The A.B.A.'s No. 1 Issue

At the American Bar Association meeting in Miami last week, Edward Kuhn, a deceptively homespun Memphis lawyer, puffed on his cigar and pin pointed the urgent issue facing him as new president of the A.B.A. The bar, said Kuhn, is just waking up to the fact that millions of Americans yearn for group practice; events are outpacing the lawyer's one-to-one relationship with clients. Warned Kuhn: "We've got to make up our minds as to whether we're going to face the facts of life or stick our heads in the damned sand." Apart from caution or complacency, the chief pressure against change comes from the A.B.A.'s 1908 canons of ethics (now being studied for revision), which condemn all efforts to stir up law business and flatly ban "lay intermediaries" --non-lawyers who aid in the choice of a lawyer. Beyond that, Canon 35 forbids a company lawyer to represent employees "in respect to their individual affairs." Canon 47 prohibits "the unauthorized practice of law by any lay agency, personal or corporate." Invisible Bar. Such restrictions were designed to protect the bar's right to set professional standards and the client's right to seek legal help in his own way. Unhappily, the canons also tend to isolate lawyers from many a vast pool of potential clients. Even the bar's free legal-aid societies are often so unadvertised that indigents are unaware of them. And millions of newly middle-class Americans have been buying, selling and bequeathing property with minimal legal help--either because they fear high fees or have no idea of how to find and hire lawyers they can trust. In the faceless welfare state, where local politicians no longer hand out cash and turkeys, the poor have mounting legal problems of their own: they must cope with Government bureaucracies over everything from relief to housing. Indeed, many experts feel that lack of legal services for the poor is a major threat to law and order. "Too often," Attorney General Katzenbach told the Miami convention, "the poor man sees the law as something which garnishees his salary, which repossesses his refrigerator, which evicts him from his house, which cancels his welfare, which binds him to usury, or which deprives him of his liberty because he cannot afford bail. Small wonder then that the poor man does not respect the law." Small wonder, too, that the present system has tended to produce "lay intermediaries"--the very specter that appalls the bar. And as people seek legal advice from union officials, real estate agents and even neighborhood notaries, pressure mounts for group legal insurance modeled on company and union medical plans. In California a state bar committee last year approved the idea of organizations arranging legal services for their members. Last year the Supreme Court itself encouraged the process by voiding Virginia's ban on a pioneering system of retained personal-injury lawyers for members of the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen. And now the Federal Government's anti-poverty program has unleashed "neighborhood law offices"--legal-service stations offering free advice to the entangled poor on everything from divorce to landlords to installment buying. Giant Step. In February, the A.B.A.'s house of delegates duly joined the poverty war by voting to aid neighborhood law offices and other methods for expanded aid to indigents. In May the A.B.A. board of governors took the next step by creating a new committee on "availability of legal services," chaired by St. Louis Lawyer F. William McCalpin, who aims to study the entire structure of the U.S. bar with special reference to group practice. McCalpin picked up plenty of static in Miami last week--notably from lawyers who fear above all that the A.B.A. will lose its grip on the profession if it endorses any intrusion of lay groups between counselor and client. According to one estimate, however, a mere three hours more of legal service per year for each of the nation's 55 million families would require 40% more U.S. lawyers. Clearly something has to give. "If you don't serve the public as it needs to be served," warns President Kuhn, "the public will force some kind of change in the profession."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.