The Changing Nature of the Legal Profession

Gregg Lombardi - Executive Director

At the 40th Anniversary of the creation of the Legal Services Corporation, there were lots of speeches by impressive dignitaries. There were also lots of impressive and surprising facts bandied around about the changing nature of the legal profession.

Here are a number of noteworthy facts and statistics that I came away with and which might be of interest to you. I have not done any confirmation of these, but can only tell you that they come from credible sources:

--The cost of litigation is resulting in alternative dispute resolution processes that are outside of the legal system. For example, in 2013, e-Bay resolved 6 million on-line disputes without the assistance of any attorney;

--In 2013, there were 335,000 cases brought in federal court in which the court provided an interpreter for a party or a witness who did not speak English;

--Washington State is considering issuing limited licenses to practice law, that would allow students to graduate from law school in substantially less time if they were only going to focus their practice on a specific type of work (for example, divorces on municipal court cases);

--New York State now allows law students to skip their final term of law school and take the bar exam in February, if they spend their final term working for a not-for-profit organization;

-- Justice Scalia at the conference said: "Access to justice is the most fundamental American ideal."

--The United Kingdom has de-regulated law. They now allow non-lawyers to own law firms;

--According to a 10-year Harvard study, the average new attorney changed jobs roughly 4 times between 2002 and 2012; 

--In half of the cases filed in the 7th Circuit in 2013 at least one party was not represented by counsel;

--In 90% of the divorce cases filed in Connecticut in 2013 at least one party was not represented by counsel;

--In 1978, federal funding for legal aid programs nationally was $205 million. That equates to $747 million in funding in 2014 dollars, when adjusted for inflation. That is more than twice the current level of federal funding for the legal aid programs’ work;

--Discretionary funding in the federal budget (which is where Legal Aid funding comes from) is now about one-third of the budget. In 2024, it’s estimated the discretionary funding will account for only 15% of the budget;

--In 1994, the largest 200 law firms in the country did about 900,000 of pro bono work. In 2013, they did over 5 million hours of pro bono work.

--Attorneys in Texas in 2013 did 2.5 million hours of pro bono work.