Spend wisely

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Posted in: Clients, Purpose

One of the reasons — maybe the main reason — why lawyers are so risk-averse is that averting risk is kind of the whole point of having lawyers. People hire us for two reasons: (a) to fix a problem that’s already occurred, or (b) to arrange things so as to minimize or eliminate the risk that problems will occur. In Susskindian terms, these are the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff and the fence at the top, respectively.

The idea that we’d be better off with fewer ambulances and more fences is starting to catch on within the profession. But there’s an important question in there: how many fences do you really need? Is it possible you’re installing more fences than can be justified by the reduced risk of accidents? And as sellers of both fences and ambulances, are lawyers sufficiently objective to be the ones making that call?

Ron Friedmann got me thinking about all this with two insightful and provocative posts about reducing corporate legal spend. He argues that institutional clients “need to do a better job assessing risk and deciding what warrants legal attention,” and draws an analogy to the US health care system which, by many accounts, costs so much in part because of rampant unnecessary treatment. If clients took the time to review all their legal spending and figure out what percentage could be eliminated with an acceptably small increase in risk, they could lower their legal spend without dramatically increasing the company’s exposure.

The idea that companies are over-protecting themselves against risk and therefore overspending on lawyers is compelling. Obviously, there are legal costs that can’t be eliminated — if the government tells you to comply with a given regulation or face prosecution, you’re going to comply. But if you separated corporate legal spend into two piles — one for “we need to do this or we’ll go out of business” and “we’d better do this to make sure we’ve covered all our bases” — you might find the second pile a lot higher than you expected. And if you weighed the savings of not covering a given base against its reasonably foreseeable consequences — not the possibility, but the probability of trouble — you might decide you’re buying too much legal risk aversion.

I can see more companies doing just that — figuring out what they can live without in terms of legal coverage and proceeding to live without it. The lawyer’s argument against that, of course, is that even the smallest detail overlooked can lead to devastating liability consequences in court. But as the rise of “good enough” continues, especially in what figures to be an economically difficult period of time to come, I can see rules and regulations being interpreted in similarly “good enough” fashion — threshold standards being lowered slightly, breaches looked upon more leniently, etc. In the aggregate, it could add up to a collective consensus that not every stone needs to be unturned and not every potential risk needs to be run by the lawyers. If that came to pass, the impact on lawyers would be profound.

In his posts, Ron specifically notes he’s excluding consumer legal spending from the discussion. But if anything, I think the reverse applies to the way individuals buy legal services: I think they underestimate risks and under-purchase legal protection. How many people buy and sell a house without using a lawyer, bypassing expertise and institutional protection in order to save a few hundred bucks on a transaction worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? How many people die intestate every year, even with children and extensive assets, because they just never got around to making a will? How many litigants choose to make their own way through our labyrinthine court system?

Individuals’ failure to avail themselves of lawyers isn’t entirely, or even mainly, their own fault, of course. Too often, lawyers have either failed to adequately market the value and importance of their services, or allowed their prices to balloon past the point where many people can afford to hire a lawyer without help from family members or government programs. In my ideal world, you couldn’t get a  driver’s license until you’d filled out even a basic will, and you couldn’t get a marriage license without having to take a basic course in family breakdown, support, custody and access — both at low costs.

Unless and until that comes to pass, lawyers have an obligation — not just for business reasons but also for social ones — to let people know how important these sorts of fundamental legal instruments are and to ensure they’re accessible to the majority of potential buyers. And at the other end of the spectrum, lawyers also have a responsibility to help their institutional clients tell the difference between “need-to-haves” and “nice-to-haves,” and to place the focus of their services firmly on the former. A trusted contractor won’t replace your garage if a repair will do just as well; trusted lawyers do the same.

Over the years, legal spending patterns have become habit-forming: institutions have gotten used to buying ever more risk-avoidance services, while individuals have gotten used to buying only those services that circumstances require them to buy. It would be reasonable, in an extended period of economic malaise, to expect those habits to change. Lawyers who want to stay ahead of dangerous curves like that should spend time thinking about what their clients absolutely require, and changing what they sell — more of some things, less of others — to match.

