Complementing this analysis is a recent report on legal regulatory reform from Stanford’s Rhode Center on the Legal Profession, Legal Innovation After Reform: Evidence from Regulatory Change, which shifts the focus away from questions of construction and centers on analyzing outcomes. In this report, David Freeman Engstrom, Lucy Ricca, Graham Ambrose, and Maddie Walsh provide a detailed empirical analysis of new legal services entities that have emerged in response to certain regulatory reforms, including Utah’s legal innovation sandbox.
Together, the Ford and Ashkenazy article and the Stanford report provide a wide-ranging account of legal innovation sandbox use in North America. Individually, they each bring unique and important contributions to the literature.
Co-directors David and Nora Freeman Engstrom keynote a Stanford Law Review Symposium on Access to Justice. The two-day event brought together experts to discuss how to bridge the widening justice gap. Read more here.
Relying on work by the Rhode Center’s David Engstrom, Nora Engstrom, Lucy Ricca, and others at the Rhode Center, the Antitrust Division of the DOJ has formally expressed an opinion in North Carolina in favor of relaxing laws that criminalize the unauthorized practice of law (UPL)
Nora Freeman Engstrom, who is a law professor at Stanford University, also said there’s no evidence in research data showing adding caps increased the supply of doctors in a state. She said it’s far-fetched somebody leaves an entire state because they might make a mistake one day in their lives.
“That’s a lot of things to go wrong,” Freeman Engstrom said. “And very few people make decisions in a real-world way based on that kind of really extenuating feeling.”
Engstrom, Engstrom, and Ricca submitted a letter in North Carolina in support of UPL reform.
Nora Freeman Engstrom was quoted by The Wall Street Journal in this article
What if we stopped speculating about ALSPs and instead started collecting data to gather useful information? That’s exactly what this episode is about.
Host Mike Madison talks with Lucy Ricca and David Freeman Engstrom from Stanford Law School’s Deborah L. Rhode Center on the Legal Profession about their research into the results so far of Utan’s “regulatory sandbox” innovation, which created space for non-traditional providers of legal services.
American states that still view adultery as a crime do not seem likely to change their laws anytime soon. Speaking in 2018, Deborah Rhode, a professor of law at Stanford University, California, said: “The criminal statutes remain in force for largely symbolic reasons, and there isn’t enough enforcement risk for anyone to incur the political costs of repealing them.”
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Another reason for the decline in public filings, said Stanford Law professor David Engstrom, is the proliferation of contracts by businesses requiring customers to agree to arbitration — a private system separate from the courts — on employment disputes and consumer issues such as phone bills. Arbitration proceedings are held behind closed doors, the decisions are virtually unappealable, and studies have found most of the rulings favor businesses, the arbitrators’ frequent customers.
At the same time, Engstrom said, state courts have seen large increases in other cases not subject to arbitration, particularly debt collections and evictions. Such cases now make up as much as three-quarters of all civil proceedings around the country, he said, while three decades ago they were about equal to the number of suits filed over auto accidents and other injury cases.
“American law has grown a lot less plaintiff-friendly in recent decades, but cases by institutional plaintiffs such as debt collectors and landlords have grown rapidly,” said Engstrom, recently chosen by the American Law Institute to lead a study of high-volume civil litigation.
Debt collection claims have more than doubled over the past twenty years as unsecured consumer credit became more widely available. What’s troubling is that these claims are frequently uncontested, resulting in a high rate of default judgments, seizure of property, wage garnishments, and other modes of enforcement.
The American Law Institute (ALI) recently launched an ambitious project to find a cure for this crippling crisis and they seem to have the perfect “doctor” (the J.D./Ph.D. kind) for the job: Stanford Law School Professor David Freeman Engstrom whose impressive CV overflows with all the right credentials and an undeniable devotion to equal access to justice.
