As many of you know, I regularly participate in Bob Ambrogi’s LegalTech Week journalist roundtable on Fridays. This past week, we actually did the roundtable live and in person at Relativity Fest. I raised two articles/developments during the roundtable. The first one had to do with the settlement by DoNotPay with the FTC, which Richard Tromans of Artificial Lawyer analyzed in a recent article. DoNotPay was fined for alleging offering legal services to consumers that they could not deliver. (Josh Browder,the owner of DoNotPay was not named as a defendant in the action).

The second was the announcement that Rocket Lawyer had been granted approval by the Arizona Supreme Court to operate as an alternative business structure. This approval paves the way for nonlawyer law firm ownership. Rocket Lawyer has previously secured similar permissions in Utah and the UK. I usually don’t post what I talk about during the roundtable since that would be a little redundant But the two articles raise some access to justice (A2J) issues that merit additional consideration and thought.

Nonlawyer ownership must be coupled with better use of AI to bring down the cost of legal services before there can be any dent in the A2J problem.

Nonlawyer Ownership Is Not a Panacea

One of the excellent points Tromans makes in his article is that merely allowing nonlawyer ownership of firms will not in and of itself impact access to justice for anyone. Tromans argued that the FTC should focus not only on DoNotPay’s alleged misrepresentations. It needs to look more broadly at bar associations that doggedly resist nonlawyer ownership to solve the seemingly intractable A2J problems we face. But he says nonlawyer ownership must be coupled with better use of AI to bring down the cost of legal services before there can be any dent in the A2J problem.

Tromans is right. Nonlawyer ownership is not a panacea and, in fact, may make the A2J problem worse. Why? Nonlawyer ownership could easily turn into a greater source of capital for large law firms. This access could do little more than allow them to become more powerful. The result: an increase in the gap between the justice their well-heeled clients can afford and the rest of humanity. Nonlawyer ownership could also enhance the ability of the Big Four accounting firms to make inroads in the legal marketplace. Certainly, as Tromans points out, nonlawyer ownership, which is allowed in the UK, has not had much, if any, impact on the A2J gap there.

Is AI the Answer?

And I don’t think coupling nonlawyer ownership with better use of AI tools will necessarily impact the situation. Big law appears to be adopting AI and Gen AI tools at a faster pace than smaller law firms. This enhanced adoption rate is partly due to Big Law’s ability to afford the more expensive tools and spread the cost among more partners. Big law also has more resources for understanding how to use these tools and training. The end result: advantage for Big Law and Big Law’s clients.

Rocket Lawyer

The approval of the Rocket Lawyer’s nonlawyer ownership application is an important A2J development in some ways. Make no mistake, Rocket Lawyer’s business model is to make legal services more affordable to small businesses and individuals with business-related problems. It does this by using technology and moving away from the billable hour. These entities are often faced with the Hobbesian choice of paying exorbitant legal fees, crippling the financial health of their businesses. Or go without legal services altogether. So, creating a method for this large group to get better and more affordable service is an important part of the A2J solution. As I have written before, Jevon Paradox suggests that making legal services more affordable to this group will increase the demand for services. This increase would make for greater profits for the providers. The proverbial win-win, at least for one underserved group.

But What About the Rest?

The Rocket Lawyer approval is all well and good, but it leaves open the question, what about the rest of the population? The great mass of people who would have trouble even affording the Rocket Lawyer charges. Not only is this group financially disadvantaged, but they often lack the sophistication and basic tools (internet service, for example) to deal with the legal system at virtually any cost.

I recently spoke to a group of legal aid attorneys about Gen AI. In the process, I learned that applicants must be significantly disadvantaged financially to qualify for legal aid. And their matters must be of specific and limited types. But even after applying the criteria, there is a vast number of people who need legal services and who qualify for legal aid services. The problem is resources: legal aid simply does not have the resources to serve all who qualify. So many are left out.

Perfect Can’t Be the Enemy of the Good

The DoNotPay situation and the Rocket Lawyer developments demonstrate that we will have to be more creative to make any real dent in the A2J problems. Nonlawyer ownership won’t solve the problems. AI, unless better used, won’t solve the problem. 

And nothing is all too often what so many in our society are getting today

We (the profession and bar associations) are going to have to stop using the desire for perfection as an excuse for not doing good. Automation, AI, bots, and Gen AI are not perfect when it comes to providing legal services. But they are better than nothing. And nothing is all too often what so many in our society are getting today. Until we quit poking holes in every possible tool that can help those needing services, we aren’t going to find solutions.

DoNotPay, certainly may have made a mistake by promising more than it could deliver. Perhaps it should have been. But that doesn’t mean that the parking ticket tools DoNotPay created that automated the ability of people to contest parking tickets was a bad thing. Those tools helped many people seek justice who otherwise would have just paid the tickets. That automated tool worked well and made a dent, however small, in the A2J gap. That’s a solution that shouldn’t be forgotten. 

Let’s not throw the baby out with the bath.