Law without lawyers?

A family disputes portal in the Netherlands, open to both legal aid and fee-paying clients, could be showing us what the future of law looks like, says Jean-Yves Gilg

Access to justice, in the current debate over legal aid, has been articulated primarily in terms of access to a lawyer. Lawyers know the law. They can leverage its potential in support of the weak. They are the gatekeepers.

No surprise, then, that they have been targeted by the government in its relentless drive to shrink the legal aid budget: cut down the bill by cutting out the lawyers - directly, by slashing fees, or indirectly by taking matters out of scope.

But in its hardline, single-track approach, the government has removed access to lawyers without replacing it with anything.

As I have suggested before, stakeholders - that's the government, lawyers, technology providers, law centres, etc - need to start designing lower-cost alternatives that will achieve comparable results. This is not an easy job but other jurisdictions have been experimenting with new models that could provide useful inspiration.

LAW COUNTERS

Take the Netherlands, for example. Between 2003 and 2006, the Dutch government closed down its law centres and replaced them with a network of 'law counters', all of which are plugged into a web-based platform, Rechtwijzer, maintained by legal research institute HiiL and powered by online dispute resolution specialists Modria.

Launched in 2007, Rechtwijzer isn't entirely joined up yet but it offers step-by-step assistance with a number of everyday legal issues. The latest iteration of the scheme is taking shape. Most importantly, it takes us beyond the traditional divide between publicly funded NHS-type legal aid on the one side and privately paid-for legal services on the other.

Focusing on divorce and separation, this latest version of the portal is already available to individuals eligible for legal aid. From July, it will be also available to any member of the public, who will be charged on a pay-as-you-go basis.

The concept is fiendishly simple: users go on to the Rechtwijzer website, find out through a virtual triage point whether they are eligible to use the service via legal aid, and proceed through to a number of stages, each encouraging discussion and positive outcomes.

Mediators and adjudicators under contract with the legal aid board are available along the way, and the final divorce settlement is reviewed for fairness by a lawyer before being ratified by the court. The Dutch government is even looking into removing the courts from the process altogether and allowing settlements to be ratified by local registrars.

PORTAL FOR ALL

The next natural step would be to turn the platform into a wider online portal for all legal services. This would include setting up a panel of approved lawyers for users who decide to instruct a lawyer after all - effectively, a referral system, much like LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer, or Saga. HiiL's justice technology architect Jin Ho Verdonschot tells me that the organisation is already looking into how this could work.

This is enormously exciting but not without grey areas. It could turn the Rechtwijzer platform into a quasi-monopoly, controlling access to lawyers. One possible consequence could be a split of the sector, with poorer clients channeled through this service, and high-end services affordable only by the most well off. It may not be so clear cut, of course, but this could change the dynamics of supply and demand in legal services.

Then there is the key question of how much self-help can people realistically embrace. Which in turn leads to another question: where does that leave the lawyers?

The Dutch legal community was initially suspicious of Rechtwijzer but it is now apparently coming around to the idea. This may sound counterintuitive but such a model could be a good thing for lawyers. Not because of the referral mechanism but because it will force lawyers to think differently about what they have to offer. Perhaps stop chasing low-fee work - unless they are really geared up for it - and instead concentrate on genuinely higher-value services that do require intimate technical skills for their resolution.

The future of law does not mean a future without lawyers. Equally, lawyers will have to change the way they think about the law and access to justice. Rechtwijzer gives us a preview of what this future could look like.

 

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Jean-Yves Gilg is editor of Solicitors Journal

jean-yves.gilg@solicitorsjournal.co.uk

 

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