Madison [Wisconsin] Capital Times
March 13, 2008
On Friday [March 14], the Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering a new definition of the practice of law that could force consumers to hire a lawyer to deal with even the most routine legal needs.
If the court approves this State Bar proposal, instead of being able to use an affordable legal document assistant, an income tax preparer or a real estate agent, Wisconsinites would have to shell out the hundreds of dollars an
hour that lawyers charge.
HALT (Help Abolish Legal Tyranny), the nation’s largest and oldest legal reform organization, is urging the court to reject the lawyers’ naked power grab and, instead, encourage the development of innovative ways to expand the availability of affordable legal help.
Our view is supported by the U.S. Justice Department, which also opposes the proposed rule.
After complaints about their original proposal were filed with the Supreme Court by consumer advocates like HALT and many Wisconsin businesses, the State Bar added an exception for service providers that are licensed by the state. We agree with the Justice Department that this new exception “would still prohibit non-lawyers from performing services for which legal
expertise is unnecessary” and believe that it would only confuse
consumers and deter meaningful competition from non-lawyers.
How do the lawyers defend their monopolistic proposal? They say it is really to protect the public from scam artists, particularly “notarios” who falsely claim to be attorneys and prey on the Latino community. But after two years of beating the bushes, the State Bar could produce only six complaints by
consumers about non-lawyer legal service providers.
During this same time frame, consumers filed over 2,000 complaints against Wisconsin attorneys.
What makes the lawyers’ proposal all the more appalling is that it comes in the midst of a legal access crisis in Wisconsin. As a blue-ribbon panel found just last year, more than “half a million Wisconsinites — people with families, many of whom have jobs, own homes and pay taxes — must contend with significant legal troubles without any legal help because they cannot afford
the professional legal help they need.”
Instead of responding to this access crisis, Wisconsin’s organized State Bar wants a new rule that would make it all but impossible for consumers to get help when they can’t afford to hire a lawyer.
There is a better way to both serve and protect legal consumers.
For many years HALT has argued that the unauthorized practice of law is claiming to be a lawyer when you’re not. We believe that the defining characteristic of the practice of law is the establishment of an attorney-client relationship.
In recent years the U.S. Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission have endorsed this common-sense view. The Wisconsin Supreme Court should too, by defining the practice of law as only including activities that require specialized legal skills where an attorney-client relationship is present.
James C. Turner is the executive director of HALT (Help Abolish Legal Tyranny), www.halt.org, a nonprofit public interest group dedicated to promoting simple, affordable and accountable justice for all.
Welcome to this web log / forum. All are welcome to post here, but we’d like to extend a special invitation to former students or colleagues who knew Fred Rodell, took his courses, were colleagues, or simply took an interest in his work and his views during his career.
Let us know how you knew Fred, what you thought of his work and his views of the legal profession, how you think the American legal system could be reformed in a way that reflects his criticisms.
Sixty-nine years ago, a young Yale law professor rocked the
legal establishment with a scathing indictment of the American civil justice system entitled Woe unto You, Lawyers!
debunker of legal myths, and the target of untold ire from thin-skinned lawyers. And his provocative observations are as accurate today as they were seven decades ago.
Rodell’s 1936 article Goodbye to Law Reviews opens by explaining — “There are two things wrong with almost all legal writing. One is its style. The other is its content. That, I think, about covers the ground.”
And proceeds to take on the entire profession — “[I]t is
pretty hard to find a group less concerned with serving society and more concerned with serving themselves than the lawyers.”
In Woe, Rodell’s critique is cultural — “In TRIBAL TIMES, there were the medicine-men. In the Middle Ages, there were the priests. Today there are the lawyers. ”
But the effect of the mystifying process is to exclude
ordinary people from the legal process — “[L]aw deals almost exclusively with the ordinary facts and occurrences of everyday business and government and living. But it deals with them in a
jargon which completely baffles and befoozles the ordinary literate man.”
As a leader in the legal realist movement, Fred Rodell stuck
to his guns for the next four decades (including a stint on HALT’s Advisory Board), arguing that we should simplify, demystify and open up our civil justice system.
Rodell was a true pioneer of the legal reform movement, one
of the first to identify the structural failures of our civil justice system and to stridently challenge the legal establishment. But since his death in 1980, his thinking has not received the serious consideration that it deserves, and his key writings have disappeared from print.
That is why we at HALT were so excited to begin working with San Francisco legal reform advocate Alex Kline and Fred Rodell’s family to revive these visionary legal reform lessons on the Internet.
In addition to introducing Rodell to a new generation, we
want to provide a meeting place for those who share an appreciation of his ideals, criticisms and reform objectives. We want to provide a forum where they can put their heads together and work to implement his ideas in practical ways.
Rodell taught at Yale Law for over forty years, and we hope
that his students will find their way to this site and use it as a place to re-connect, brainstorm, and formulate action plans to bring about the changes he advocated.
Today we are launching FredRodell.com to make Woe and Goodbye available to all, along with TheLawBlog, a forum for renewed critique, debate and thinking.
James C. Turner
Executive Director
HALT, Inc.
February 19, 2008