This Week In Legal Tech: ABA Future Panel Chairs Respond To LegalZoom Co-Founder
ABA leaders respond to criticism of their new Report on the Future of Legal Services in the United States.
Last week in this column, I published an interview with Eddie Hartman, co-founder of LegalZoom, about his thoughts on the Report on the Future of Legal Services in the United States, recently issued by the ABA’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services. (See also my own impressions of the report.) I then heard from Judy Perry Martinez and Andrew Perlman, the chair and vice chair of the commission, who wanted to respond to Hartman. While it is not my intention to turn this column into an extended discussion of the report, I believe it is only fair to allow Martinez and Perlman to respond. Thus, for the remainder of this week’s column, I hand over the microphone to Martinez and Perlman.
By Judy Perry Martinez and Andrew Perlman
In a recent column by Bob Ambrogi, Eddie Hartman criticizes the final report of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. His criticisms reflect a number of inaccuracies and misunderstandings, and we want to set the record straight.
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Mr. Hartman begins with the claim that “[t]here is a stark absence of substance” in the Commission’s report. He supports this claim by saying that, even if the ABA were inclined to agree with the Commission’s recommendations, the ABA is not in a position to implement many of them, like calls for increased funding for the Legal Services Corporation, the decriminalization of minor offenses, and the greater use of legal checkups. Well, of course. The Commission fully recognized that the ABA is not a state legislature, Congress, or a state supreme court. If the Commission’s final report focused only on solutions that the ABA itself could implement, the report would have been very brief and woefully incomplete.
As Mr. Hartman knows, the problems facing the American justice system are far too pervasive for a single entity to solve. Any report that takes the access to justice problem seriously has to identify a wide range of solutions, many of which will have to be implemented by others, including courts and legislatures. To be sure, the ABA can support and advocate for the implementation of those solutions, but just because the ABA cannot itself implement them does not mean that the report lacks substance. In fact, the report’s recommendations include detailed calls for regulatory change, legislative action, judicial experimentation, and greater interdisciplinary collaborations. It is hard to understand Mr. Hartman’s conclusion that these recommendations reflect an “absence of substance.”
Mr. Hartman next turns his attention to recommendations that the ABA is in a position to implement. He explains that, with regard to “things the ABA can actually influence, for their members, the resolutions are purely toothless.” To support this claim, he cites Recommendation 2.2, which says that “[c]ourts should examine, and if they deem appropriate and beneficial to providing greater access to competent legal services, adopt rules and procedures for judicially-authorized-and-regulated legal services providers.”
Mr. Hartman misunderstands the ABA’s relationship to the courts. The courts are not “members” of the ABA, and the ABA does not have any authority over the courts. As its name suggests, Recommendation 2.2 is merely a “recommendation” for the state supreme courts to consider. And it is a good one at that. New kinds of legal services providers are emerging around the country (e.g., courthouse navigators, limited license legal technicians), and courts should be examining them to determine if they will help to close the justice gap.
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Mr. Hartman next criticizes Resolution 3: “All members of the legal profession should keep abreast of relevant technologies.” He says: “Crawl before you walk, dear ABA, and walk before you run. Your members are still using WordPerfect; do not insist they go read Satoshi Nakamoto.”
Putting aside the snarky tone, the statement is a gross exaggeration. Mr. Hartman himself acknowledges that he is an ABA member, and there are thousands of others like him who are technologically savvy and leading the charge to ensure that other lawyers are too. The Commission’s report correctly recognizes that more widespread technological proficiency can help to improve how legal services are delivered and accessed.
Elsewhere, Mr. Hartman says that the Commission “shut out the people … actively building the future of legal services delivery at scale.” This statement is puzzling, given that LegalZoom was a major sponsor of the Commission’s signature event: A National Summit on Innovation in Legal Services at Stanford in 2015. In fact, LegalZoom’s CEO was a speaker at the Summit. Other speakers included Mark Britton, the founder and CEO of Avvo; Richard Barton, founder of Expedia, Glassdoor, and Zillow; Colin Rule, founder of online dispute resolution company Modria; and Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services and the UK Civil Justice Council’s report Online Dispute Resolution for Low-Value Civil Claims.
Moreover, the Commission’s members, liaisons, and special advisors included people who have quite a bit of experience with shaping the future of legal services:
- Ruth Hill Bro (former chair of the ABA Standing Committee on Technology and Information Systems and author of the ABA Cybersecurity Handbook).
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- Chad Burton (founder of one of the first virtual law firms and CEO of CuroLegal, a next-generation legal technology consulting and software development firm).
- Lisa Colpoys (executive director of Illinois Legal Aid Online).
- Margaret Hagan (founder of Open Law Lab using technology and design to increase access to justice, and lecturer at the Stanford Institute of Design).
- Stephanie Kimbro (author of the books Virtual Law Practice: How to Deliver Legal Services Online and Consumer Law Revolution: The Lawyers’ Guide to the Online Legal Marketplace).
- Marty Smith (founder of MetaJure, the smart document management system).
- Ron Staudt (professor at Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago-Kent College of Law and director of the Center for Access to Justice and Technology).
Renee Knake, the Doherty Chair in Legal Ethics at the University of Houston Law Center, served as one of our reporters and was a co-founder of Michigan State’s highly regarded Reinvent Law program. And one of us (Andrew Perlman, the dean of Suffolk University Law School) was the founding director of Suffolk’s Institute on Law Practice Technology & Innovation and its related concentration in that area. In addition, the Commission was guided by experienced bar leaders who understand how to listen, collaborate, and lead others through change.
At the end of the day, Mr. Hartman’s ad hominem criticisms are tellingly light on details about what our report supposedly overlooks. It is always easy to criticize the work of others, but it is much harder to create a constructive report that lays out a clear-eyed path forward. As we note in the report, our recommendations may have been too bold for some and insufficiently bold for others. But what cannot be denied is that the report contains wide-ranging recommendations that, if fully implemented, would make an important difference in how legal services are delivered and accessed in the United States.
Judy Perry Martinez was the chair of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. Andrew Perlman was the vice chair of the ABA Commission on the Future of Legal Services. The Commission completed its work in August 2016.
Robert Ambrogi is a Massachusetts lawyer and journalist who has been covering legal technology and the web for more than 20 years, primarily through his blog LawSites.com. Former editor-in-chief of several legal newspapers, he is a fellow of the College of Law Practice Management and an inaugural Fastcase 50 honoree. He can be reached by email at ambrogi@gmail.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@BobAmbrogi).
