The future of legal representation
Nora Freeman Engstrom is a professor of law who says that in civil cases, there is no right to counsel and lawyers are prohibitively expensive.
As a consequence, in three-quarters of civil cases, one or more of the parties is condemned to navigate a system, built by lawyers for lawyers, alone. Buckling under the weight of these unrepresented litigants, some states are looking at alternatives, including non-lawyer representation, curated legal help for low-income citizens, and even AI, as Engstrom tells host Russ Altman on this episode of Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything podcast.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host Russ Altman. I thought it would be good to revisit the original intent of this show. In 2017 when we started, we wanted to create a forum to dive into and discuss the motivations and the research that my colleagues do across the campus in science, technology, engineering, medicine, and other topics. Stanford University and all universities, for the most part, have a long history of doing important work that impacts the world, and it's a joy to share with you how this work is motivated by humans who are working hard to create a better future for everybody. In that spirit, I hope you will walk away from every episode with a deeper understanding of the work that's in progress here, and that you'll share it with your friends, family, neighbors, coworkers as well.
[00:00:48] Nora Freeman Engstrom: In the civil side of the docket, there is no right to counsel, so there's not really a,
[00:00:53] Russ Altman: Wow.
[00:00:54] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah. So there's no right to counsel. So, and we, and the, and the government or institutional actors can do a lot of things to you, and you don't have a right to a lawyer to help you. So right now, in three quarters of cases in American courts, at least one side lacks a lawyer. And, and this is a really big deal. It is what you know, how our courts behave and how our courts are treating regular folks.
[00:01:25] Russ Altman: This is Stanford Engineering's The Future of Everything, and I'm your host, Russ Altman. If you enjoy The Future of Everything, please remember to follow it in whatever app you're listening to right now. That way you'll always be alerted to new episodes and you'll never miss the future of anything. Today, Nora Freeman Engstrom will tell us that access to lawyers is a key problem throughout the United States, that sometimes three quarters of cases have only one lawyer in the room and the other party is not represented. It's the future of legal representation. Before we get started, please remember to follow this podcast, The Future of Everything, in whatever app you're listening to, that'll make sure that you're always alerted to new episodes.
[00:02:12] So when we think about law cases, let's take civil cases, not criminal. In criminal cases, you are guaranteed to have a lawyer. Guess what? In civil cases you are not. And so when we imagine two lawyers going at it in the, in the law court, that's not always what happens. In fact, in a large fraction of cases, three quarters in fact, one side doesn't have a lawyer. And guess what? You don't tend to win when you're up against a lawyer and you don't have one. Well, Nora Freeman Engstrom is a professor of law at Stanford University and an expert on legal ethics, legal representation, and ensuring access to justice. She's gonna tell us that there's a big problem in representation. It has historical roots, it causes unfair outcomes even when people know that the law is on their side. They sometimes, a lot of times, lose. She's gonna tell us what is happening to try to address this, and why can't we have the equivalent of nurse practitioners for law.
[00:03:11] Nora, what led you to focus on legal representation and access to justice as a major portion of your scholarly work?
[00:03:21] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Well, I've long taught ethics at Stanford, and part of ethics is you do think about the fact lawyers are supposed to be quote, public citizens with a special responsibility for the quality of justice. So that had kind of been in the back of my mind and I've written some about how lawyers behave and how they sometimes misbehave. Um, but the real focus on access to justice started about four years ago. My mentor and very, very dear friend, Deborah Rhode, who is a giant in the legal world and at Stanford, passed away and she had run a center in the legal profession at the law school, and I was asked to run that actually, along with my husband, who is now the co-director. And so we started running this center on the legal profession, and that caused us to really focus in on how the legal profession is serving and sometimes not serving clients. And then I was just gripped, uh, by this sense that there's a real crisis here and I don't think there had been sufficient attention paid. Now that's, Deborah had been paying a lot of attention to it, but really thinking this is a crisis and there are a lot of, you know, there are a lot of problems in the world, Russ, and we know that.
[00:04:39] Russ Altman: Yeah.
[00:04:39] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Um, but feeling like, gosh, this is a crisis that my profession made.
[00:04:46] Russ Altman: So, so gimme the dimensions of this crisis. Like, uh, that this is kind of big news and I, I might not have been aware of it. So how, how do we know, characterize the crisis for me, if you will.