The legacy of work-life balance

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Posted in: Big Firms, Billing, New Lawyers, Purpose, Satisfaction, Talent

I think we’ll soon be closing the book on one of the legal profession’s most-used and least-understood phrases of the last decade: “work-life balance.” It was still all the rage just a couple of years ago — new lawyers invoked it as a mantra, talent recruiters bandied it about, and many legal publications (including those I’m responsible for) frequently referenced it. But even before the economy fell off a cliff, you could see the pushback growing — and not just from cranky corner-office partners who felt the youngsters hadn’t paid their dues. The pushback came from a growing sense that “work-life balance” (WLB) was a meaningless phrase that obfuscated some real issues lawyers needed to grapple with.

Essentially, WLB was shorthand for the widespread sense that the demands of a legal career had outstripped the personal benefits it conferred — or, as my father used to say, “There’s not much point in earning a living if you can’t live the living you’re earning.” WLB was applied most frequently within the context of large law firms, where even jaded observers would admit that billable-hour targets had escaped any rational trajectory. Across all firm sizes, though, people looked at the law and saw a career where effort and satisfaction were headed in opposite directions. It was not irrational to think that this could stand some improvement.

(It’s important to recognize, by the way, that WLB was not exclusively a Millennial issue. Lawyers of all ages reported dissatisfaction with the perceived effort/reward ratio of their careers, especially in larger firms — though Gen Y was the most willing to talk about it, at length. Remember that WLB was also often used to describe the plight of older small-firm lawyers whose clients had come to demand legal services far more quickly and cheaply than before, catching the lawyer in a vise between ever more work and ever less time. Wherever legal work seemed to grow beyond the boundaries of “worth it,” we heard about WLB.)

Most lawyers seeking WLB were really seeking an answer to the question: “Does a legal career have to be all-consuming and exhausting?” As to that, I’ve written before that lawyers now work long hours thanks to a competitive economy and our own inefficiency, and that we’ll always have to run fast enough to keep up with our clients. But during the economic bubble, lawyers who asked that question often perceived that the answer was “no.” The demand for legal services sufficiently outstripped the supply of lawyers, such that lawyers could start to dictate the terms of their availability to employers and sometimes even to clients. The whole thing got wrapped up too often in buzzwords like “personal fulfillment,” “family time,” and WLB, but what it really came down to was lawyers’ rational response to market conditions. They had a chance to get more rewards for their time and effort — unfortunately, many of them chose those rewards in $160,000 annual packages.

Now, of course, the market has changed just a little. After 10,000 lawyer and staff layoffs at large US and UK firms, even the most active WLB boosters have toned down talk that might earn them the dreaded “entitlement” label. Articles and posts that reference the term “work-life balance” now do so in an environment of cold pragmatism: Ashby Jones at the WSJ Law Blog and Dawn Wagenaar at The Complete Lawyer provide good recent examples. Realist observers like Dan Hull and Scott Greenfield have gained the upper hand in the WLB discussion — check out this slam-bang debate at Legal OnRamp about “work-life balance” generational expectations.

Where proponents of “work-life balance” went off-track, to my mind, was that they argued the duty to ensure a satisfactory proportion between a lawyer’s work and the rest of her life was an institutional responsibility — that it was up to the law firm, basically. The  firms disagreed, and all they had to do was wait for the marketplace to turn their way to make that clear.

Law firms aren’t going to unilaterally change their business models for the sake of WLB. No law firm ever budged an inch on its billable quotas or offered associates more money and perks because its partners genuinely felt they should be nicer employers — appeals to conscience at partners’ meetings don’t have a roaring record of success. Firms change their working conditions as the talent market dictates. In a seller’s market like the one we’ve just had, they play nice; in a buyer’s market like this, they don’t. If almost every potential legal recruit said, “I’m not going to work at that firm — the demands are ridiculous and the benefits to my career aren’t nearly worth it,” and did so for several consecutive years, then you’d see the firm think about changing its business model. That didn’t even happen during the boom, and I doubt it’s going to happen now.

