The legal profession is in the throes of a mental health crisis. State bars across the country continue to be rocked by the tragic loss of their lawyers to suicide and accidental drug overdose. Recent studies have also shed further light on the severity and scale of lawyers’ long-recognized struggles with depression, anxiety, substance abuse,…
How Should We License Lawyers?
During the summer of 2020, anger and frustration about lawyer licensing practices boiled over. The bar exam had always imposed economic and psychological burdens on test takers, but the rise of a pandemic added an additional hazard: exposure to a dangerous virus. Some states continued the in-person traditional exam despite the health risks, but others…
The Politics of Lawyer Regulation: The Case of Malpractice Insurance
This article examines the politics of lawyer regulation and considers why some states will adopt lawyer regulation that protects the public, when others will not. It uses the debates over how to regulate uninsured lawyers as a lens through which to examine the question. Clients often cannot recover damages from uninsured lawyers who commit malpractice,…
The Lawyer of the Future as “Transaction Engineer”: Digital Technologies and the Disruption of the Legal Profession
Fenwick, M., & Vermeulen, E. P. (2019). The Lawyer of the Future as “Transaction Engineer”: Digital Technologies and the Disruption of the Legal Profession. In Legal Tech, Smart Contracts and Blockchain (pp. 253-272). Springer, Singapore This chapter introduces two connected arguments about the future of the legal profession . First, the ongoing “digital revolution ” will continue…
Flattening the World of Legal Services? The Ethical and Liability Minefields of Offshoring Legal and Law-Related Services
This article examines offshore outsourcing of legal and law related services as the newest twist in the international market for legal services. We consider the impact of offshore outsourcing on the profession generally and analyse the ethical issues raised by offshore outsourcing, both as it exists today and as the practice may develop in the…
Making sense of professional enablers’ involvement in laundering organized crime proceeds and of their regulation
Money laundering has ascended the enforcement and criminological agenda in the course of this century, and has been accompanied by an increased focus on legal professionals as ‘enablers’ of crime. This article explores the dynamics of this enforcement, media and political agenda, and how the legal profession has responded in the UK and elsewhere, within…
The Evolution of Professionalism as a Mode of Regulation: Evidence from the United States
Opinion is divided on how far and in what ways professionalism as a mode of regulation has evolved. To date, attention has focused on the impact of neoliberal political and economic ideologies that challenge the idea that professions should be trusted to regulate themselves. This article further examines the impact of these attacks on professionalism…
Designing Just Solutions at Scale: Lawyerless Legal Services and Evidence-Based Regulation
Around the world, billions of people lack access to justice, often because they cannot access help in resolving their justice issues. An important reason for this is that many access models rely centrally on lawyers, and such models simply cannot scale. Some jurisdictions allow lawyerless legal services. We offer a new framework for understanding lawyerless…
Access to Justice and Legal Services Regulatory Reform
Researchers have launched a new era of studies exploring relationships between legal services regulation and access to justice. These scholarly developments respond to recent changes in how Anglo-American jurisdictions regulate the practice of law, changing who can make money from the practice of law, who can engage in it, and who can direct and control…
The impact of international lawyer organizations on lawyer regulation
Levin, L. C., Mather, L., & de Groot-van Leeuwen, L. (2018). The impact of international lawyer organizations on lawyer regulation. Fordham Int’l LJ, 42, 407. While much of the scholarly attention devoted to lawyer regulation focuses on state or national actors, the impact of international lawyer organizations has been largely ignored. Increasingly, however, a number of such…