[00:04:56] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah. So it's, it is one of these, these things that is, I think it's a big deal, but it's the big deal that nobody's talking about, right? I mean, and I realize the world is full of urgent issues to think about. But picture, Russ, picture a case, right? Picture a courthouse. And what you're probably picturing is two lawyers and one sitting at council table and one's at a podium and they're talking to a jury. There's a judge there. Um, this idea that civil cases are places where lawyers square off. And frankly, that's what I pictured.
[00:05:31] Russ Altman: We see this on TV all the time.
[00:05:32] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Totally. I mean, that's, you know, if you ask anybody to close their eyes and picture a case, you know, whether you're thinking of, um, you know, A Few Good Men, whatever courthouse scene you're picturing, but that's what you're picturing. Um, but that's wrong. That's actually not what cases look like in the United States today. What they look like in the United States today is one side, it's typically the plaintiff, who is, tends to be a big institutional actor, like a debt collection agency or a, or a debt collection buyer, I should say, or an institutional landlord up against an individual. And the individual is very, very, very often unrepresented. So it's one side that is big and powerful and has a lawyer against an individual who is not represented at all.
[00:06:30] Russ Altman: And just to state the obvious, they should be represented. And they're not doing this willingly as a, like, I'm gonna represent myself type situation.
[00:06:38] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah, I mean, so there's, there, there are a few things in what you just said that to unpack. One is this should be represented. So you don't have a right to a lawyer in civil cases. So we all think of, you know, there's this case Gideon versus Wainwright that establishes a right to counsel in certain criminal cases. Actually, it's not all criminal cases, which even a lot of law students don't understand. It's only certain big criminal cases and for different parts of the criminal justice process, not the whole thing. That's the criminal side of the docket. In the civil side of the docket, there is no right to counsel, so there's not really a,
[00:07:13] Russ Altman: Wow.
[00:07:13] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah. So there's no right to counsel. So, and we, and the, and the government or institutional actors can do a lot of things to you, and you don't have a right to a lawyer to help you. So right now, in three quarters of cases in American courts, at least one side lacks a lawyer. And, and this is a really big deal, and it is what, you know, how our courts behave and how our courts are treating regular folks, um, right now, what our, what our courts are doing. One lawyer or one judge said to me recently, she said, you know, Nora, what I do is I put on a black robe and I manufacture poverty. That's what I do.
[00:07:54] Russ Altman: Wow. So I guess we can also, uh, assume that the, the sides that have the lawyer are doing a lot of winning of cases.
[00:08:01] Nora Freeman Engstrom: They're doing a lot of winning. They're doing very well on the winning front. And what they're doing is they're winning to do things like evict people from apartments, foreclose on homes. Or they're bringing debt collection actions to say, hey, you didn't pay us, you know, you're supposed to pay us back. Um, and that leads to garnishment of wages. And what a garnishment of wages is, is, hey, I'm gonna take some of your paycheck every couple weeks or every month, and I'm gonna dock it, I'm gonna take some out of.
[00:08:32] Russ Altman: And that goes directly to poverty as you, as you just said. That's why the judge said, uh, what they said.
[00:08:37] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah, it goes directly to poverty.
[00:08:40] Russ Altman: Now, how much freedom do the judges have? Like if, if the judge sees what might be a miscarriage of justice and, and we haven't even established whether these are miscarriages, but let's, let's say in a case there, do the judge have any latitude to kind of be a, some sort of proxy lawyer for the, for the person who's doesn't have representation?
[00:08:59] Nora Freeman Engstrom: It's a great question. So, so traditionally in the United States, what we have what's called an adversarial system of justice. So we've built our court processes to be, to have the clash, the clash that we were, the Few Good Men clash, right? The judge is supposed to be, they're neutral, the referee, who is not a player on the field, that is just there to call balls and strikes. Um, and so that's the way judges, it's, it's been kind of driven into judges that that's how they're supposed to behave. They're just supposed to be there and to weigh the evidence as presented by the parties. And so recognize that works really well when you have two equally represented sides.
[00:09:42] Russ Altman: Right, right.
