In a recent New York Review of Books essay from Judge Jed Rakoff, “Why You Won’t Get Your Day in Court,” we learn this:
Until 1970, according to statistics compiled by the National Center for State Courts, the great majority of individuals who brought or defended lawsuits in state courts were represented by lawyers. But today as many as two thirds of all individual civil litigants in state trial courts are representing themselves, without a lawyer. Indeed, in some states, an astonishing 90 percent of all family law and housing law cases—which are the most common legal disputes for most Americans—involve at least one party who is not represented by a lawyer.
Of course, this appalling “access to justice gap” exists alongside an apparent glut of law graduates: As we all know, within 10 months of graduation, fewer than 60 percent of 2015 graduates obtained full-time, long-term employment requiring bar passage.
The Hidden Threat: How Fake Identities used by Remote Employees Put Your Business at Risk—and How to Defend Against This
Based on our experience in recent client matters, we have seen an escalating threat posed by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) information technology (IT) workers engaging in sophisticated schemes to evade US and UN sanctions, steal intellectual property from US companies, and/or inject ransomware into company IT environments, in support of enhancing North Korea’s illicit weapons program.
We’ve all become a bit numb to this contradiction, but if the legal education system were something other than deeply dysfunctional, neither the dreary employment figures nor the justice gap statistics would be true, but somehow they both are.
Brian Dalton is the director of research for Breaking Media. Feel free to email him with any questions or comments.