News Tag: Legal Innovation

December 16, 2019

2020 Resolution—Make Law Better by Looking Outside Law

One of the common traits of our legal profession is to view
ourselves as unique in the world. And that is certainly true to an extent, as the
practice of law involves specialized expertise and services that good lawyers
are distinctively able to provide.

But we are not as unique as we think we are, particularly when it comes to the business of law and the way we deliver our services. For that reason, my Fourth Annual New Year’s Resolution for our Profession is to break out of our legal bubble. There is much we can learn from other professions and industries to improve both the practice of law and access to justice.

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November 12, 2019

New CBA/CBF Task Force Aims to Lead Our Profession into the Future

The CBA and CBF earlier this month launched a new Task Force on the Sustainable Practice of Law & Innovation with the interconnected goals of making legal services more affordable and accessible for the public and making the practice of law more innovative and sustainable for lawyers. Building on the CBA and CBF’s prior leadership on these issues and similar efforts in other jurisdictions, the Task Force will reimagine the way we regulate the business of law in Illinois and ultimately make recommendations to the Illinois Supreme Court to modernize the Rules of Professional Conduct to advance these goals. Learn more…

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October 8, 2019

CBA and CBF Aiming for Significant Legal Regulatory Reform with Creation of New Joint Task Force

The Chicago Bar Association and the Chicago Bar Foundation have announced the creation of a first-of-its-kind Illinois task force that will work to identify regulatory reform recommendations to provide enhanced access and more affordable legal services to the public, while also working to make the practice of law more innovative and sustainable for lawyers.

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June 26, 2019

New Incubator Launches in Colorado with Helping Hand from the CBF

Earlier this month, the CBF and our Justice Entrepreneurs Project (JEP) gained a new partner in the cause with the official launch of the Legal Entrepreneurs for Justice (LEJ) incubator in Denver.

Over the years since the CBF developed and launched the JEP, one of our goals for the program has been to identify successful […]

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March 27, 2019

Uber, Taxis and the Legal Market

Take a trip down bad memory lane to about ten years ago when you needed to get a cab but were not in a place where taxis tend to be plentiful on the street. Remember what that was like?

Hold that thought for a moment, and now think of what it is like today for someone who is looking for a lawyer and doesn’t know where to turn. While it is sure to get most lawyers upset to be compared to the taxi industry, the similarities in these two market failures are striking. We can write a different script for what happens in the legal market but need to start now.

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February 27, 2019

What Are We Selling?

It seems a simple question to ask, but one we do not think enough about in law and too often answer incorrectly. Getting that answer right is the first essential step towards carrying out my New
Year’s Resolution for 2019 for the legal profession to tackle our affordability problem for everyday people.

Two recent commentaries in the New York Times and the Atlantic challenge us to re-examine our profession’s longstanding assumptions on this question, and offer a good jumping off point for discussion.

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December 20, 2018

2019 Resolution—Time to Tackle our Affordability Problem for Everyday People

Lawyers often joke that they couldn’t afford themselves if they ran into a serious legal problem. While that is (usually) an exaggeration when a lawyer says it, it reflects a reality we all know to be true for most people in our community. It was not always like this, but somewhere along the way our profession managed to price the proverbial “regular guy” out of the market for most legal services.

As lawyers, we like to think of ourselves as problem solvers. This time the problem is us, and in 2019 we all need to make it a priority to solve it.

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December 11, 2018

Sharing the JEP’s (Not So) Secret Keys to Success

The goal of the CBF Justice Entrepreneurs Project has always been twofold. First and most obviously, we want to increase access to affordable legal services for low and middle-income people and businesses in the Chicago area through the direct efforts of the lawyers in the JEP network.

The second aim of the JEP has always been to […]

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August 30, 2018

Expanding Practices and Access through Limited Scope

Across the country, the civil justice system is undergoing a transformation. More and more litigants are appearing in court without lawyers, making up well over half of the civil litigants in Illinois and closer to 75% nationally. Self-representation is no longer limited to the poorest users of the court system; growing numbers of middle-class people […]

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August 15, 2018

Our Profession’s Losing Battle Against the Market

By any definition, we have a failure in the market for legal services for everyday people today, and a growing one at that. We have more lawyers than ever before at the same time as record numbers of people who need or would benefit from legal help are not getting it. Yet when faced with proposed changes to the Rules of Professional Conduct to address this market failure, the default response of our profession is to fight to maintain a losing status quo perhaps making some technical changes but avoiding the larger issues.

Lipstick on a pig, as the saying goes, when what we really need is a new regulatory approach that does not force lawyers to compete in the market with one hand tied behind their backs.

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