The thing is, “work-life balance” is a lawyer’s personal choice and responsibility. If money and “prestige” are that important to you, you’ll sign up to work 3,000 hours a year at a law firm, and you can reap the rewards and suffer the personal consequences accordingly. If keeping your work hours within a predictable box is important to you, you’ll be seeking out public-sector jobs or setting up a practice with just enough reasonable clients to pay the mortgage — and you’ll always have one eye on your bank statements. When we talk about “balance” in lawyers’ lives, we’re really talking about the tradeoff everyone has to make between compensation and lifestyle. If WLB stood for anything, it was for the fact that we all have the right and the obligation to make that tradeoff on the terms we want.

But here’s the caveat, and here’s where “work-life balance” proponents were right —  most lawyers in their first several years of practice don’t really have that choice. There are two institutional flaws in our system that hurt our newest colleagues. First, there’s the unspoken symbiosis between law schools and law firms — the former charge students huge amounts of money and provide little practical lawyer training, allowing the latter to hire low-skilled and heavily indebted graduates to fill virtually the only positions lucrative enough to pay off their loans. And secondly, billable-hour targets for associates at more than a few firms simply can’t be achieved without damage to one’s health or ethics, or both. These problems are neither natural nor inevitable — they result from our neglect of the system, and they annually damage our profession’s standards and morale.

In the heyday of WLB, we were at least starting to talk about these things, and the whole debate should have shined a light directly on them. What we were groping towards, under the banner of WLB, was the gnawing sense that most everyone starts their legal career behind the eight-ball for no particularly good reason. Now that the moment has passed, I worry that WLB will be relegated to the status of a mere generational quarrel during a freak economy. We need to do better than that. There are still some serious institutional problems for our profession to resolve — dealing with them openly and effectively would be the kind of legacy “work-life balance” deserves.

Lawyers as a public good

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Posted in: Law School, Purpose

Thanks to San Diego lawyer and blogger Joseph Dang, I belatedly caught up with an article in California Lawyer magazine about the University of California at Irvine’s intention to launch a new law school this fall. If you’re not familiar with this plan, UC Irvine ambiti0usly aims to debut in the Top 20 rank of US law schools, in no small part by adopting an innovative, non-traditional approach to the school’s purpose and curriculum:

“Relatively early in the 20th century,” [Dean Erwin] Chemerinsky observes, “preparing lawyers for the practice of law was relegated to the bottom rung of law schools, and the top law schools didn’t see it as their primary mission. Could you imagine if a school graduated medical students or dental students who never treated a patient? Yet most law students have never had a client.”

The new school aims to change all that, starting with its first year, when law students will be introduced to the practical tools of their profession through a lawyering-skills class that integrates clinical experience. Then, in their second year, students will work through simulated fact situations, honing their skills in a particular field of civil or criminal law, so that when they are ready to register for a third-year, semester-long clinical course, they will already have a working knowledge of how to represent clients. “My central vision for the school,” says Chemerinsky, “is that we will do the best job of any school in the country in preparing students for the [actual] practice of law. A top-quality clinical program is key to achieving this.”

Among UC-Irvine’s other goals is to encourage more interdisciplinary study among law students and produce a healthy ratio of graduates taking public-sector jobs. It’s a bold experiment, and the odds are long against it, but there’s no better time than this for a new kind of law school to take root within the profession. Perhaps needless to say, I think this is a great idea.

But what really caught my imagination, and sparked a whole other line of thinking, was one other aspect of the UC Irvine model: thanks to funding by a clutch of law firms, the university plans to offer every student a full scholarship — that is to say, free tuition. That’s a concept that, among other things, cuts to the heart of what law schools are for. If the idea behind a law school is to turn out the world’s best lawyers — and UC Irvine appears to be aiming that way — doesn’t it make sense to remove barriers to that goal raised by the ability of the best candidates to afford the program? And in turn, doesn’t that get us thinking a little about the role of the marketplace in the formation of lawyers and the services they will eventually deliver?

This ended up, interestingly enough, dovetailing with a growing discussion within journalism circles about the future of the newspaper. You’ve certainly read enough articles about it and heard me talk about it here before — the fact that most everyone accepts newspapers are dying (and TV is next) and that the web is the immediate future, but that no one knows how to build a profitable business model that can sustain a news-gathering organization.  Premium subscriptions, micro-payments, online advertising — it’s all been tried and nothing has really worked yet. So now people are starting to talk about radically different solutions.

