Lawyers in the United States have long enjoyed a monopoly over the provision of legal services. Shielded by sweeping unauthorized practice of law (UPL) restrictions and reinforced by rules that ban fee-sharing and nonlawyer ownership, the legal profession has long cast out would-be legal service providers—both human and technological—that aim to expand the pool of available legal help. But, amid mounting pressure from tech-driven innovation and a deepening access-to-justice crisis, that century-old monopoly is beginning to buckle.

A new edited volume, Rethinking the Lawyers’ Monopoly: Access to Justice and the Future of Legal Services, takes stock of this moment of rupture. Co-edited by Stanford professors Nora & David Freeman Engstrom, the volume features a diverse cast of contributors—including legal ethicists, economists, political scientists, technologists, business consultants, and judges—the volume explores the future of legal services regulation through thoughtful and innovative analysis. Here, Nora and David discuss the volume and its implications for access to justice.

Q: What prompted this volume? Why now?

Nora: This volume was born from a convening we held in 2023, where we gathered together prominent scholars, stakeholders, and thinkers to discuss potential innovations for mitigating America’s crippling access-to-justice crisis. As it stands, in roughly 75% of the 20 million civil cases filed in state court each year, at least one party lacks an attorney. And, tens of millions of Americans face some sort of legal issue, but don’t take any formal legal action to protect their interests. Put simply, there’s a mountain of unmet legal need, with millions of Americans forced to navigate high-risk legal issues—including eviction, debt, wage theft, family dissolution, and more—without the help of a competent legal professional.

David: A logical way to mitigate this crisis would be to increase the supply of legal service providers. But, until very recently, efforts to do so have been stymied by the fact that lawyers hold an exclusive monopoly on the provision of legal advice. Every state has adopted unauthorized practice of law rules and statutes that prohibit (and sometimes criminalize) nonlawyers from counseling clients on even simple legal matters. And, law firm funding and ownership restrictions further circumscribe who can fund legal services providers, constricting supply even more.

Nora: But those guardrails are under mounting pressure. Key stakeholders have started to pay attention to the access-to-justice crisis. At the same time, advances in legal technology—particularly generative AI—have opened the door to new, scalable forms of assistance. The profession’s old model is creaking under the weight of modern needs and capabilities.

David: So, along with our contributors, we assembled this volume to interrogate the system we have—and to help chart a course to something better.

Q: What themes or questions organize the volume?

Nora: We organize the seventeen chapters in the volume around four core questions. First, how should we conceptualize the problems at the intersection of legal services regulation and access to justice? Is it a regulatory issue? An economic issue? A political issue? Something else?

Second, we ask what we can learn from reforms already underway. We look to, for instance, reforms that have already been enacted in the nation’s largest trial court, efforts taken by grassroots organizers, and developments in the nascent “justice tech” industry. We explore what’s working—and what isn’t.

Third, we adopt a comparative lens. We look abroad, and to efforts taken by Tribal Courts in the U.S., to analyze how other jurisdictions have grappled with nonlawyer service providers and with regulating legal tech. So too do we look to the law’s sister profession, medicine, which has wrestled with its own issues of access and equity, including the recent influx of private equity ownership of healthcare providers (we’re seeing analogous trends in the legal field) and the growth of adjunct medical providers, such as physicians’ assistants and nurse practitioners.

And finally, we look to the future of legal services reform, envisioning what the future of legal services might look like. How, we ask, might regulators best respond to an influx of legal tech providers? Will impact litigation be a key driver of regulatory reform? How will we tailor reforms to specific substantive areas of the law? Our contributors offer thoughtful answers to these and many other questions, offering a grab-bag of potential ideas and reforms that could make a significant difference in improving the delivery of legal services.

Q: What are some key insights from the volume?

David: That’s a tough question. Every single chapter, we think, offers significant insights that meaningfully add to high-stakes discussions about the future of access to justice and the delivery of legal services—we were so lucky to have so many accomplished and field-leading thinkers contribute their works to this volume. So, in the interest of economy, I’ll highlight only a few:

• Professor Rebecca L. Sandefur—the dean of the access to justice field—and her co-author Matthew Burnett critique previous reform efforts, noting that they are often “lawyer-driver,” as opposed to “client-driven.” They argue that reformers have, to this point, largely failed to account for the particular identities, priorities, and preferences of those who seek legal assistance, and they offer a blueprint for correcting that error.
• The Honorable Carolyn Kuhl, former Presiding Judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court, surveys that court system’s efforts to assist self-represented litigants, offering a candid appraisal of the court’s successes and failures.
• Professor Jamila Michener of Cornell’s Department of Government dives into methods to correct the societal power imbalances that lead to legal disputes in the first place, showcasing the power of collective action on the part of tenants’ unions to right structural injustices.
• Former Northwestern Law School Dean Daniel B. Rodriguez and I propose an innovative new federal-state hybrid regulatory framework to govern lawyers and legal tech companies in a new era of technology-based legal assistance.
• Professor Lauren van Schilfgaarde, an expert in Tribal sovereignty and federal Indian law, provides a first-of-its-kind analysis of the codification of Tribal lay advocates—nonlawyer legal services providers operating in Native American Tribal Courts—asking what lessons they may hold for the broader access to justice movement.
• Professor Gisela Rühl, of Humboldt University of Berlin, provides a survey of the myriad German legal tech companies that have leveraged digital technology to standardize and enforce small-scale consumer claims, and the regulatory innovations that arose in response.
• Professor Rebecca Aviel analyzes the specific access-to-justice challenges facing the family justice system in the U.S., pointing out that the bespoke elements of family law likely require tailored access to justice solutions.

Nora: As this selection hopefully illustrates, the chapters in the volume provide diverse perspectives on a diverse set of topics. Whether you’re a policymaker, practitioner, technologist, judge, or scholar, there’s something here to inform your thinking—and, we hope, to inspire action. The future of legal services is being written right now, and these chapters help us to ask sharper questions, consider smarter reforms, and build a more accessible system to better serve the people who need it most.

Q: What do you hope readers take away from the volume?

David: That reform is not only necessary, but possible. The access-to-justice crisis is real and growing. The status quo is failing. But change is already underway, driven by courts, regulators, organizers, legislators, and more. Our hope is that this volume informs and enriches those efforts, while also prompting readers—whether they are lawyers, policymakers, or simply citizens—to think more boldly about what the legal system could be.

Nora Freeman Engstrom is the Ernest W. McFarland Professor of Law at Stanford Law School. A nationally recognized expert in both tort law and legal ethics, she explores the day-to-day operation of the tort system, including the system’s interaction with alternative compensation mechanisms, such as no-fault automobile insurance and the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program.

David Freeman Engstrom is the LSVF Professor in Law at Stanford Law School. A far-ranging scholar of the design and implementation of litigation and regulatory regimes, Engstrom’s expertise runs to civil procedure, administrative law, constitutional law, law and technology, and empirical legal studies.