Reviewing and recommending revisions to the rules of conduct for lawyers in Illinois is the charge of a task force created by the Chicago Bar Association and the Chicago Bar Foundation.
The CBA/CBF Task Force of Sustainable Practice of Law & Innovation committees are designed to address multiple issues facing lawyers in Illinois. Once recommendations have been formulated, they will be sent to the Illinois Supreme Court for consideration and changes will affect the practice of law throughout the state.
In large part, because of my background in legal marketing, I am one of only a few non-lawyer members of the 50-member task force. The purpose of this column is to provide an overview of what we are doing and look at where we are going in the future.
What does all of this mean to you? It means that the end product is to reimagine the regulation of the practice of law to:
1. “Improve opportunities for lawyers to connect with legal consumers and practice law in a more sustainable, financially viable, and consumer-centric manner; and,
2. "Provide more cost-effective and efficient legal support to the public by, where appropriate, optimizing the use of other legal professionals, partnering with online legal service providers and other business and technology entities, and expanding the limited scope rules.”
The objectives of the task force generally are to: empower the public to determine and obtain the level of services appropriate for their needs, Protect the public from harm from purchasing or receiving bad legal advice or inappropriate legal services, Enable lawyers to compete on a level playing field, protect professional independence of lawyer judgement, use “Plain English” whenever possible to promote understanding for practitioners and other stakeholders, and finally, to increase education/encouragement among bench and bar on use of limited scope.
In addition, the guidance we were given was to make the practice of law more sustainable for lawyers ensuring that opportunities are available and accessible to them in a changing legal marketplace, and to regulate with “as light a hand as possible” to preserve the core values of the legal profession and protect the public, enabling market forces to address the current failure in the consumer market for legal services.
To accomplish these objectives, we created five committees, they are: Modernizing Lawyer Referral & Law Firm Models, Optimizing the Use of Other Legal Professionals, Partnering with Online Legal Service Providers and Other Business and Technology Entities, Plain Language Ethics Rules, and Expanding the Limited Scope Rules. I am a member of the Plain Language Ethics Rules committee.
- The committees are structured in such a way as to support the guiding philosophy and to accomplish task force objectives. The roles of the committees are as follows:
Modernizing lawyer referral and law firm models to open the door to expand opportunities for lawyers to represent clients in an affordable and financially viable manner.
- Optimizing the use of other legal professionals or paraprofessionals to assist clients and provide a variety of legal services such as community legal navigators or limited licensed legal technicians.
- Partnering with online legal service providers and other business and technology entities to make legal forms, documents and self-help resources more readily available to the public.
- Undertaking a critical review and assessment of the ARDC professional rules of responsibility with a focus on a renewed “plain language” approach.
- Assessing whether the limited scope rules for lawyers in Illinois should be expanded beyond civil cases in state court to include misdemeanor, quasi-criminal or federal court cases.