[00:09:43] Nora Freeman Engstrom: It's great, right? But when you have one side that's really well represented and one side that isn't represented at all, that model doesn't work very well. So folks call it an institutional mismatch. We have this notion of the judicial role that presupposes a certain thing happening in front of the judge, and yet that thing isn't happening in front of the judge, and yet the judge is still taking this adversarial role. So, so the judge, you know, some judges are really grappling with what to do, 'cause frankly, you know, the judges in this country tend to be incredibly dedicated, thoughtful public servants. And the, they didn't go into this business, they could surely be making more money doing other things. And they didn't go into, you know, to do what they do with their law degree in order to manufacture poverty. That doesn't feel good.
[00:10:40] Russ Altman: Right. Okay. So now, now I'm troubled. We got, we got to the, uh, troubled portion of our discussion. Uh, does a, can a motivated unrepresented individual get help on the internet? Can they, can they do things to prepare to try to put up a, a defense? Uh, is that just Pollyanna-ish ridiculous idea from Russ. Oh, where, where are we, uh, what are the options, um, a as you see it?
[00:11:06] Nora Freeman Engstrom: So, first is this idea of just, you know, hey, y'all just figure it out, right? Um, and there, there's some of that for sure. Um, although the, the legal information on the internet isn't particularly good, so the National Center for State Courts recently said self-represented individuals are, quote, drowning in a, quote, sea of junk. And that's because there's some good information out there, it's true. But there's a lot of not so good information out there, and it's really hard to figure out the difference. So that's one problem. Another problem is, partly what the, there's this other part of the problem. So what we've been talking about is, you know, folks who are getting hammered by an institutional landlord, right? Or an institutional debt buyer. Um, there's this other side that not everybody is in like a defensive crouch when it comes to law.
[00:12:07] Some people have rights, they're getting affected in certain ways and they wanna do something to vindicate their right. So picture here, a person who is entitled to overtime pay and is working overtime and isn't getting overtime pay. Or a person who is getting abused by her spouse or partner and really needs a domestic violence restraining order. Um, or a person who had insurance and the insurance should cover what just happened, you know, to their home or to their car. And yet the insurance company is jerking them around in a sense.
[00:12:42] Russ Altman: I just wanna say these are important examples because in the case of like debt collection, as long as it's a real debt, then people might not have as much sympathy. And in the case of not paying your rent, but you've just given us three scenarios where you know, the heart is like, okay, this is an injustice.
[00:12:57] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah, it feels like an injustice, right? And I could go on and on. The person who has the order for spousal support and yet the person isn't, so, it's on and on where they actually, law could help, right? And the law on the book says, hey, you're entitled to help here, like you're entitled to overtime. I'm not talking about somebody who isn't entitled to it. I'm talking about where the entitlement is there. So there's, that's the other side of the access to justice crisis. So I think of it as this two layer calamity. So there's the calamity we were just talking about at the beginning, the seventy-five percent figure, the folks who were in this kind of defensive posture and getting hammered by law. And getting evicted from their apartment or their wages are being garnished.
[00:13:41] Russ Altman: And are the lawyers just too expensive or not even available?
[00:13:45] Nora Freeman Engstrom: They, yes. Yes, and. Um, so even the, the, um, the DOJ US attorney's Office in DC recently did a study. It's actually hard to figure out like how much do lawyers cost, right? And what they found is a second year associate costs on the order, and this is a second year associate, which is to say someone who was in law school, like, you know, fifteen months ago, um, charges upwards of three hundred dollars an hour. Um, that is, that's a lot of money, right? You know, you think about all, you know, all these surveys that say, well, people can't, you know, fifty-seven percent of Americans can't handle an unexpected a thousand dollar bill. Um, so lawyers are really, really expensive. There is legal aid out there, so there's this thing called the Legal Services Corporation and they fund legal aid offices, but they have been sounding the alarm for some time. What they say is, we can only help half the people who come to us and need help and who qualify for help.
[00:14:55] Russ Altman: Right.
[00:14:55] Nora Freeman Engstrom: The other half we turn away. And those are folks who are legitimately poor. So the idea is lawyers are, are really expensive and our system of legal aid, there are just folks who are so dedicated, who are doing their absolute best in working day and night to try to help folks. Um, but they don't have the capacity they need.
[00:15:20] Russ Altman: Can, can non-lawyers help?
[00:15:23] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah. So that, we've just come to a really big issue, which is to say, you know, my son I'll, I'm gonna start to say something that's gonna sound like it's a completely random aside.
