, so all the things you’re describing and the focus on self-represented litigants just hit home. The fact that there are so many folks who are never going to get the help, the one-to-one full help from a lawyer.

There are so many legal problems. One research from Isles, more than 260 million legal problems a year experienced by 55 million Americans, and sounds like a lot of them are actually happening in LA given the size of that court and not enough lawyers. So creating these systems, creating this access, and perhaps creating new forms of help because you mentioned generative ai and so there might be new things that come out of this, but we are dealing with a crisis, a civil justice crisis that has its roots in things that lawyers did many, many years ago. And I would love to turn to that for a moment because I’ve always thought that really understanding how we got to a place where we are can really help us make much better decisions going forward as we design new systems. And it sounds like that’s what you all are actively doing in la and we happen to have an expert with us, Nora, on exactly that topic.

So you’ve recently co-authored this really thought provoking article, Nora, and I want to read a quote from the introduction. I would like to just read the whole introduction because I just thought it was just Chef’s kiss, but I’m going to read this quote in theBar relentless campaign to Shutter auto Clubs, not because they harmed members, but rather because they threatened lawyers’ livelihoods. We unearth direct proof that today’s UPL bans, which continue to stymie the delivery of affordable legal services have fundamentally rotten roots. And this research is absolutely fascinating. So if you could give us an overview of some of the conclusions that you’ve drawn from this research, and I’m thinking about what steps we can take as we’re moving forward as you all are designing these solutions based on what we know how we got here.

Nora Freeman Engstrom:

Yeah, Cat, I agree with you so fully that we can’t look ahead unless we understand how we got to where we are. And so I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the past few years. David and I wrote another piece, the making of the A two J crisis, trying to understand, which was kind of a light touch, it’s just a short piece. But then James Stone, my former student and I have written this really long piece called Auto Clubs and the lost origins of the Access to Justice Crisis. And it will be coming out we think in October in the Yale Law Journal. And it starts with this kind of interesting finding that I had hit upon 15 years ago that I had read an unpublished dissertation that had two pages devoted to these auto clubs that settled car wreck claims. And that struck me as strange because I belong to aaa and they do not settle Car wreck claims, they hand out maps, they help with roadside assistance, they’ll charge your car battery, but there’s no lawyer that comes with my AAA membership.

And so I made a mental note to circle back and it took me 15 years to do it, but James and I have done that. And what we found is in the 1910 and 1920s, the AAA or the equivalent of aaa, they were very popular. There were at least 1100 clubs in existence throughout the United States. They had large memberships and they provided wraparound legal services, both criminal help and civil help. And even on the criminal side of the docket, it wouldn’t just that they would defend you in a criminal charge, they would defend you all through appeal and even a habeas proceeding. And on the civil side of the docket, they would serve both as plaintiff’s counsel and as defense counsel. And these firms or the auto clubs employed full on lawyers. So you are getting a full on lawyer with the cost of your auto club membership.

And by the way, the Auto Club membership was cheap and adjusted for inflation. It was only $170 for all these services including these wraparound legal services. So what happened? So James and I and James traveled around the country going to archives every basically scrap of paper we could find in a number of court offices were very generous with us and going into their dusty court records centers and finding their old court records. And what we found is in the 1930s under the shadow of the Great Depression lawyers decided to kill off the competition. They just decided to do that, and they decided to do it even while sometimes publicly saying that they were doing it because these entities were a threat to lawyers wellbeing. Another quote by this guy, Richard Merrick. Richard Merrick, we loved in the course of our research, he always said the quiet part out loud.

It was one of those, whenever he gave us speech, you were like, oh my gosh, you just said that. Or in briefs, he said that they needed to shut down auto clubs because they reaped the rewards of the performance of functions belonging to the lawyer. Another person from New York who led some of the litigation against auto clubs in New York said that it was a problem and they needed to shut down these corporate law providers, lest the lawyer be driven from the banquet table, at which for centuries he has had a distinguished place. And so this was not about the fact that auto clubs were hurting people. In fact, in case after Case where auto clubs were shut down, there was not even a shred of evidence, not even a hint that they were hurting folks, that the members weren’t happy with the services they received. Auto club membership was booming, suggesting quite the opposite, but instead, theBar membership was worried about threats to their livelihood and the grips of the Great Depression, and they decided to just kill them. And that’s what they did, and that’s what they did. Not just to auto clubs, but to other corporate law practitioners of the day.

