Challenging our perspectives on legal education and innovation

March 31 2016 31 March 2016

The story of an Ontario custody battle over an eight-year old girl, which led to a 36-day trial and $500,000 in legal fees, has been gaining attention and notoriety in legal circles. In a scathing written judgment, Ontario Superior Court Justice Alex Pazaratz asked, “what will it take to convince angry parents that nasty and aggressive litigation never turns out well?”

Better public legal education, beginning in primary and secondary schools, would be a start. This is the natural first step to creating informed consumers, which makes better clients.

Also needed is a greater alignment of lawyers’ objectives and incentives with those of their clients and communities, and a more resolute focus on marginalized perspectives in legal innovation.

This means the legal community will have to address some uncomfortable truths. Consider the following comment about the eight-year old girl at the centre of the above-mentioned case: “…[A]dults in [the child’s] life testified about the emotional toll her parents’ war was waging on the little girl. She had headaches and often felt ill, even vomiting from stress or soiling herself before being taken to swap from one house to another.”

Why is it that in my legal education, and in my experience with legal innovation, we so seldom discuss the experience of that little girl? This unwillingness to address such challenging issues plays to the legal community’s disadvantage, widening the gap between our personal incentives and societal purpose. Bringing these more challenging discussions into the legal education and innovation rhetoric would help set the foundation from which to build stronger relationships with clients and the community. This is one of the surest ways to ensure the future vitality and growth of the industry.

For this reason, marginalized and low- to middle-income income individuals — the largest demographic of users of our legal system — must become a focus point for legal education and innovation. In order to refine this focus, the legal community needs more voices from these backgrounds. Lowering law school fees would encourage more low-income individuals to apply, and would ensure that debt repayment does not become their primary career motivation.

New voices are also needed to bring a poverty-based perspective to legal innovation. Currently, legal innovation revolves primarily around connecting people to lawyers, and making legal work easier and faster. Of the 40 Toronto legal startups profiled by technology lawyer Addison Cameron-Huff, only five can be said to target consumers directly. At LegalX, the legal tech cluster at the MaRS Discovery District in Toronto, only three of the 11 listed startup ventures have direct application to low-income consumers.

And yet, with legal needs being so pervasive, and expensive, the numbers alone among low-income users generate market potential worthy of serious consideration. In Canada, it is estimated that up to 70 per cent of family matters are self-litigated. Another estimate puts the number of Canadians without a will at about 50 per cent. A large portion of this group simply cannot afford the available service models. However, that does not mean they would reject the possibility of legal services entirely.

This is where new perspectives are needed. Many legal innovators come from a Big Law background, and, like most of the legal community, have little direct experience with poverty. To give our industry the best possible chance at creating innovations for lower-income groups, we need the experience and perspective of those who have actually been in that position. It is completely possible to conceive of a lawyer from Bay St. inventing a legal technology designed for low-income individuals. However, it is far more likely that such a technology will see a successful run to market if its development is aided by someone who understands the target market first-hand.

Legal innovation has a long way to go to meet that target market but the desire to bring new voices to the table is already being felt. I recommend the CBA’s Do Law Differently guide as a refreshing look at the current dynamic of legal innovation. Hopefully we will continue to refine our dialogue, with a specific focus on public education, aligning our incentives to those our clients, and bringing poverty-based perspectives into innovation. I believe such efforts can ultimately be of enormous benefit to both the legal industry and to our community at large.

Sam Michaels is a third year law student at Osgoode Hall Law School. He is the founder of www.CanadaLegalHelp.com and the Editor-in-Chief of the Obiter Dicta, Osgoode’s student-run newspaper. 

CBA National Magazine covers legal trends and issues. Any opinions expressed are the author’s own.

Photo licensed under Creative Commons by UnknownNet Photography