[00:15:35] Russ Altman: Oh, we love this. We love this. This is The Future of Everything. Yes. So you can include everything.
[00:15:39] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Alright, so my son was sick the other day. He was, he, well, it was over the summer, he got sick. He was at a summer camp and he got sick on a Friday. And he said, well, they told me that, you know, the, I could that, whatever, the doctor's office doesn't open until Monday. And I said, well that's, you know, that's a problem because I thought he had an ear infection. And so I said, well, don't worry, is there a CVS nearby? And he said, yeah. And I said, okay, we'll take the bus to the CVS and go in and there's a MinuteClinic there. I, you know, looked, he was in Rhode Island, so looked, and there it is, it's just two miles away. And he went to the CVS MinuteClinic, and he got seen by a nurse practitioner. He got his prescription for his ear infection and it was over in two hours. We don't have anything like that in law.
[00:16:22] Russ Altman: There's no law practitioners.
[00:16:24] Nora Freeman Engstrom: There's no,
[00:16:25] Russ Altman: Who are not lawyers.
[00:16:26] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Exactly. So in medicine, a lot of little things like my son's ear infection, you don't need a brain surgeon to work on. You need someone with specialized training and expertise. You need someone who is available. Uh, but you don't need someone who has the full, you know, four years of medical school and a three-year residency, and you've been drained in absolutely everything to splint, you know, a sprained ankle or to look inside a kid's ear. In fact, in the majority of states, nurse practitioners have full practice authority, which is to say they can diagnose, they can treat, they can prescribe without supervision by a doctor. So that's why this CVS MinuteClinic, it wasn't, you know, it wasn't that this person that my son saw was being overseen by a doctor. No, it was just a skilled professional who was practicing within her zone of competence. Lawyers don't, law doesn't have anything like that. It is lawyer or bust when it comes to law. You can have a full on, you know, licensed lawyer who's been through law school and passed the bar and does continuing education, um, even for very simple things.
[00:17:41] Russ Altman: So why is that? Why is that? Because, you know, I, I'm a, I'm a physician and I know medicine is highly regulated and, uh, uh, and it's, uh, it's usually licensure and stuff is at the state level. And so I, I, I'm guessing that that CVS thing is a state level decision by Rhode Island to say we're gonna allow nurse practitioners. I'm not sure about that. But could states, could individual states say, wait a minute, we're gonna allow non-lawyer, legal practitioners do the equivalent of the CVS thing?
[00:18:11] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yes, they could. And right now, actually, right now as we speak, that's a huge fight that's happening. So, you know.
[00:18:20] Russ Altman: There might be some money involved. Let me guess.
[00:18:23] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Oh, how did you guess? Um, so, so right now, you know it's lawyer or bust and as we establish, like, lawyers are really unavailable, they're super expensive. And folks, in part, because of this shortage are left to grapple with a system designed by lawyers for lawyers alone. So I call it a two door problem. In law right now, you can have a full lawyer or you can go on your own.
[00:18:54] Russ Altman: Wow.
[00:18:55] Nora Freeman Engstrom: And that's, it's just like pick.
[00:18:57] Russ Altman: Yep.
[00:18:59] Nora Freeman Engstrom: There's just two options. In medicine as we just established, there is this third door. And, and not all doctors, as you can imagine were super delighted by the idea of nurse practitioners and physician's assistants and giving them this, you know, very substantial practice authority. But it exists in the majority of states and the kind of how exactly that happened in medicine is really interesting. Uh, co-authoring a, a book that, or co-editing an edited volume that is, will come out really soon. And there's a great chapter in there about how doctors resisted some and then the, the, the resistance was overcome when it comes to medicine. So yes, in law we could do the same thing. Um, right now, and I should say, this is just an important piece too, of well, why, you know, but you know, why don't you just like, okay, it's not allow, but like surely you can just learn some law and give some advice, right? It is, it is a crime. It is a crime in nearly every state for a non-lawyer to give legal advice without a license. In California, it's a misdemeanor. In some states it is a felony. And when I say give legal advice, if I were a non-lawyer and I saw my neighbor parked too close to the fire hydrant outside our house and I went outside and said, hey, just so you know, your car could be ticketed 'cause you're parked too close to the fire hydrant. It's against the law to do that.
[00:20:36] Russ Altman: Wow. So that and, and you're, that, that, that, oh, okay.