Cat Moon:

This is just mind blowing. When I read the article, I was just absolutely blown away. And to your point, the quiet part out loud, it’s just, and everyone I’ve shared it with equally including people who are not lawyers and they’re like, wait, what AAA used to help people with their traffic accidents and speeding tickets? Well, I find just the fundamental structure of UPL and what I think our profession has really based its ethics. Our entire foundation of ethics is that we are protecting the public. And so it raises all kinds of hairy questions, of course. And I think at this point in time, it raises some interesting ones. I don’t know that it’s novel really, but interesting because we are now faced with this opportunity perhaps to leverage technology, emerging technology like generative AI to really empower people to help themselves in ways that tier two four has not been really easy.

Lawyers have really been able to maintain this monopoly on the provision of legal services because we’ve been able to hoard our expertise and access to information and understanding. And so specifically with generative ai, we see it behaving in ways that might make not just the information itself accessible, but actually translating to something understandable to someone who does not have legal training. So as we see this evolving, all kinds of ethical questions pop up into my brain because as a profession, we are ethically obligated to help people who can’t afford to hire a lawyer, even though that’s aspirational, not obligatory, but it’s built into it. As we see this technology evolve and as projects like the LA Courts project are actively seeking to use the technology for this purpose to connect people with help, that’s not a human, what do you see happening this tension? This is I think, where we draw the connection to knowing where we’ve come from, seeing the potential opportunities where we’re going, how can this inform us so that we can start to reverse these wrongs?

Nora Freeman Engstrom:

Yeah, so I would say one thing that just really comes out of this study for me is the access to justice crisis doesn’t just happen, right? This fact that in 75% of cases, at least one side is self-represented. The fact that the vast majority of Americans who suffer illegal wrong do not seek to vindicate their rights. This is not just the way things are. This is what the profession created. And in fact, the auto club story, I think that maybe the most provocative thing we found wasn’t just that auto clubs were doing it was that lots of folks were doing it right. You could walk into a bank and get your will. It was easy. You could belong to an organization, a neighborhood organization, and there was a group fending off of home foreclosure efforts. Your union would help you vindicate your rights in certain respects.

All these organizations were employing lawyers. And it’s all been erased and it’s all been erased for lawyer motivated reasons. So I think it does help us to see new possibilities when we think about, and just to say, I’m an turn it over to David to talk a little bit about what we call courthouse, UPL, but it helps us to see when we think about, well, you can’t do that against the law. It’s against the law that was created by lawyers for lawyers in a really self-interested way. And that I think makes it kind of all up for grabs a little bit. And it also means, in my view, I mean I am so proud to be a lawyer, unlike a lot of lawyers. I want my kids to be lawyers. I think it is such a noble profession, but I do believe that we have an obligation to clean up our own mess, and this is our mess and we have an obligation to clean it up. We created this world, we’ve profited from this world, and now we have an obligation to change this world.

Cat Moon:

I’m shaking my head so visibly and vigorously that it might just fly off my neck. But yes, I concur across the board, David.

David Freeman Engstrom:

Boy, I have so many ways I could go with this, but I guess I wanted to just note that maybe this starts to join up the past and the present and the future, but it does strike me that regulatory reform is at a really pivotal moment in its life. And for listeners who may be new to that idea, by the way, it’s like the worst slogan ever created for a movement. It could only be created by lawyers like regulatory reform. But anyway, this is the movement around the country right now to relax the usual rules that say only lawyers can practice law and only lawyers can. That’s UPL. And only lawyers can own or maybe alternatively put capitalized law firms, which is generally thought to come under that in of Rule 5.4. It’s happening everywhere and some places more than others for sure, but it’s happening in lots of places around the country right now.

