It’s no surprise that the legal system is dealing with
a few crises at the moment. But that doesn’t mean Ilene
Seidman, associate dean for academic
affairs and clinical law professor at Suffolk University isn’t flummoxed by it.
“There’s millions of people in this country who need
representation,” said Seidman on the justice gap, or the gap between those who
need legal aid and those who can get it. “There’s a crisis in our country.
Between 70 and 90 percent of people in various civil matters are unrepresented,
depending on who you ask. Yet you have all these people graduating from law
school who ‘there are no jobs for’…it seems truly insane to me.”
The
goal of the program from the start was to create lawyers who were more prepared
for “the practice of today and tomorrow, not the practice of yesterday.” That
means lawyers who were prepared to practice in the setting that Seidman says
most lawyers practice in the private sector—small and solo practices—while also
creating a business model where graduates could earn a living and do good legal
work in their communities.
“They like to work in communities where they can play
a role that is positive, and we try to give them a path that could make that
happen,” said Seidman.
In her mind that meant charging head first
into two of the most awkward areas for lawyers to navigate: legal aid and new
technology.
The New
Frontier
Accelerator’s operating principle is that
by teaching lawyers to embrace technology and learn fundamental business
practices from the get-go, they’d be more equipped to manage practices
themselves—and allow for a greater quantity of cases. That quantity could be
part of the answer to how a firm could support itself by helping low and
average income people. And that prognostic thinking has been exactly what many
argue the profession of law needs.
“Most firms are just focused on the
income, but at someplace like the Accelerator, or a firm modeled on the same
principles, it’s about creating legal access to justice on the field
generally,” said Gerald Glover
III, who graduated from the program last year
and now works at Exari. “It’s not just about making money, but the impact
and responsibility as an attorney to provide access to the courthouse…the
billable hour has effectively become a hinderance. We need more efficiency, and
that means implementing technology, like automating certain forms…that can save
me 20 hours of paralegal work.”
With
Accelerator, that change comes from the law students themselves. As a
fee-generating law firm within the law school, students get hands-on experience
in everything from handling cases to building their own automated forms. Glover
himself created a smart document where consumers could see if lawyers would be
able to provide an answer to whether they could seal their criminal record. In
doing so, Glover thinks it can help make the criminal justice system more
accessible to those who aren’t a middle age white man.
“At Accelerator you don’t just say ‘What
do you think about this?’ We have a lot of those conversations too, but we’re
also doing those things. We explore time management software, billing software,
the dynamics of small firms versus big firms, how we would market ourselves,
and then we market ourselves,” said Glover. “We have the extra—and
incredible—responsibility of the ownership of the whole process, from client
outreach to management of the firm.”
That responsibility is important to
Seidman, who believes law schools owe it to their graduates to be teaching
these tools while they’re still students. After all, what better way to train
lawyers who can hit the ground running in their post-graduate careers than by
getting them that experience before they get their diploma? In Seidman and
Glover’s minds, that’s just not something that’s offered as much as it should
be.
The New
Access Model
Especially with the justice gap presenting
an increasingly significant problem. Ask anyone who’s seen a “Law and Order”
episode and they’ll tell you that “if you cannot afford an attorney one will be
appointed to you”—but that’ in criminal cases. In the more common and standard
cases in civil court, lawyers don’t come with the deal, and may not come cheap.
As such, the number of people representing themselves in court has soared since
the economy soured.
Although those day-to-day access cases may
seem mundane to many lawyers, and often deal with lower opportunities for
maximizing profits, Seidman notes that they can be some of the most important
cases of their client’s lives.
“On the civil side of the law there’s a
lot at stake, particularly for average income people in legal problems of
everyday life—mortgage crisis, people losing homes, employment discrimination,
family law matters, and so on—average income people often run up against the
civil side of the law, and cannot afford representation,” said Seidman.
“A lawyer that says ‘I’m going to charge you x amount per hour, whatever
needs to be done’ is really not going to be the prevailing method of
representation for low and average income people. For [those people] the
delivery models are going to be different.”
The New
Toolkit
Which means the toolset of the average
lawyer needs to be different. In order to equip these lawyers, the Accelerator
program covers everything from the business of law (How can you ethically
market a practice? How do you put a value on your own services?) to the booming
technological side of law (“Lawyering in the Age of Smart Machines” and
“Process Improvement and Legal Project Management” were just two of the classes
Glover remembers taking). Seidman noIt’s a strategy a lot of law schools are
taking, but not many are turning into immersive school experiences. As Seidman
sees it one course is good, a whole program is a lot better.
And that change means people up and down
the chain are learning.
“I was very intimidated as a professor; we’re used to
having mastery of our subject. But I always liken this to how 100 years ago
medical professors thought about the introduction to radiology: ‘If I can feel
it I can see where the break is!’ Maybe, but you can be a lot more efficient by
getting an actual photograph of it,” said Seidman. “If I, as a person who went
to Woodstock, can learn to use and in some sense do the creation of [legal technology]
myself, anyone can.”
In the end that’s what Accelerator is
doing: Bridging the justice gap with a new type of law grad. And it seems to be
working.
“‘Going forward how will you be
sustainable?’ That’s not something you have to worry about in another clinic;
the administration figures that out for you. But [at the Accelerator] they made
us adults. They really treated us like professionals, which was incredible,”
said Glover, who believes that it’s only a matter of time before the skills he
picked up in Accelerator become a priority for clients at any income level.
“It’s not just being efficient for the
sake of being efficient and charging more money; it’s not enough anymore to say
‘I didn’t know I could do this,’ and take 40 hours instead of 10…If this
attorney doesn’t do it they’re going to go to the guy down the street. Learning
these tools are just the inevitable and responsible thing to do.”
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