[00:20:39] Nora Freeman Engstrom: You are a non-lawyer.
[00:20:40] Russ Altman: Wow. So, um, so, so this might be happening all the time, uh, and, and it's kind of in, I guess it's kind of like an incidental use. We can't go after all these people, but if you started to do it, and especially I'm guessing it doesn't matter that you're paid or not, like there's no distinction. Even free legal advice is, um,
[00:20:59] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Even free legal advice, and I have to say, this is embarrassing but for, I mean, I think I was a lawyer and I thought, well, the, like I'd heard of this law called unauthorized practice of law, but I kind of pictured that was like if you showed up in court and said, you know, yes, your Honor, I'm here to represent and you weren't a lawyer, then that was unauthorized practice of law. But no, the state definitions of unauthorized practice of law are capacious. Uh, so they really do sweep in the stuff that I just, you know, the, the fire hydrant example. Um, now, which is not to say prosecutors are going after this, willy-nilly. But it's certainly chills anybody's effort to do anything helpful at scale.
[00:21:52] Russ Altman: This is The Future of Everything with Russ Altman. We'll have more with Nora Freeman Engstrom next. Welcome back to The Future of Everything. I'm Russ Altman. I'm speaking with Nora Freeman Engstrom from Stanford University. In the last segment, we were alerted to a problem in getting lawyers to help represent people, especially people who are, um, at risk of major financial loss.
[00:22:22] Um, but at the end, uh, Nora, you mentioned that some states are changing this idea that you can't, you can only have lawyers, um, helping people in these cases. So what's happening in those states?
[00:22:35] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah, so this is, you know, I said that there's this two door problem, right? It's a lawyer or you're on your own. A number of states are saying, you know, we should have a third door, right? In medicine we have nurse practitioners. How about in law we have something equivalent? So, and this is just, you know, we talked about at the beginning that, you know, I've been thinking about this really carefully for only about five years, and it's within five years, just coincidentally, that this action has totally taken off. So a number of states, um, including Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, Utah and Washington.
[00:23:19] Russ Altman: There you go.
[00:23:20] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Have some way, uh, relaxed, uh, these unauthorized practice of law rules to let some more folks into the fold.
[00:23:30] Russ Altman: Well, yeah. What dimensions does that take? Like how do, how do you make that first step? Uh, is it paralegals, is it people who are working with lawyerly supervision? Like what are the models or, and I'm, I'm guessing they might be very different across the different states.
[00:23:45] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah, so they're different across different states. So, so everywhere you can have, you can have a para, like having a paralegal is not controversial, that's permitted in every state. But they can't practice law. And so it's both, they're both restricted in what they can do, um, and they're also restricted that they have to be under this lawyer supervision.
[00:24:06] Russ Altman: Right.
[00:24:06] Nora Freeman Engstrom: So, you know, again, going back to the CVS MinuteClinic, it wasn't that a nurse practitioner was there looking at my son's ear with a doctor looking over her shoulder. It's the full ability to do this without supervision. Um, and so that's what some states are allowing, uh, and it's, and it is a mix of models. Right now it is very much a moment of exploration and an experimentation, which is to see what works. Um, you know, there's this idea of community justice workers, which is to say, let's allow, uh, our nonprofits, our, our legal aid organizations to have more non-lawyers helping people without direct supervision. That we can be, that can be kind of a force multiplier essentially.
[00:24:55] Um, but they're still being supervised by the nonprofit. And so there's this backstop to ensure quality control. Um, so there's a lot of interesting thought and experimentation going on 'cause everybody recognizes that they want quality to be high, right? You don't want it to be, you know, okay, if you're rich, you get Cadillac counsel. And if you're not rich, you get some sort of lawyer like. Um, we want to ensure that there are high quality responsible providers. And I think everybody recognizes that just like a nurse practitioner, is never gonna perform brain surgery, and we would never want that. They're gonna be things that you need a real lawyer for and that, that these trained specialized, you know, carefully regulated non-lawyers.
