By Aron Solomon / For The Herald
Washington state launched the Limited License Legal Technician (LLLT) program in 2015, with the truly admirable goal of training practitioners to provide affordable, regulated and skilled legal services to the people in the state who had family law issues but couldn’t afford a lawyer.
Only five years after the launch of what was, on the ground, an overwhelmingly successful program, the state Supreme Court turned on the program and ended it. There is little in the legal innovation space more disappointing than putting resources behind a new program to give more people access to justice, seeing promising initial results, and then having the program end before it can get the ultimate traction it deserves. But that’s exactly what happened here.
The question that remains is whether the state will ultimately be allowed to get away with it.
Washington’s LLLT program was killed off just as the American Bar Association House of Delegates passed Resolution 115 in February, 2020. The resolution “encourages U.S. jurisdictions to consider regulatory innovations that have the potential to improve the accessibility, affordability and quality of civil legal services, while also ensuring necessary and appropriate protections that best serve clients and the public.” These are all goals that the Washington LLLT license has already met.
For those thinking that the LLLT was a cakewalk and would produce practitioners with a level of training and skill below what is reasonably necessary to properly serve their clients, this simply was never the reality of the programs’ rigorous requirements. Admission and Practice Rule 28 was finalized in 2015 and allowed only paralegals meeting certain educational standards and having passed a test to perform limited practice in the area of family law in the state.
As of early 2015, LLLTs in Washington are also allowed to become minor partners in law firms and share fees with lawyers, making Washington the only state in the union that allows non-lawyer ownership of a law firm. Yet, even though legal technicians can be part owners of law firms, they aren’t permitted to supervise lawyers in any way.
This entire issue really grabbed my imagination, so I spent a few weeks in dialogue with people who have made it through the program and are successfully practicing. Because of the ongoing tension with some lawyers and the potential for further judicial involvement, I am summarizing these conversations and keeping the sources anonymous.
One legal tech spoke at length about the diversity not only in the clients served, but in the people who are attracted to the program itself. They noted that there was a huge diversity in the legal technician pipeline, including people of color, as well as those who have degrees of disability that affected their decision not to go to law school but instead to work hard for their legal tech license.
Another legal tech shared the story of more than five years of work to get their license given the complexities of their personal situation. From what I learned, this is a person who has the passion and talent to earn a law degree, just not the personal circumstances to make that a reality. My take is that for many legal techs, the program took a long time, depending whether the candidate had all the paralegal education needed to start with, which can add at least a year (if the candidate already has a bachelor’s degree) but could likely add two or more years.
Everyone I interviewed was sure to specify that they were well aware that they have to be especially mindful of the limits of their role. They have a carefully defined list of prohibited activities. And they have to be comfortable referring clients to lawyers for matters outside their expertise or purview. But these conversations revealed to me a group of dedicated professionals (not “paraprofessionals”) whose daily activities resemble the work of many lawyers. These techs analyze legal issues, perform legal research, draft legal papers and provide valuable legal advice to their clients; again, clients who would more than likely not be able to afford counsel.
The sad ending — at least for now — is that the LLLT program has been killed off (the term being used is “sunsetted”) by the state, with the official end next summer, though no new candidates can now register. Yet it’s clear that the termination of this program is ripe for judicial review. I have heard rumblings from the state that a viable case could come forward with the potential to work its way back before the state justices.
If a case coming out of the discontinuation of the LLLT program does manage to climb up the court system, this would be a great thing for access to justice. Far too much of what these legal techs do doesn’t need to be done by lawyers. This is a fantastic program that steps in where other initiatives have failed; it gives more people access to the legal system.
Ultimately, I’m only scratching the surface of an issue that merits a lot more digging; by both journalists and jurists. It seems that the most critical legal process issue here is the ridiculous disconnect between the program’s establishment and operation and its abrupt shutdown. For a program designed to help a lot of people in the state in need of access to justice, its sunsetting is simply unjust.
Aron Solomon is the head of strategy for Esquire Digital and the editor of Today’s Esquire. He has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was the founder of LegalX, the world’s first legal technology accelerator.
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