But it’s at a really pivotal moment right now. My view is that the movement is starting to pull back from what’s sometimes referred to as entity-based reform, this idea that we might give entities the ability to practice law, including things like auto clubs. It’s pulling back to more role-based reforms. So things like paraprofessional reform, as is probably going to happen soon in Texas. And then also things like community justice workers, which is kind of the newest flavor of regulatory reform where you would empower legal aid groups, for instance, to oversee new types of legal services providers who aren’t fully licensed lawyers. That pullback is happening. I think entity reform, the sorts of sandbox reforms that are happening in Utah are starting to maybe get less priority in these efforts. And I think that’s a real mistake. I think we need all types of innovation. I think entities can play a role, and I think courts need to play a role as well in all of this.

And so that means thinking hard about how entities and institutions can do better to serve self-represented litigants, given the extent of the justice gap and the extent of the access to justice crisis. And I do worry that we’re at a pivotal moment and that we’re pushing hard towards maybe the low hanging fruit, the more easily achieved reforms, things like paraprofessional reform or community justice workers. And we’re actually leaving out what I think of sometimes as more thorough going entity-based reforms that, by the way, would also leave more room for software-based provision, where I think there actually is a really important role to play.

Cat Moon:

Yeah, that’s a really interesting observation because there is a range of reform happening, and I agree with you that reform needs to happen in different ways. I think of the profession kind of as a spectrum, and it needs to happen in different ways across that spectrum. And part of what makes innovation work is that you try a lot of different things to see what really has the desired impact. And so when we start pulling back from the types of experiments that we are running, we might be losing some important opportunities. So thank you for making that excellent point. I am curious, going back to the AI piece specifically. I had a conversation most recently with Dean Andrew Perlman from Suffolk about the ethics around using generative AI in the practice of law for a recent conversation for this podcast. And one thing we didn’t really dig into that I think is a follow on from this conversation, especially with regard to UPL, is there is I think a big question looming over folks who care about these particular issues.

So not everyone has this top of mind, but a lot of people do. And it’s really the idea how might generative AI help empower people to help themselves resolve these legal problems? And I think that that’s again, one of the pieces that you alluded to in the LA Courts project, but how do you think that we kind of address the UPL issues right as this technology evolves? Because I think it’s going to be really interesting to see how our profession deals with it in the scope of the current regulatory system. Because even though there are people kind of playing around the edges, and I don’t mean that lightly, but people experimenting around the edges. You refer to Utah, Arizona, there are other programs popping up around the country, but there hasn’t been a meaningful sea change. Pretty much the model rules that have been in place for a while are still the model rules in most places.

So if we see the technology and if we want to call it a platform software, however we define it, really being able to do something that we might qualify or describe as the practice of law, right? If a chatbot is able to give reliable and accurate and helpful legal advice to someone, I have a couple of questions around that. Do we have an ethical obligation to do that because it’s actually going to help a lot more people that are being helped. Right now you mentioned the 75% of matters where there’s at least one self-represented litigant. And we know that in some cases, in some jurisdictions, that number approaches 100%. And we know that 92% of legal problems experienced by low-income Americans get no meaningful help from a lawyer or anything else. But if the technology goes in this direction and we actually can train it, shape it, we can make choices that make it safe and reliable and accurate and accessible, how does this intersect with our current structure and how might it give us an opportunity to right some of these wrongs?

Nora Freeman Engstrom:

It’s such an interesting question. And I would say the first thing I would say is I do think that there’s hope for technology, but I don’t think we should, just as David was saying, we should be taking a yes and approach. It’s also the case that 31 million Americans have gotten help through CVS minute clinics for their medical care. Why don’t we have anything like that for law? It sure seems like it would be useful. It used to be you could go into a bank and get a will. Why can’t we do that anymore? So I’ll move that now to this side, but I do think we shouldn’t. I think it’s so easy. Technology is so seductive to think like, okay, it’s going to be technology. And I don’t think it should just be technology anymore than I think it should just be community justice workers any more than, I think it should just be entity level regulation.