[00:25:47] Russ Altman: No, it's really interesting because I, you know, I'm part of the training of the nurse practitioners is knowing and recognizing when they're dealing with something that's out of their, uh, out of their jurisdiction. So to mix metaphors, um, and then they can say, you need to go to the ER or you need to do whatever. And so there, there is gonna, obviously it's, just thinking about it, it seems like there's gonna be a need for these legal folks or these non-lawyer legal folks to say, uh, I just realized that this case is now out of the domain that I'm kind of credentialed to do. And then the problem is, I'm guessing, that they need to be able to have the emergency room equivalent, and it's not clear, uh, if that exists.
[00:26:25] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yes. That, there, you're, you're right. Um, that, that kind of figuring out what kind of that triage model looks like.
[00:26:32] Russ Altman: Yeah.
[00:26:33] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Uh, and, and making sure that folks know exactly where the kind of boundaries of their competence lies. So we are, we're in very early days of this. Um, and at the same time, we want folks to be specialized and we want them to be trained, but we can't over-regulate the thing. So Washington State actually did this kind of, tried this a number of years ago, um, with these like licensed legal technicians. And what they did, it was a bit of a cautionary tale in that they, they regulate, like they made it so hard to become a licensed legal technician, that it actually is like, well, if I'm gonna work that hard to get that, I might as well, I might as well just do the whole law school thing.
[00:27:22] Russ Altman: I wanted to ask, has it always been like this is, is this, is this like, uh, the last two hundred and fifty years, uh, in the US or, or did something change? Or where did you know what, what, what's the dynamic?
[00:27:33] Nora Freeman Engstrom: So that was a question that I, that really came to me a couple years ago with like, huh, is this, you know, we, we just have such a view of when we look at the world to think, well, you know, it's always been this way. There's something, right, there's something baked in about this. And so I, I started digging. I started digging into the 1910s and 1920s, and one of the, I found something I found was startling, which is in the 1910s and 1920s, they did have a thing where if you weren't a lawyer, you couldn't provide legal advice. But it was different in so far as right now we have this other rule we haven't talked about. We talked about unauthorized practice of law rules. There's this other rule, oh, it's called Model Rule 5.4 D, which just really rolls off the tongue. Um, but what that rule says is, if you're a lawyer, you have to work for yourself or maybe the government. Or an organization owned by, funded by lawyers.
[00:28:35] Russ Altman: Yeah. You made brief reference to this before.
[00:28:37] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah, so, so you can't, for example, work at CVS, right? So you can't be, you know, a somebody who is a trained professional, but offering legal advice at, for example, CVS. Um, and so it was kind like, well, you know, that's gotta be baked in too, right? That's been part of the legal system since I've, you know,
[00:28:59] Russ Altman: Yeah. Which part of the Constitution outlines that?
[00:29:01] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah, exactly. So in 1910 and 1920, that part of the rule book did not exist. And so you could go into your bank and get a will. There were lawyers in banks writing wills for folks, and there were these things called auto clubs. It was right when the car was developing and the, you know, the, the Model T is rolling off assembly lines. There were auto clubs, um, around the country that were thriving. So it was kind of the AAA of yesterday.
[00:29:40] Russ Altman: Yep. Yep.
[00:29:40] Nora Freeman Engstrom: And the AA of yesterday, you, with the price of your membership, got a lawyer for all things automobile. For the cost of the membership. You had a lawyer if you hurt somebody in a car, if you were hurt in a car, if you were arrested, they actually would like, represent you throughout the criminal process. We found cases where they would do habeas petitions. Um, so you, at the price of your membership, got a lawyer for all things legal. Um, and then we found lots of other organizations that were doing similar things. So there were, there were lawyers, uh, you know, kind of embedded into life where folks had access to lawyers as part of other things, right? So,
[00:30:29] Russ Altman: Yeah. So what happened?
[00:30:30] Nora Freeman Engstrom: So the bar, it turns out, 1930s were, um, not a time when a lot of money was sloshing around, right? The Great Depression, lawyers were feeling the pinch like everybody else, and they looked around and decided that they did not like the competition, essentially, and they decimated it. So, uh, I, I have a piece that came out this fall with a former student, um, called Auto Clubs and the Lost Origins of the Access to Justice Crisis. And what we trace, and it was actually, it was a really fun project that my co-author, former student, uh, James Stone went around the country to archives and auto museums.
[00:31:15] Russ Altman: Oh, this is super fun.
[00:31:16] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah, it was really,
[00:31:17] Russ Altman: And you can also see why somebody like Henry Ford would've supported this 'cause he needed to sell cars. And if that was a big concern, if he could, uh, allay that fear, he could sell more cars.
