Legal News

Should Wal-Mart Add Legal Services to Jeans, T-Shirts and Toasters?

By Nathan Koppel

Gillian Hadfield, a “Sidley Austin visiting professor of law” at Harvard, has a provocative piece today in the Washignton Post. The piece takes aim at the legal industry's guild system. (HT: ABA Journal)

Her starting point is that too many Americans can't afford to vindicate their legal rights. Surveys, she writes, show that 30 to 40% of Americans with legal problems do nothing to resolve them, as compared with just 5% in Britain.

Why?

Because the American bar erects massive barriers to entry, including prohibiting non-lawyers with specialized expertise (housing, immigration, child custody) from offering legal advice. Also, the U.S. bars non-lawyer controlled companies from selling legal services, unlike in England, where starting next year large companies like Tesco (the European equivalent of Wal-Mart, she writes) will be able to sell legal advice.

"Those facing legal problems in the United States . . . can't buy what they need from entrepreneurs or full-service stores like Wal-Mart that now package low-cost eye exams, insurance, banking and more with their diapers and detergents," she writes.

Lawyers typically argue that barriers to entry are necessary to save consumers from quack legal advice. Hadfield has a counter-argument at the ready.

"There's nothing wrong with ensuring quality of service, but attacks on innovative providers in the United States go well beyond what can be justified in a world that looks so much to law to organize everyday life."

LB'ers, we demand your take on this important issue, which dovetails into the related gripe that licensed lawyers should be free to practice law in any state in the country. Many states, of course, require lawyers to pass their home-state bar exams to practice law in the jurisdiction, an onerous requirement that trips up many seasoned attorneys, including the likes of new Quinn Emanuel name partner Kathleen Sullivan.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 12, 2010 (boomark / email).