Lawyers seeking new ways to drum up business

The reason why the ABA is seeking to prohibit non-lawyers from giving legal advice is because that makes it so that non-qualified persons cannot hang out a shingle and call themselves experts. This is to protect the public.

After all, I suspect you wouldn't want someone with 1 semester of trade school who worked in a doctor's office part-time filing papers to give you medical advice, yet that is often the sole level of qualifications for paralegals.

Oh, and as for the filing of so-called "frivolous lawsuits" - we attorneys don't file them without the consent and urging of clients. Why not blame the clients for agreeing to these filings if it bothers you so much?

Do we care about the ABA?

The ABA is against online law schools? The ABA is starting to sound like the AMA.

jespah
If you read the article the restrictions go far deeper than hanging out a shingle and claiming to be a lawyer. I think the lawyers are just looking to protect their domain and to drum up additional business.

There's little need to drum up legal business; there's plenty of it.

Is it turf protection? Yes. Of course it is. But at the same time, there's a reason for this. The law is actually not an easy discipline, yet a lot of folks think that, for some odd reason, you don't need professional credentials to be able to understand it. The people who would never dream of taking out a friend's gall bladder based on information on the Internet have no trouble whatsoever offering that same person "legal advice" based on what they saw on "The Practice".

I am agaist the prohibition against drafting legal documents. This is a long-term function of paralegals and can be quite properly performed by them. But the completion of legal documents (e. g. signature certification) cannot and should not be done by anyone but an attorney.

I worked for three years auditing law firms around the country. Many paralegals are fine, educated folks who know more about procedure than I do. However, an equally large number are clerical personnel who occasionally prepare a legal document for an attorney's signature. These paras have little to no training and rarely do quasi-legal work, yet they are treated (and billed at the same rate) as people who completed a two-year graduate-level paralegal course.

Basically, that comes down to a lack of regulation when it comes to paralegals, and I definitely blame the legal profession for that. In our haste to call a lot of people paralegals (and alleviate the burdens on attorneys), certification and quality was left out. Nurses, who are comparable para-professionals, get a rigorous type of training. Plus, there is a qualitative difference between LPNs and RNs. What I am suggesting is a similar division between paralegals, based on education level.

Most RNs today need a MS degree to function in today's hospital. That amounts to 6 years of college.

The LPN is a two year degree.

There has been the same argument amongst social workers rehabilitation counselors, and people with a master's level in psychology,at least in New York. Many people in those three fields all provide mental health services.

I don't know what is happening now, but when I was working social workers had licensure, and could bill insurance companies, Medicare and Medicaid, and rehab counselors and people with master's level psychology degrees couldn't, although the amount of training was similar.

That meant that social workers could open their own private practices, while the people in the other two professions needed to work with an agency, where a licensed person would sign off. Rehabilitation counselors had a national organization that conferred certification, after undergoing rigorous testing.

One of the reasons for this was that the social workers had a huge organization in N.Y., and would block any effort of any other group in the mental health field to gain licensure. In that case, it was surely a matter of turf protection.