In The Guardian, Maura Kelly looks at non-profit newsrooms and start-up media organizations like GlobalPost. But interestingly, Bruce Ackerman (of Freakonomics fame) and Ian Ayres effectively combine these two approaches and have proposed (also in The Guardian) national endowment systems for investigative journalism:

In contrast to current proposals, we do not rely on public or private do-gooders to dole out money to their favourite journalists. Each national endowment would subsidize investigations on a strict mathematical formula based on the number of citizens who actually read their reports on news sites. …

[C]ommon sense, as well as fundamental liberal values, counsels against any governmental effort to regulate the quality of news. So long as the endowment only subsidizes investigative expenditures, in-depth reporting will get a large share of the fund – provided that it generates important stories that generate broad interest.

The endowment must monitor media hits and circulation counts. This is doable. Advertisers already rely on independent audits. So can the government. Some governmental monitoring of financial matters is also necessary. News organizations would otherwise be tempted to obtain subsidies for marketing and business operations. Without minimizing the problems involved in institutional design, the creation of an effective and disciplined national endowment seems entirely realistic.

The driving theory behind these efforts to save journalism is that investigative reporting — finding out what people don’t want to tell us — is a public good that’s too important to be left to the vagaries of the market. Just as we don’t rely on privately run firehouses to keep our cities from burning down, we can’t rely on privately run media companies to bring pressure to bear on our society’s power brokers. Newspapers, as Seth Godin says, wrap two cents of journalism with ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction. Investigative journalism suffers from the tragedy of the commons: everyone benefits from its existence, but hardly anyone is willing to pay for it by itself. By removing (or at least reducing the impact of) market forces from its implementation, we can help investigate reporting to flourish and deliver real benefits of transparency and accountability to our society and its institutions.

What does any of this have to do with UC Irvine’s law school and its full-scholarship program? Think about this: what if every law school in the world had free tuition? (Or, more accurately, no tuition.) What if interested third parties covered all the costs of legal education in order to ensure it was done properly, freed from the shackles of market pressures and US News & World Report silliness? Now think about this: what if lawyers were free?  What if we decided that the provision of legal services was so important to the operation of a just society that market mechanisms preventing access to justice should be removed? What would our profession look like then?

Well, it’s a safe bet that our graduating law school classes would be far more diverse, especially socio-economically: the built-in bias in favour of applicants from wealthy backgrounds would fade. It’s also a safe bet that a law school curriculum designed to maximize the benefit of each graduating lawyer to the public good would be incredibly different from what most law schools now offer. Also very different would be the qualifications required of the people offering the courses.

What would become of the private bar? Remember, lawyers in this system aren’t charging fees directly; they’re billing the government or a non-profit entity for their work (but not, I’ll wager, for their time). Rationally, the funding organization would want to create certain standards of competent advice and productive service; it would be interesting to see which ones they came up with. Law firm compensation and advancement likely would not be based on hours billed but on other criteria — perhaps client satisfaction, risk reduction, value generation and so forth. Solos would be plentiful, mega-firms less so. Millionaire lawyers, like millionaire media and performing artists of the near future, would be rare. More people would go into the law not to make money, but to serve society. (Many doctors are already familiar with this sort of model, and I think those who have to answer to a for-profit entity would describe a very different quality of service than those who answer to a non-profit entity.)

This is, I readily admit, a thought exercise rather than a practical or even fully desirable scenario; think of it as Imagine for lawyers. There would be plenty of complications and downsides to a publicly funded legal profession. But there are plenty of complications and downsides to our current professional setup too. Today, law is a private-sector business that provides what is very arguably a public good. It’s fair to surmise that at least some of the difficulties and tensions between lawyers and society result from that misalignment.

If lawyers were considered a public good — if everyone knew and could access all their rights, could easily build legal risk management and problem avoidance into their lives and businesses, utterly free from worries about the direct cost because we were all collectively funding it for our mutual benefit — what sort of legal profession would we end up with? What would we lose? What would we gain?

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A few thoughts about Wall Street

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Posted in: Purpose

Ottawa is a long way, literally and figuratively, from the financial core of the United States, and my wife is the economics major in the family. So I’m not going to pretend to have any insights to offer on the sucking chest wounds opening up on Wall Street these days. If you’re looking for good analysis of the situation from a legal profession perspective, start your search at Adam Smith Esq. But I do have three quick thoughts for you that relate in some way to the current troubles.

