Last week brought news of three innovations that, each in their own way, aim to increase access to justice. It’s noteworthy that none of them came from lawyers.

First is a report that for the first time in Canada, a third-party litigation funding company, BridgePoint Financial Services Inc.,  persuaded an Alberta trial judge to allow it to provide funding to the representative plaintiff in a class action,  Hobsbawn v. ATCO Gas and Pipelines Ltd. The judge’s reasons aren’t known because the ex parte order was sealed, and Alberta’s class actions costs regime is a little different than other Canadian provinces’, but this is still a potentially pivotal ruling. It could remove the chilling effect of brutal costs penalties for would-be plaintiffs, which nominally should increase access to justice. It also gives rise to substantial ethical concerns, and I’m on record as having serious misgivings about treating a civil action as an investment. But there’s no denying it’s innovative, and that it should make it easier for people to get to court.

Also making inroads in Canada is legal expense insurance, as the local arm of worldwide provider DAS inches closer to approval of its offering by the national superintendent of financial institutions. Already popular in Quebec, legal expense insurance could become widespread throughout the rest of the country if DAS is given the go-ahead. For an annual premium of $500, policyholders receive indemnification of up to $100,000 in legal costs for matters like wrongful dismissal disputes, tax problems and personal injury claims — but not, significantly, family law matters, the most common source of access problems. Legal expense insurance also raises the question of who makes the decisions about how a legal matter is conducted: the policyholder or the insurer? But again, it’s hard to argue that this offering leaves potential litigants worse off than they are under the current system.

And finally, shifting gears and hemispheres, comes word from Australia of what is so far a successful family law initiative called Family Relationship Centres. This excerpt from the story summarizes the project better than I could:

Everyone who walks through the door, or calls the toll-free line, is entitled to three free hours of help every two years, whether it be on-site counselling and mediation or off-site specialized services. After that, costs are based on ability to pay. Walk in the door of a Family Relationship Centre and you are greeted by a “parenting counsellor” rather than a wall of pamphlets. Their job is to get a sense of your personal situation and how it’s playing out for your family, and to assess what help you need to start moving ahead.

The centres are meant to act as triage units for ex-partners who may be hobbled by mental health issues and addictions, or children acting out because of prolonged family conflict. “They will not close that file until they are certain that person has got the help they need,” says Parkinson. Mediation is a mandatory first step, a move aimed at making the costly and adversarial court system a “mechanism of last resort.” The last of the centres opened last year, and already Australia has seen an 18 per cent drop in court filings.

These Centres are part of a massive and very expensive state overhaul of the family law system in Australia, and so far they seem to be working very well. But like the other two advances noted previously, this project apparently developed with little if any leadership from the legal profession.

We seem to be ceding the innovation ground in law to private companies, which by definition are primarily interested in turning a profit, and to government, which has a different set of priorities than either lawyers or their clients. Last month, the very first InnovAction Honourable Mention handed out by the College of Law Practice Management went to the Practical Law Company; last year, an InnovAction Award went to Novus Law LLC — both private companies. I doubt they’ll be the last winners from outside the practicing bar.

So why aren’t lawyers, law firms, or lawyer regulating bodies leading the way in developing innovative legal service delivery solutions? Part of the reason lies in the profession’s singular resistance to initiatives that involve risk or an entrepreneurial spirit. But part of the reason, it seems to me, is also the fact that the solutions these entities are providing are to problems the legal profession helped create.

In most cases where plaintiffs shy away from using the legal system, it’s because the cost of the trial is both disproportionate to the potential award and completely out of reach of the great majority of individuals. And the cost of a trial is largely within the control of lawyers, because lawyers’ fees are by far the single biggest component of litigation costs. Who else bears responsibility for how much we charge? Yes, there are other factors inflating trial costs — better funded courts could reduce backlogs and delays, and discovery can be difficult to predict and control. But if there’s a case to be made that someone or something other than the price of lawyers’ services bears the majority of responsibility for litigation costs, I’d like to hear it.

Most innovations in the law these days are devoted to making the legal services delivery process more streamlined, more efficient, and more affordable to more people. A good number of these solutions come from individual lawyers and law firms, which is extremely encouraging. But as a profession, we should be concerned about the extent to which other solutions are emerging from outside our walls — and the extent to which they’re aimed at solving legal cost problems for which I think lawyers bear primary responsibility.