But in terms of the technology piece, I have some cautious optimism, but it is really cautious right now. The legal advice you get on the internet is not good. And I don’t think that’s going to change anytime soon because Chad GPT or whatever it is, is going to be pulling from the internet and as the national center for state courts, it coined the term sea of junk. And so self-represented litigants are just going to be drowning in a sea of junk. And by the way, all the hallucinations that folks are getting so up in arms about overwhelmingly, the folks who are doing that are not lawyers, it’s self-represented litigants, and they’re doing the best they can, but they’re drowning in the sea of junk. And so I do think that there’s some possibility here to really make a difference, but it’s going to need to be a mediator. We’ve got to send a life raft or a life jacket, however you want to do it, to help save people from the sea of junk. And I think that’s role that maybe courthouses are well equipped to play.

David Freeman Engstrom:

So if I could jump in there for a second, Cat, I have thought for the past year or more that we as a profession are devoting way too much mind space to the questions around legal hallucinations. That’s where so much of the thinking is when I talk to judicial conferences and judicial councils, that’s what they want to talk about. And I think that is such a side issue. I think we’ve dealt with this before. I think when we first started outsourcing and offshoring legal work to places like India, there was a similar panic about what this meant, whether we needed bespoke new legal ethical rules to handle it. We even had something like a panic when Westlaw and Lexus first came about when we first had access to real online legal research tools. I think too much mindspace is being devoted to it. I think the question for the next five to 10 years is going to be what Nora and I are starting to refer to as courthouse UPL.

And we frankly have, we have an article underway with that exact title, and we think that given the way the legal tech marketplace is evolving or not evolving, I wonder whether the private legal tech sector will ever be able to serve very many self-represented litigants. The challenges are, the economic challenges are just so hard there. You have a group of people who might only need legal services once and who have a very limited ability to pay. I wonder if legal tech is going to be the answer. And I wonder just how much generative AI as applied by the legal tech industry is actually going to be able to ease the access to justice crisis where it’s most acute. And so there’s also the sea of junk concern, right? This idea that Americans now have access to something that looks an awful lot like legal advice, and it’s basically free.

Some of it’s quite good, a lot of it is really bad. That’s the sea of junk. The National Center of state courts was just brilliant in coining that term and putting out a tiny chat about it. Given all of this, I think Nora and I both think that courts might be, the answer might be the way forward, especially when we’re talking about that particular segment of the civil justice system where so many people go without representation and have a choice between a sea of junk or a legal tech marketplace that may or may not ever really be robust. If that’s true, then courts might be the real players here. They might be the real institutions. By the way. They also might be one of the few remaining authoritative sources of legal information within this very complicated ecosystem. And if so, then courthouse UPL is going to be huge because for years of course, courts I think rightly have been concerned about impartiality and neutrality.

Court staff have been quite concerned about UPL laws, which of course apply, maybe not to judges, but certainly to court staff. When we talk to this court staff in the LA Superior Court, they’re inundated with referral requests and requests for information and they can’t do it. And so I think courts all around the country right now are looking at generative AI tools and thinking, can we build court hosted technology tools that provide information maybe right up to the line of advice and can provide real help to self-represented litigants? And that may be the power of the real power and the real place where we can leverage generative AI on behalf of self-represented litigants

Cat Moon:

A brilliant place to place that, especially if we’re looking at the existing system. And where can the greatest bang for the buck the most impact happen in the existing system? Absolutely. And I’ve seen legal aid organizations around the country, they’re creating chatbots that are starting to do things like this. So they’re getting very close to that line of giving legal advice, but they are making legal information much more accessible and understandable for folks. And I’m so curious about the sea of junk because if we look at UPL, it really provides only two options to folks. It’s either you hire a lawyer or you get lucky enough to be one of the very few people who get legal aid help if you’re poor enough. And in Tennessee, I think there’s fewer than two legal aid lawyers for every 20,000 people who qualify, right? That’s my jurisdiction.