Media: I’ve been disappointed with how the MLM (mainstream legal media) has been covering the financial turmoil. Most of the focus at the legal media giants has been on which law firms have bagged the corporate work on the breakup, merger or bankruptcy of which financial behemoth. I’m not reading a lot about the human toll of these institutions’ collapse, or about the implications for the corporate legal sector as a whole. And I’ve yet to hear anyone ask the question that people were asking in the wake of the Enron scandal: where were the lawyers? Many global law firms grew very rich off the same hideously complex financial instruments that everyone is now denouncing as having been clearly unstable and unsustainable. Did lawyers not see the disaster coming, or did they prefer not to look that deeply or that far ahead? It’d be nice if the periodicals that lionized these lawyers in the good times asked these questions in the bad.

Clients: Very few lawyers (especially among readers of this blog, I’m guessing) count among their clients the world’s largest banking and financial institutions. But every lawyer has clients who read newspapers and watch television news, and these latter two vehicles have been brimful lately with dire comparisons (do a Google News search for “worst crisis since the Depression” and marvel at the results) and grim forecasts. Ratcheting up their audience’s anxiety levels is great for business, but the end result is a population-wide injection of stress. Bottom line: your clients are probably worried about the handbasket they’re in and where it’s heading. Now might be a good time to drop them a line with some reassuring words and making yourself available to talk (not on billable time, obviously). You don’t need to provide them with expert financial analysis; but you might provide them with an attentive ear, a sympathetic outlet for their anxiety, and a simple reminder of what lawyers are supposed to do: care sufficiently about their clients to be available in difficult times.

Community: A lot of people have lost and will yet lose their jobs in this crisis, and the burden of cleaning up this mess will be borne around the world and well into the future. Harder times than many of us are used to could lie ahead. So this seems like an appropriate time to think about those members of our community who couldn’t dodge these bullets, or who already suffer from misfortune on a greater scale. We’re about to launch our annual United Way drive here at the office, and as the campaign chair, I see and hear a lot about people in our community who never had a chance to get where we did, or who suffer daily from poverty, abuse and mental illness. Lawyers talk a good game about giving back to the community, and many walk that talk — but we need more to step up. They say lawyers thrive in both good and bad times; if so, then it’s even more incumbent on us to help out where and when we’re needed.

Stock market analysts are talking detachedly these days about all the investing opportunities this crisis affords. You might want to give some thought to the personal, client and community opportunities that are opening up as well.

The day after tomorrow

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Posted in: Purpose

As Patrick J. Lamb of Valorem Law Firm reminds us, change is inevitable once a marketplace has decided to do things differently. In a week in which the American Bar Association not only gave offshoring a passing grade but positively embraced it (Ron Friedmann and Russell Smith contribute their thoughts), and in which the prospect of publicly traded law firms is discussed not in a mere blog but in the hallowed pages of The Economist (as the Australian pioneer in this regard reports more financial success), then you’ve got to know tumult is underway. Maybe law schools will get it too, though they have farther to go, judging from the latest silliness involving the US News and World Report rankings (see me vent my frustration at Legal Blog Watch yesterday). But ready or not, no matter where you are in the law, change is here, and it’s real.

You know, I read a book a few years ago that helped reshape how I view geopolitical and sociological change. The Fourth Turning contends a whole bunch of things, not all of which I necessarily buy, but for present purposes, the most significant is that roughly 80-year chunks of history can be divided into four “seasons,” and we’re now firmly into Winter: a period of destructive crisis. Whereas the preceding Fall (by my estimate, from the mid-’80s to 9/11) was a time of institutional unravelling and decay, Winter is a time of dynamic upheaval, when an old civic order is replaced with a new one. Change and reform that seemed impossible in the Fall come fast and furious in Winter, and there’s no guarantee the change will be for the better.

