Lauren van Schilfgaarde (UCLA Law) explains that many Tribal codes allow lay advocates to appear before Tribal courts without requiring them to be state bar members or have attended an ABA-accredited law school. Tribal courts, being extra-constitutional, are not bound by US constitutional requirements, including guarantees for adequate legal representation. Tribes have built justice systems based on Tribal customs, traditions, and community needs. These systems often require cultural competence not provided in American legal education, leading Tribes to develop their own lay advocacy requirements, which are enshrined in Tribal codes that set forth comprehensive requirements and ethical frameworks governing lay advocate practices. The examination of these Tribal codes reveals how lay advocates are an integral part of many Tribes’ justice systems.

Jamila Michener (Cornell Political Science) asks how we might rethink access to justice as a political movement, not a legal one. She focuses on the “Civil Gideon” movement as a case study in how breaking the lawyers’ monopoly will require a political movement that sees access-to-legal service as part of a larger system of change. Michener’s contribution both further illuminates the right-to-counsel movement – including its weaknesses and (Michener argues) limited impact – and recontextualizes it, describing an essential role for counsel within broader organizing efforts.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth (Vanderbilt Law) argues that the legal services regulatory scheme perversely both over- and under-regulates the legal services marketplace – licensing too few lawyers on the front end and then, on the back end, taking insufficient steps to ensure adequate quality. According to Allensworth, the current system of lawyer regulation bars nonlawyer providers from the system and simultaneously shunts the lowest-quality lawyers into the system’s lower precincts, where the consequences of poor representation are most sharply felt. Allensworth’s lightning bolt of a chapter shows that the challenge of regulatory reform is not just opening the system to new providers but also rethinking how to allocate – and police – the providers already there.

Giesela Rühl (Humboldt University of Berlin) explains that during the past two decades, German courts have experienced a dramatic decline in cases. While the causes for the loss remain unclear, it is plausible that German courts are not an attractive means of resolving lower-value claims. Thus, these claims remain unenforced. A number of legal tech companies have entered the German legal services market to mitigate that problem. These companies enforce lower-value claims and are extremely popular with consumers. The legal profession, however, has met all this with skepticism – and at times even with hostility – as some lawyers question whether legal tech companies illegally provide legal services. These discussions have since led to various court cases, as well as the adoption of a new federal law that specifically targets legal tech companies. The chapter critically engages with these developments, outlining the regulatory environment for the provision of legal services in Germany as well as relevant case law and legislation. Overall, the chapter hypothesizes that access to justice in Germany has benefited from legal tech companies but that important problems remain to be addressed.

W. Bradley Wendel (Cornell Law) provides a useful counterpoint to a set of chapters focused on mapping the connection between the current regime of legal services regulation and access to justice. His chapter is a passionate defense of the traditional lawyer’s role as a defender of key public values and a bulwark of rule of law. His chapter elegantly reminds readers that lawyers and the legal profession sit at an important crossroads as essential defenders of rule-of-law values that are under attack and yet waning in their market and cultural power.

Brian Libgober (Northwestern Political Science) drills down on the well-known but critically important fact that the justice gap particularly afflicts communities of color. Libgober tours new research finding that African Americans face significant barriers in finding lawyers, perhaps because of anticipated decisional bias within the legal system. The result is a bracing reminder that the justice gap is rooted in much wider structures of racial inequality and a profit-oriented legal marketplace that systematically under-serves certain segments of the population. His work shows the urgency – and difficulty – of meaningful reform.

Natalie Byrom explains how the Legal Services Act 2007 (LSA 2007) aimed to reform legal services in England and Wales to enhance consumer protection and access to justice. However, its focus on professional titles and reserved activities created complexity and hindered innovation, especially for low-income individuals. Public funding cuts in 2013 worsened the situation, leading to increased self-representation and strain on the judiciary. In response, the Ministry of Justice and Senior Judiciary launched a £1.3bn digital reform in 2014 to modernize court operations. However, by 2023, only twenty-four out of forty-four projects were completed, with key initiatives like the Online Solutions Court abandoned due to delays and COVID-19 disruptions. In November 2023, a new vision proposed a public–private partnership for digital justice, leveraging technology to streamline processes and support from private sector services. This raises questions about market readiness, incentives for data sharing, and necessary regulatory adjustments to ensure fair access to justice. Addressing these challenges is crucial for improving legal service delivery and access to justice.

David Freeman Engstrom (Stanford) and Daniel B. Rodriguez (Northwestern) argue that current structure of American legal services regulation, known as “Our Bar Federalism,” is outdated. Fifty states maintain their own rules and regulatory apparatus for a legal profession and industry that are now national and multinational. This fragmented system is a key factor in the American civil justice system’s access-to-justice crisis, where restrictive state rules support the lawyers’ monopoly. With new legal services delivery models and AI, this scheme will seem increasingly provincial and retrograde. This chapter argues it’s time to rethink "Our Bar Federalism," and explore hybrid state-federal regulatory system.

David Engstrom and Jess Lu (both Stanford Law) first show that an otherwise fast-growing and dynamic “legal tech” industry has not generated significant “direct-to-consumer” technologies designed to help self-represented litigants navigate a complex legal system. They then interrogate that puzzle: Why is it that better consumer legal tech hasn’t flourished? They ultimately settle on the idea that rule reforms alone may not stimulate high-scale, direct-to-consumer technology. Instead, other policy interventions may be necessary, including standardizing what is currently a checkerboard of court technology and data infrastructures. Perhaps more importantly, direct-to-consumer legal tech may have trouble overcoming some of the problems that are inherent to markets that are attempting to serve individuals with episodic attachment to the civil justice system and limited ability to pay. The result is an important meditation on whether reforms to UPL, Rule 5.4, or something else entirely are necessary to unlock the potential of potent new technologies in order to narrow the justice gap.

Rebecca Sandefur (Arizona State) and Mathew Burnett (American Bar Foundation) – one a MacArthur Genius Award-winning sociologist, the other a longtime leader on access-to-justice issues – explore ways to reform legal services regulation, from relaxing UPL rules (to welcome new providers into the system) to relaxing Rule 5.4’s bar on nonlawyer ownership of law firms (to make available new sources of capital investment). After reviewing existing empirical evidence, they argue in favor of the former, in order to spur new human-centered service models, as against longer-term and less proven reforms altering law firm ownership.

Neil Steinkamp and Samantha DiDimenico, strategic consultants who have done extensive work on access-to-justice issues, offer a unique how-to guide for engaging courts and community stakeholders in order to generate quantitative and qualitative data that can contribute to reform efforts. Focusing on “civil Gideon,” a growing set of efforts to establish a “right to counsel” akin to what criminal defendants have long enjoyed under the Sixth Amendment, Steinkamp offers a step-by-step roadmap for developing an empirically rigorous and comprehensively informed dialogue toward regulatory reform.