IAALS and the Legal Profession: Building Momentum and Expanding Access
The delivery of legal services plays a critical role in the pursuit of improving access to justice. For justice to be a reality for everyone, legal services must be accessible and affordable for everyone. The legal system is failing to deliver on that promise, and affordable legal services are out of reach for the vast majority of Americans. It is well documented that this problem exists for low-income Americans, but less attention is given to the fact that middle class Americans are also priced out of justice. To date, very few resources and organized efforts are dedicated to improving and expanding legal services for the middle class, which represents roughly half of Americans.
IAALS’ work within the legal profession is aimed at changing that. With expanded access to legal help, the financial, procedural, and time-intensive obstacles standing in the way of justice begin to fade. By building a broader ecosystem of providers and providing best practices to guide innovation, we are expanding access to affordable legal help.
Creating People-Centered Regulatory Pathways
For nearly a decade, IAALS has led the national movement to modernize legal regulations that open new pathways for new legal helpers to enter the marketplace and serve the countless people that lawyers are not. IAALS has collaborated with and advised a wide range of task forces and working groups around the country that are considering regulatory reform in their communities, while also convening national stakeholders to develop new recommendations and resources that build momentum for change.
Regulatory Sandboxes and Alternative Business Structure Programs
In 2019, IAALS proposed a model of regulation that envisioned a nonprofit, independent regulator of legal service providers utilizing a risk-based approach to regulation to improve consumer access to a wide range of quality legal services within a competitive market for legal services.
Leaders in Utah and Arizona were inspired by the model and launched the Utah Sandbox and Arizona Alternative Business Structure (ABS) Program, both first of their kind programs in the United States. Since the launch of the sandbox and ABS programs, three additional states and territories—Indiana, Puerto Rico, and Washington—have launched a sandbox or ABS program, and task forces or other entities in additional states—Texas, Minnesota, Tennessee, California, and Illinois—have or are considering such programs. The Sandbox programs are pilot programs designed to test new ideas, and the Utah Supreme Court is in the process of sunsetting its Sandbox program and institutionalizing reform efforts.
IAALS recently published an interim evaluation of the Utah Sandbox that included a process evaluation, outcomes evaluation, and social return on investment analysis, and earlier this year IAALS launched its ABS Evaluation Blueprint project with the objective of co-designing an evaluation framework for ABS programs that measure their impact on consumers and if they are meeting their objectives. As a next step, IAALS intends to evaluate Arizona's ABS program.
Supporting and Growing Allied Legal Professional Programs
IAALS is also leading the charge to bring allied legal professionals (ALPs) to the legal marketplace in more states across the country. ALPs are the nurse practitioners of the legal profession, and research shows that these licensed and regulated professionals who are not lawyers achieve strong client outcomes and high satisfaction in the limited matters they handle. IAALS is establishing national best-practice thinking around ALP programs and is the go-to organization when it comes to structuring and implementing them.
Our National Framework for Program Growth provides 18 high-level recommendations to guide states that are considering, implementing, or refining ALP programs. IAALS also provides expert guidance on creating reciprocity between programs and will soon provide guidance on a uniform professional title that states should give these practitioners.
Regulating AI in the Delivery of Consumer-Facing Legal Services
More recently, IAALS has turned its attention to the growing need to determine if and how to regulate the use of AI in the delivery of consumer-facing legal services. People are using AI tools to solve legal problems, and unsurprisingly, we are starting to see situations involving their misuse of AI tools result in litigation. IAALS convened experts with different perspectives from across the country to grapple with these questions and published a recommended phased approach to regulating AI. IAALS is now collaborating with the Duke Center of Law and Technology to widen the conversation through a webinar series and toolkit for leaders in jurisdictions who are interested in developing prosecutorial guidance or non-prosecution policies.
Focusing on the Middle Class
Our Cases Without Counsel work revealed that the primary driver of self-representation is the inability to afford a lawyer. People overwhelmingly report wanting lawyers, though that preference is expressed in a market that offers few alternatives. One way to bridge this gap is to encourage practitioners to offer unbundled legal services, and IAALS has developed recommendations and resources to support this proven model.
But unbundling is just one piece of the puzzle. With an eye toward creating an organized effort to close the middle-class slice of the access to legal services gap, IAALS, in partnership with The Chicago Bar Foundation, launched the Above the Line Network (ATLN). ATLN is a community of leaders from across the United States, Canada, and beyond working together to transform the delivery of legal services for the underserved middle class. ATLN has built a thriving community of over 140 providers and innovators across 30 states and three Canadian provinces, with a Hub for members, stakeholder roundtables, presentations, webinars, resources, and workshops on promising models that bring middle class justice within reach.
Beyond the Provider Pipeline
Each of these pathways expands the supply of people who can help. Allied legal professionals, alternative business structures, and unbundled representation all widen the range of providers a person can turn to, and each depends on recruiting, training, and licensing human beings. That is real progress, and it is bounded by how quickly those pipelines can grow.
Meanwhile, a very large group of people are not waiting. In Utah, before regulatory reform began, defendants appeared without counsel in the overwhelming majority of debt collection and eviction cases, and similar patterns hold in courts across the country. Nationally, 76% of civil cases involve at least one self-represented litigant, and while the burden falls hardest on low-income people, it reaches well into the middle class. For most of them, the practical choice has never been between a lawyer and a lower-cost provider. It has been between navigating the system alone and giving up.
This distinction matters, because it changes what counts as a solution. For a person who will stand at the podium regardless, help that depends on securing a provider does not arrive. What reaches them instead is whatever guidance, forms, and tools they can obtain directly — and increasingly, that means general-purpose AI systems, used without supervision and without anyone measuring the result.
Strengthening the capability of people who represent themselves is therefore not a fallback position. It is a distinct pathway, and it is the only one whose reach is not limited by the number of professionals we can train. The profession has long treated self-representation as a problem to be eliminated rather than a reality to be equipped for, and that instinct has left millions of people outside the reach of every reform described here.
It has also left us without evidence. Efforts to evaluate legal technology have concentrated on tools built for lawyers, measuring research accuracy, citation reliability, and document review. Far less attention has gone to the question that matters most for people without representation: does this tool help someone identify a claim, meet a deadline, or respond to a motion they have never seen before? Without shared measures for that, we cannot distinguish a tool that helps from one that merely sounds authoritative — and neither courts nor consumers have a basis for telling the difference. Building that evidence base is the kind of gap IAALS exists to fill.
Thinking Like a Client
Clients value affordability, but what else do they value, particularly in their lawyers? In our Think Like a Client project, we set out to answer this question and to fill a well-established and frequently lamented gap between the legal needs of the public and how the profession actually meets those needs. Perhaps not surprisingly, clients value a wide range of attributes in a lawyer: communication, demeanor, business model, lawyering, and tenacity. By understanding what clients value in their lawyers, we can place clients at the center of efforts to improve legal services and the legal profession at large.
Looking Ahead: The Next Decade of Legal Services
The progress of the last decade proves that the legal profession is capable of meaningful, structural evolution, but that progress has not been linear. Reforms have faced significant resistance, been reversed or constrained, and in some cases fallen short of their ambitions. However, creating a modern legal ecosystem is an ongoing endeavor, not a single destination. Looking to the future, IAALS remains focused on turning experimental momentum and innovation into permanent, nationwide infrastructure. By bringing together data, broad stakeholder networks, and an unwavering commitment to the public good, IAALS will continue building a responsive, multi-tiered legal ecosystem where quality legal help is within reach for all.
