Democratizing Legal Services: What Legal Technology “Disruption” Could Really Mean

Starting with the Basics

As understood by the World Justice Project, “access to justice refers to the ability of all people to seek and obtain effective remedies through accessible, affordable, impartial, efficient, effective, and culturally competent institutions of justice” (emphasis mine). Although it varies by country, there is a demonstrated need for access to justice programs in the United States (It should be noted that in the same World Justice Project report, Germany fairs extremely well: “Germany ranks in the top 10 worldwide in three dimensions and performs well overall…The country’s civil justice system ranks third overall and is characterized by the affordability of attorneys, accessibility and efficiency of courts, and lack of undue influence. Police discrimination against foreigners, however, is perceived to be a problem.”). “Less than 15% of people who need legal services have access to them,” said Eddie Hartman, Co-Founder of LegalZoom. “If we had less than 15% of seriously ill people actually going to doctors, we’d call that a massive health crisis.” Small business owners are similarly priced out – in a study by Legal Shield, they found that almost 60 percent of small business owners who had a legal issue did not hire a lawyer.

Implementation of “access to justice” varies – in the US, bar-admitted attorneys are expected by both their employers and the American Bar Association to conduct pro bono work; at the state and federal level, commissions have been created to bring together stakeholders in an effort to remove barriers; and non-profit organizations like the Legal Aid Society have a long history of serving underrepresented communities. But creating universal access to justice is a complex task. According to statistics released by the Center for American Progress (CAP), for every one attorney willing to provide pro-bono legal services, there are 6,415 unopened cases.

Although there are many such services available already, they are deeply fragmented, with different levels of funding, resources, and outreach. This makes it difficult for individuals to navigate the system and find the right service for their needs. An effort to bring together that disparate network, and educate the target audience on how to utilize all the resources within it, would be a very complicated and expensive task. From there, the challenges become more tenuous – cultural distrust of the legal system, uncertainty about whether or not one “deserves” access to legal services, and other deeply embedded attitudes would be significantly harder to overcome.

In addition, all of these services are aimed at the poorest and most underserved communities. This means that the poorest (and even then, not all or even a majority) have access to services, and – because they can afford it – the richest have access to the services. The middle, however, is left to muddle through, spending a significant percentage of their disposable income, only being able to afford sub-par services, and/or choosing to forgo legal services entirely. That means that even in the best scenarios, access to justice is a difficult ideal to achieve for the entirety of our population.

There is also one other issue that is not often discussed: access to justice refers to (however ambiguously) legal recourse of “injustices”. While that is vitally important – especially with regards to civil liberties – it also excludes all manner of other legal services that impact individuals, such as writing wills, reviewing employment contracts, or filing the correct business paperwork. Access to justice, as a concept, doesn’t cover these other legal issues that can still have major barriers to access for the general population, and impact their ability to create and protect successful lives and businesses. This is important because much of a functioning country relies on functioning legal systems – they not only ensure justice and peace, they also allow for (or when falsely applied, prevent) economic growth, social mobility, and all the other pillars that we, the people, believe to be important.

Legal Technology and Access to Services

Whereas in the past we talked about touching thousands of clients, today’s startups can touch millions. That’s a massive difference in terms of scale, but one we have yet to see in the legal sector. Even the biggest of Big Law firms cannot handle millions of clients (class action lawsuits notwithstanding). With the advent of legal technology, this is changing – but not how we’d expect.

Rather than creating systems where individual law firms are able to take on millions of clients, legal tech is creating systems were millions of clients can get access to legal services. The most obvious examples are LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, both of which are online platforms that enable anyone to file business documents, create wills, and more online for a nominal fee. There are also newer companies like Valcu and Clerky, who focus solely on automating incorporation. Small business entrepreneurs can create and incorporate their businesses without ever talking to a single attorney – or leaving their living room. But all of those websites are relatively self-directed: the client, so to speak, would still need to read and understand the terms, correctly identify what they’re looking for, and file everything in a correct and timely fashion. These companies have started offering access to attorneys and accountants as well, but their bread and butter is really the automated forms online. So what about those who need more comprehensive legal support?

There are now startups for that, too. Companies like Priori Legal, LegalHero, LawGives, and Up Counsel act like a Craigslist for legal services, creating lists of vetted attorneys based on your needs, even going so far as to manage fees and invoicing directly through the website. There are even nonprofit organizations that offer similar services in the access to justice realm, like LawHelp.org.

And finally, there are all of the new legal tech start-ups that act as facilitators for attorneys – automatically reviewing contracts, assisting in ediscovery, and managing other time-consuming aspects of legal practice. Some emerging technology companies using artificial intelligence to automate contract review include eBrevia, Legal Robot and LawGeex. This enables attorneys to spend less time per case, and as a result leaves them with more time to take on pro bono cases or pass their cost-savings onto their clients. An unintended consequence of this is that with the assistance of the right legal tech to manage workloads and access to vetted portals to find clients, it is becoming easier for attorneys to leave their Big Law firms and open a small or solo practice. This especially will start to impact the legal industry as younger attorneys place more emphasis on workplace flexibility, meritocratic hierarchy structures, and other aspects of corporate culture that have been missing in Big Law thus far.

That being said, Big Law is getting in on the legal tech game to a degree. Davis Wright Tremaine was awarded “Innovative Law Firm of the Year” two years running, in large part due to their De Novo initiative, a cross-functional team of lawyers, technologists, web developers, and legal process improvement experts who partner with clients to develop innovative legal services delivery models. Dentons, the largest law firm in the world, runs a wholly-owned subsidiary called NextLaw Labs, which invests in legal tech companies and develops legal technology products. The products are piloted in-house at Dentons first, and then later released on the market to other firms.

It’s hard to say what the outcome of legal tech and legal innovation will be in the long run. Arguing that this disruption will “end” Big Law, however, is probably a stretch. There will always be very big, complicated cases that Big Law is best suited to handle. What seems more likely is that we’ll see a diversification in the legal services industries, with more providers offering a range of services to a range of clients. There will be an overall increase in the number of clients as barriers to access are removed, and different sized law practices and legal tech companies will slowly start filling in the gaps. What we can say for sure, though, is that while individually none of the startups appear to be disrupting the legal industry, collectively they’re democratizing access to legal services for potentially millions of people. By providing information about when to hire someone and who to hire, along with resources to reduce the overall costs of access to legal services, startups are paving the way for a more democratic implementation of the law across the board.

Written by Melis Tusiray, Director of Programs at American Friends of Bucerius. Originally published on the Bucerius Law School blog.