According to Lucy Ricca, executive director of the Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Professional at Stanford Law School, the program’s demise was due in part to onerous registration requirements that made it time-consuming and difficult to become licensed, blunting the impact of the program.

States working to implement programs now, meanwhile, are hoping to learn from Washington’s example and find the proper balance between protecting consumers and avoiding overregulation that can make the programs too burdensome to participants, Ricca said.

“If you make the requirement to become a licensed legal paraprofessional so onerous it undermines the affordability and accessibility … providers can’t actually offer low-cost legal services independently on the back side,” she said.

“We know that middle-class Americans are a big part of this justice gap,” Ricca said. “If we can have independent paraprofessionals meeting the needs of those people, that should be a high priority whether or not the fees are so low that low-income people can access them. We need solutions all across the spectrum.”