That’s why I know that number off the top of my head. So the other option is that you represent yourself, you just kind of go it alone. So really we are just telling people this sea of junk is your option at this point because we can’t really exercise control over the autonomy people have once they are not afforded a lawyer either because of price or they’re not poor enough or what have you. So I am just so curious about how we can leverage courts to kind of wrangle the sea of junk and create access that again, makes it accurate and accessible and safe. I think that’s going to be a big challenge for us is deciding how we’re going to play in that space. Right? We just going to try to shut things down because we’re still trying to shut down legal zoom. I think just a few months ago, some lawyers in New Jersey sued LegalZoom again to shut them down as practicing law.

So just so much opportunity. I just keep coming back to a point you made and talking about the auto clubs. Nora is those lawyers at that time made choices about how we were going to control this market and it was choice. And so now we’re in a position hopefully to make some different choices and kudos to both of you for doing such important work. You both have just an extraordinary ability to do this important scholarly work. And at the same time, you are working on these very practical boots on the ground projects that are really hopefully going to serve as models and inspiration for folks around the country. But no pressure, no pressure that everyone is watching the amazing work that you are doing. Well, we’re ending our time together, and I would just like to invite you both if you have any closing thoughts to share anywhere you’d like to point for new information, just anything you would like to share before we conclude today.

Nora Freeman Engstrom:

I’ll just say you ended with, it’s what I call the two door problem that we right now in the United States are forcing people into one of two doors. You can have a lawyer for more than $300 an hour per a second year associate according to the US Attorney General’s office statistics. Or you can go it a loan, you decide. And where else in our society do we have only two choices? That’s like saying you can walk or you can drive your own car. It doesn’t make any sense to say, well, bikes aren’t quite as safe as cars, so you can’t ride a bike. It’s illegal. And by the way, bikes are not as safe as cars, seven times more likely to die per mile traveled. They’re great, but they’re just not quite as safe. And so there’s just no other place where we do this than I do think it’s time for us to expand our imaginations.

David Freeman Engstrom:

I think it’s a real moment of reckoning for the profession, and that includes judges and the public servants who run our courts, and it also includes lawyers and practitioners. And on the court side, it’s just such an exciting moment. It’s a moment where there’s just a really significant rethinking of what courts are, how they do their work, how they conceptualize their relationship with self-represented litigants. So it goes everything technology even to the court’s own. And so I encourage anyone in the court space to think hard about that and to be part of this reckoning. I think that’s super important. On the practitioner side, I tell this to my Stanford students all the time. I firmly believe that in the next five or 10 years, we’ll reach a point where a non-trivial proportion of legal services in this country are delivered by entities we can’t quite envision just yet.

But that do it with a mix of lawyers, non-lawyers and software. And so if you’re a law student or a young lawyer out there, like the future leaders of theBar, I believe at least some of them, some of them will still provide bespoke, high-end bespoke legal services to high-end clients, but also some of the leaders of theBar are going to create and pilot those entities. And I think there’s a real opportunity for leadership there. And so I encourage any law student or any young lawyer starting to make their way in this profession to be part of the reckoning in that way.

Cat Moon:

Here, I would clap, except that that might make an obnoxious noise in my microphone. I agree. I think it’s such an exciting time to be entering the profession. I know there’s kind of a little bit of fear because it feels like there’s a lot of unknown, but for all the reasons you just said, David, there are these incredible opportunities to be had, right? Different choices to be made, new things to build, and I feel like this is kind of unprecedented and in our profession, so what an exciting time. Well, thank you both so much for joining me. I am really, truly grateful for your time and your incredible insight. I hope that we can have more follow-up conversations because I really want to follow all the work that you’re doing and share that with folks because I do think it’s providing inspiration to people to see what’s possible. And I also want to thank listeners for listening to this episode. Talk Justice is brought to you by the Leaders counsel of the Legal Services Corporation and Legal Talk Network. If you like what you heard today, please be sure to rate and review the show and subscribe on your favorite podcast app.

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