Looked at in this context, the waves buffeting the legal profession can be understood as part of a cyclical pattern of evolution rather than an unforeseen bolt of upheaval. We’ve been talking about reform in the practice of law for decades — the first article calling for the death of the billable hour probably dates from the Jurassic Era — but the social and institutional paralysis of the past couple of decades has frustrated these efforts. Now, though, greater forces than simple goodwill are in motion, and boulders that once seemed impossible to move now suddenly shift with greater ease than ever. All of which means it’s time for us to pause and take stock of where we’re trying to go.

Look, if you’re reading this blog, you’re aware of the changes manifesting themselves in the law, and probably you’d like to see things change for the better: a more effective and fulfilled legal profession, a more informed and satisfied client base, a more focused and responsive legal education system, a fairer and more accessible justice system, a more collaborative and innovative spirit of lawyering. Those of us so motivated constitute a small minority in the legal community, but we’re growing. And I’m greatly cheered by the thought that at this time of crisis in our profession, we have the means and the opportunity to help direct the forces of change into positive channels, and to help make the profession better than it is and maybe even as good as it needs to be. Continue Reading

Could clients drive firms to do more pro bono?

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Posted in: Clients, Purpose

Australia, the legal profession’s innovation laboratory, is busy delivering another dose of fresh thinking. The state of Victoria is requiring all law firms that take on legal work for the government to perform pro bono work as a condition of the retainer — specifically, to the tune of 5% to 15% of the total value of their government contracts (most choose 15%). According to an article in the May 2008 issue of the New South Wales Law Society Journal, the scheme is now being considered for introduction countrywide.

The idea is not universally popular. Opponents raise two main objections: that reducing pro bono to a commercial consideration undermines the altruistic nature of the work for both provider and assistee, and that it’s unfair to single out lawyers when no other suppliers of professional services to government face the same obligation. Supporters counter that the government is leading rather than mandating, that the requirement is far from onerous, that legal services are uniquely in need of pro bono provision, and that many law firms now take pro bono seriously as a fundamental element of the business, driving up its adoption throughout Victoria.

I think it’s a great initiative, especially because it seems like a work in progress. One of the firms involved in the program suggests two improvements if it goes Australia-wide: that the government increase its legal aid and community legal sector funding, to make clear that pro bono is not and never will be a substitute for legal aid; and that the government continues to be prepared to waive conflicts claims in pro bono cases involving the government as a party. Add these two elements, and this might be pretty close to a perfect system.

In fact, I think it’s exportable — and not just outside Australia. While it’d be great to see governments in other countries adopt this program, I don’t see any reason why large corporate clients couldn’t do the same thing. Continue Reading

Restoring the culture of trust

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Posted in: Purpose

Seth Godin served one up on the legal profession last week, and he wasn’t even trying. He was writing about marketers and their responsibility to serve a greater interest than the narrow, short-term goal of increasing a client’s sales. He identified two points at opposite ends of an aspirational spectrum — statesmen and lawyers — and told marketers to choose between them. His critiques of lawyers are devastating for their matter-of-factness:

Lawyers are sworn to be advocates. It’s their duty. They take a side and they argue it. They’re not supposed to tell the truth, they’re supposed to argue a point of view. … Marketing culture has become a culture of lawyers. Apparently, marketers are now advocates sworn to argue on behalf of a client. ….

The lawyer works with constituents who fully expect him to be an advocate. The judge, the clients and the jury (hopefully) understand that he is making a case, not telling the truth. Marketers work in a different world. As marketing has transformed from a specialized subset of business to a ubiquitous element of society, marketers still have the chance to be believed. But trust belongs to statesmen, not lawyers. People don’t say, “I trust her, she’s the lawyer for the other side.”

Lawyers have a choice to make, too. We can reinforce this reputation as skilled and dangerous weapons to be deployed and applied as needed, at a time when trust is becoming intrinsically important to business and consumer relationships; or we can make a real effort to reinvigorate the role of trust in our professional culture, giving it to and expecting it from each other and our clients. Continue Reading

Professionalism reloaded

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Posted in: Purpose

The Law Society of Upper Canada has just published the papers submitted as part of the Chief Justice’s Tenth Colloquium on the Legal Profession, which was held here in Ottawa last month and at which I appeared as the keynote commentary speaker. If you’re battling insomnia and would like to read the full, 6,700-word version of the brief remarks I delivered, you can find my paper here. But take the time to review the other papers too, especially those submitted by Margaret Ross and Justice Michael Moldaver — all these works contain challenging and provocative thoughts that every lawyer should take time to consider.

