Saturday, July 22, 2006
Raising the bar on legal practices
From the RoundTable blog
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Roger Lewis
Lewis lives in Blacksburg and is a former Arizona newspaper reporter and congressional aide.
Virginia Tech announced recently that it is going into the law school business with the University of Richmond.
With only 5 percent of the world's population, the U.S. already has 70 percent of the world's lawyers, according to one estimate.
As law school enrollment bulges, the largely self-governing industry embraces or accepts continuous expansion of the economic pie to feed its membership. Its recipe includes more confrontations of greater length and complexity and more advertising.
Except perhaps for some overworked judges and public sector lawyers, longer and more complex disputes are income producers.
Having now joined the push to expand the industry, Tech should launch a reform movement.
Tech could establish a SLIE -- a School for Legal Integrity and Efficiency. A spokesman for Tech's Board of Visitors in 2004 gave the idea a friendly but non-committing response. No money right now, it was said.
Very likely, SLIE could be established with donations given nationally by people concerned about the lack of objective, independent oversight.
Perhaps the site could be the old Blacksburg middle school. SLIE could rise as a legal reform system that would create hundreds of jobs in Virginia initially and expand nationally.
The argument for SLIE goes like this:
Enron is but the most highlighted example of illegal and/or questionable conduct by corporate, securities, lobbying and other entities. Hundreds of criminal and civil cases have been concluded and many more remain under investigation.
America's system of checks and balances is working. If federal agencies, headed these days by pro big-money political appointees do not act, many of the 50 state attorneys general are ready to pounce. Attorneys general need monitoring too, of course.
Bar associations, judicial panels and the like strive to uphold textbook ethics. Probably most of their members give freely of themselves to good causes.
These monitors deserve help. Busy as they are, they cannot be expected to solely carry the burden of policing their law colleagues.
Arrayed against them are law miscreants with questionable ethics. It seems likely that the unfolding misdeeds in the business world were facilitated by advice or acquiescence of counsel. And some counselors themselves may be victims of faulty information furnished them.
The accounting industry used to be largely self-regulating. Scandal caused Congress to create an elaborate system of oversight.
Instead of such a complex governmental system to aid enforcement of legal integrity and efficiency, SLIE would foster oversight via a largely private sector approach. SLIE would work like this: Graduates would learn general law. They would specialize in the day-to-day operations of the law industry.
In their purview would be such things as multiple continuances, growth of out-of-court settlements dictated by excessively high costs of courtroom litigation, certain lawyer-promoted civil actions, professional plaintiffs and witnesses, fee-splitting, and increasingly costly maintenance services.
For ease, let's call SLIE grads, SLIERs.
SLIERs would not be admitted to practice like today's lawyers. Instead, the state would license them separately.
SLIERs would be confined always to targeting members of the law industry or practices therein. They would not be bar association members but hopefully independent, objective allies.
They would be employed by anyone using the private or public legal system. An ethical corporation, for example, might employ one SLIER to sit in with a dozen corporate attorneys mapping programs or strategies.
Presence of the SLIER would help ensure high standards of planning. It would be analogous to an independent value engineer watchdogging a construction contractor.
Also, working as consultants to private and public bodies, SLIERs could fashion improved procedures for legal workings.
More and streamlined arbitration might be encouraged. SLIERs would push changes that reduce legal costs through simpler, standardized approaches.
In today's world, a governmental agency or private business or organization usually must employ counsel merely to interpret incoming legal verbiage.
To discourage revolving-door movement between being a SLIER and being a lawyer, a four-year hiatus from practicing either would be imposed on switchers.
Virginia's lawyer-dominated legislature would have to establish the SLIE and licensing of graduates. The proposal was offered this year to the chairmen of the Senate and House committees on Courts of Justice.
Too late for any bill and hearings this year, promptly replied the office of the senate committee chair Sen. Kenneth Stolle. No word from the House committee chair Del. David Albo. Both are Republicans and lawyers.
Tech, let's air the issue. Despite all those lawyer jokes, Americans respect the law ideal. Let's ensure high standards. If they have slipped, let's help raise the bar.