[00:31:28] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Totally. Uh, so actually auto clubs started as this, like trying to like encourage people that auto, that that automobiles were not just a rich man's toy.
[00:31:38] Russ Altman: Right. Right.
[00:31:38] Nora Freeman Engstrom: And so, but then once like, American's were like, we are in, we want we own cars. Uh, car ownership, uh, by 1928 was extremely broad in the United States. Um, so there was this sense of like, well, we gotta give people confidence, uh, that they're, that it's gonna work, uh, that if they get into trouble, uh, with driving, we're gonna, we're gonna have their back. And actually, auto clubs did other things too. They did do the AAA stuff of roadside assistance. Um, they also lobbied for, for, 'cause at the time, I mean, we had roads that were set up for horses and all of a sudden we needed them to be set up for cars. So we needed all sorts of speed limits and jurisdictional lines and things like that. So auto clubs did all of that too. But what I think is so fascinating is that we can then, if we squint, we can envision this,
[00:32:27] Russ Altman: Different world.
[00:32:27] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Yeah. A past where you could have gone into CVS and gotten, not just your ears looked at, but also like, you know,
[00:32:37] Russ Altman: An oil change.
[00:32:39] Nora Freeman Engstrom: I need to think about, you know, my name change. I need to tell, uh, this adoption I'm trying to do.
[00:32:48] Russ Altman: This, this is fantastic. And so, and, and, and we could go on, but I just, we only have a minute or so left and I wanna ask you about AI and because you said before that it's a mess, that when people go on the internet, I, I believe you said, sea of junk. And I wanna know if AI is included there now, or if that's a ray of hope that it actually might not be so junky. I know that, I am positive, and I'm sure you know this, that people are typing legal questions into ChatGPT. There's no doubt in anybody's mind because I know that they're doing that for medicine, they're doing that for everything. What's your take on the likelihood that that stuff will be useful and will empower people, perhaps in the context of these other innovations, such as what the states are doing and going back to the, um, to the AAA days?
[00:33:31] Nora Freeman Engstrom: So, I mean, you know, I'm sure other folks know, that AI is only as good as the data it's trained on, right? And right now the data that it can be trained on is not very good. And so AI is not very good. Um, but there is a ray of hope here, and that is, there is an entity in all this that we haven't talked very much about, that it turns out knows law really well. And that entity is courts. And so when I said that courts, you know, nobody likes to put on a black robe and manufacture poverty, um, they also look around and look at the rather dismal state of affairs and they're thinking hard about how can we help.
[00:34:16] Um, and so something else that gives me hope is LA Superior Court. So LA Superior Court, um, they adjudicate three times more cases per year than all federal courts combined. Unbelievable, right? The biggest court system in the world. And they have looked at this situation and they are, see that it's, it's a terrible, terrible problem. Um, and they are thinking hard about, we have access to information. Um, right now the information that's publicly available is bad. But we could help people.
[00:34:59] Russ Altman: So they do have information that would be useful.
[00:35:01] Nora Freeman Engstrom: Oh, for sure. For sure. Um, and they can curate and sift through the bad information and figure out what is good and what is bad. Um, and so we are working with them. We at the Rhode Center on the legal profession are working with them to try to improve things, including by designing AI tools. Um, so I don't think, you know, the AI, AI that sifts through what's on the internet is not gonna be good anytime soon. Um, but is this possibility that we, you know, curated information from trusted intermediaries can essentially sift through the sea of junk, um, and, and, you know, be a life preserver out of it. And so I do think if more courts are like LA that gives me a lot of reason for optimism.
[00:35:52] Russ Altman: Thanks to Nora Freeman Engstrom. That was the future of legal representation. Thank you for tuning into this episode. Don't forget we have more than 250 episodes in our back catalogs, and so you can spend all day listening to me talk to interesting people about their work. If you're enjoying the show, remember to tell your friends, family, colleagues, anyone who you like that this is a good show and that they should subscribe and listen. Personal recommendations are a great way to spread the word about the show and grow our listenership, and therefore grow our impact. You can connect with me on many social media platforms, including Threads, Bluesky, Mastodon @RBAltman, or @RussBAltman. You can follow Stanford Engineering @StanfordSchoolofEngineering, or @StanfordENG.