Life after lawyers

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Posted in: Clients, Competition, Purpose

We need to start thinking about what the post-lawyer justice system is going to look like.

I can see how this might be an absurd or even heretical notion to some people. But there’s reason to believe that lawyers won’t be an essential part of the legal system in the future — and if so, our profession has to come to grips with what would mean, for us and for society generally.

I’m thinking about this because we’re preparing our cover story for National’s June issue, on the problems faced by family courts across Canada (and quite likely, in other jurisdictions) caused by self-represented litigants. if you’ve been inside one of these courts lately, you know what these problems are: backlogged dockets, mistreated witnesses, judges obliged to act as de facto counsel, wasted court time — and paying clients in the middle of it, wondering why they bothered to hire a lawyer since their spouse is doing nicely without one.

But here’s the problem: it’s been like this for more than a decade. We wrote about the pro se crisis in an October 1999 cover story titled “Who needs a lawyer?” (Sorry, no link — this was the Pleistocene Era, Net-wise.) And at a certain point, crisis becomes commonplace: we simply adjust to it. I think we’re perilously close to that stage in family law right now — people are getting used to the idea that family justice is a lawyer-optional event.

I’m coming to think that family law is the canary in the coal mine. Every day, more things that used to be the exclusive bailiwick of lawyers are automated, down-marketed and commoditized by non-lawyers. You already know this if your practice involves transactional matters like wills and real estate. But the pro se trend in family court shows that litigators aren’t immune either — as if the rise of mediation didn’t make that clear years ago.

We still talk about how we can “fix the problem” of people going without legal representation. But there are two big elephants in the room that few lawyers seem interested in talking about. The first is that the cost of retaining our services makes us largely inaccessible to all but the rich and the very poor, and that as long as we operate in a rarefied, self-regulated, protected marketplace, those costs are not going to fall.

The second is that a family court system with fewer lawyers and more self-represented parties is, no question, slow, inefficient, lopsided and chaotic. But you know what? It still works. Courtrooms still open their doors every morning, support is still mandated, and custody is still awarded — with or without lawyers’ involvement. We should be extremely nervous about the message that’s sending to the general population about just how indispensable we really are.

Lawyers are now a luxury good, but we increasingly deal in commoditized services. If you want to know where that disconnect leads, drop by your local family court sometime.

Professionalism revived

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Posted in: Ethics, Purpose

If you’re interested, here’s a version of the remarks I delivered this morning at the Chief Justice’s Colloquium on Professionalism here in Ottawa. Many thanks again to the organizers for inviting me to speak!

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When we talk about professionalism, we can start getting bogged down, because it’s a word that means a lot of different things to different people. Now, in my case, I’m an editor, I’m an English major, I’m basically a word geek – I gave up Scrabble for Lent, if that helps put it in perspective. So to prepare for this event, I did what word geeks do: I went out and looked up “professionalism” in the dictionary. And what I found there was that the Latin root of “professional” is profiteri.

Profiteri has two components: pro, which means “forth,” and fateri, which means “confess.” Taken together, they mean “to announce a belief.” It has religious roots – its original use was to bind yourself, publicly, by a vow or oath, to a vocation or higher purpose. When the word began to filter into wider use, it was applied to occupations, but only to those that involved the same sort of considerations as religious vows: service, selflessness, higher purpose – generally, making things better for others. Originally, only three occupations qualified as professions: ministry or theology, of course; medicine; and law.

So when we talk about traditional standards of professionalism, it’s important we remember we’re not talking about excellence, or good manners, or “total quality management” – or at least, not primarily about that kind of thing. We’re talking about serving the interests of others, prioritizing them above ours for a greater cause.

For a while now, we’ve been talking about a decline in professionalism in the law, or the loss of professionalism. And generally, these discussions have tended to center around things like uncivil behaviour by lawyers, or an unseemly focus on money, or a lack of proper respect for the court, that sort of thing.And it’s good that we’re looking at these things, because they’re real problems, and some of them are serious. But to my mind, they’re really all symptoms – they’re not the underlying disease. There’s a bigger cause behind these effects. Continue Reading