Cognitive Dissonance at USC Law on the Availability of Legal Help
Good evening y’all! 
One of the things I try to do every morning (before venturing out into the world with my bow and arrow) is running through the mini-feed of the NC SPICE Twitter account and looking for any useful or interesting stories that might be helpful to the solo and small practitioners we serve. It helps them out, and has the side benefit of keeping me informed about what’s going on in the world.1
And every now and then I come across stories that just kinda make me scratch my head…
The good folks over at Solo Practice University had one of those tweets this morning:
Making Justice Accessible to Everyone http://t.co/WjolmO34 #SPU
— Susan Cartier Liebel (@SoloPracticeU) October 1, 2012
Seemed like an innocuous-enough tweet so I clicked the link, and was taken to this press release from the University of Southern California’s Gould School of Law. It outlines the planned testimony earlier today of “Legal Trailblazer Gillian Hadfield,” a professor at the law school, who insists “the legal system’s regulatory approach needs to dramatically shift with less-expensive alternatives to attorneys[.]”
As part of her prepared remarks, the release claims:
“My main message for the Court is one rarely heard from the legal profession,” Hadfield said. “There is no way to generate the kind of legal help ordinary Americans need without fundamental change in the way the judiciary regulates the practice of law… We cannot possibly solve the access to justice problem without changes in our regulatory approach.”
Now I don’t know who Gillian Hadfield is; I’m sure she’s a great lady and a sage scholar of the law. And I’ll even go a step further and accept at face value the claim that her “message” of needed regulatory reform “is one rarely heard from the legal profession.”2
But she teaches at USC Law.
A school with annual tuition and fee rates of $51,490.00 in 2012-2013.
The 6th most-expensive law school in the nation.3 
Take a minute to juxtapose Hadfield’s view promoting non-lawyer lawyers with the long-standing lamentation law schools flooded the market with too many graduates. I think those complaints are wrong — the problem isn’t too many lawyers, it’s too many lawyers trying to bill out $250+ an hour so they can repay student loan debts in excess of a quarter-million dollars apiece — but the contrast highlights how completely backwards the discussion over the legal market has gotten.
If you want to promote deregulation of the legal industry, say on the notion that more competition would induce more innovation and produce a better product, then go for it. At least that’s a plausible argument and frankly one I’d support.4
But to promote deregulation on the mind-numbing theory there’s an undersupply of legal help available, all while enriching yourself via (and thus contributing to) one of the top drivers behind inflated legal rates, is beyond farcical. 
The press release closes by noting Professor Hadfield’s valiant efforts to tame her employer:
She is part of a growing movement to reform legal education. Her mission is to teach law students to be problem solvers.
“Many law professors come to law school thinking that our job is to be the expert at the front of the class imparting information,” she said. “But one of the most important things we can do for our students is to get them actively engaged in problem-solving together to generate workable solutions to client problems. As I see it, my job as a professor is to design the materials and opportunities for them to do that and then to take myself out of center stage as much as possible.”
With due respect to the esteemed Professor Hadfield, if you really want to “take [yourself] out of center stage as much as possible” I’d suggest you encourage USC Law to lead by example and slash its tuition and fee rates.
Approach that objective with even a fraction of the zeal you’ve devoted to deregulating the entire legal profession, and I suspect you’d discover there is a “way to generate the kind of legal help ordinary Americans need”: producing lawyers ordinary Americans can actually afford to hire. 
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From the law:/dev/null Unsolicited Commentary archives:
- Cognitive Dissonance at USC Law on the Availability of Legal Help (10/01/12) [this post]
- A conservative’s [brief] case for higher education funding (11/09/11)
- Cooley Law grads blame school for their own naiveté (08/12/11)
- The YLD’s incomplete approach to law school transparency (08/06/11)
- Your 1L Grades Don’t Matter (05/29/11)
- An insane weekend (01/09/11)
- Is law school really worth it? (Part II) (11/14/10)
- Is law school really worth it? My $.02 (11/13/10)
- 5 thoughts on this Shirley Sherrod foolishness (07/21/10)
- Unsolicited commentary on the legal clusterf*ck facing homosexuals (06/11/10)
- Unsolicited commentary on immigration (05/06/10)
- Supremes uphold common sense (01/22/10)
- Unsolicited commentary on Elections ’09 (11/08/09)
- There’s a LOT of cool new material every. single. day!
[↩] - A point I’m not sure is supported by the evidence, what with New York moving to mandatory pro bono hours and states promoting other regulatory changes. While the particular reforms might differ, the entire “access to justice” debate’s focus has been on the tweaking of regulations. [↩]
- For comparison, the national median for private law school tuition and fees is currently $40,585.00; the median for public law school tuition and fees comes to less than half USC Law’s amount, at $23,590.00 per year.
[↩] - I’ve learned in the months since the bar exam that there are quite a few things that are so simple they could be accomplished by a well-trained monkey, yet require a lawyer’s signature instead. I don’t fear deregulation. [↩]
