Start with the number that ought to end every complacent conversation about the American legal profession.
According to the Legal Services Corporation’s 2022 Justice Gap study, low-income Americans receive no legal help, or not enough of it, for 92 percent of the substantial civil legal problems they face. Not 92 percent of some exotic subset. Ninety-two percent of the whole. In the same study, 74 percent of low-income households reported at least one civil legal problem in the prior year, and 39 percent reported five or more. These are evictions, garnishments, custody, debt collection, benefits terminations, domestic abuse — the problems that determine whether a family stays housed, solvent, and together.
We have built, over roughly a century, an elaborate and genuinely well-intentioned apparatus for making sure that the person who gives legal help is competent, honest, insured, supervised, and answerable. And we have built almost nothing for the 92 percent, because that apparatus is aimed exclusively at the transaction between a lawyer and a client. It has essentially nothing to say about the person who never becomes a client at all.
That is the trade nobody voted on. This essay is about its price.
I want to be careful at the outset about what I am and am not arguing. I am not arguing that lawyers should be unregulated. I am not arguing that the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility is staffed by bad actors — it is not, and the people who work there are doing a job the profession asked them to do. I am arguing something narrower and, I think, harder to dismiss: that a system calibrated to prevent every possible bad outcome for the client who has a lawyer will systematically produce fewer lawyers, more cautious lawyers, and higher prices — and that those costs fall on people who are not in the room when the rules get written.
Two locked doors
Before you get to discipline, notice the two structural doors, because they set the price floor for everything else.
The first door is who may help at all. In Minnesota, Minn. Stat. § 481.02, subd. 1, makes it unlawful for anyone other than a licensed member of the bar
“by word, sign, letter, or advertisement, to hold out as competent or qualified to give legal advice or counsel, or to prepare legal documents … or, for a fee or any consideration, to give legal advice or counsel, perform for or furnish to another legal services …”
Violation is a misdemeanor; county attorneys are directed to prosecute, and the attorney general or a county attorney may sue to enjoin. The prohibition is not limited to appearing in court. It reaches advice, counsel, and document preparation — which is to say, it reaches nearly everything a person with an eviction notice actually needs.
The rule exists for an obvious reason: unlicensed people giving legal advice have hurt a great many clients. But notice what the rule does not weigh. It compares a licensed lawyer to an unlicensed provider and correctly prefers the lawyer. It never asks the question that matters to the 92 percent, which is not “lawyer or non-lawyer?” but “trained non-lawyer, or nobody?” A rule that answers only the first question will always be over-protective with respect to the second.
The second door is who may fund the work. Minnesota Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4, titled “Professional Independence of a Lawyer,” provides that “[a] lawyer or law firm shall not share legal fees with a nonlawyer” except in narrow enumerated cases, that “[a] lawyer shall not form a partnership with a nonlawyer if any of the activities of the partnership consist of the practice of law,” and that a lawyer shall not practice in a firm in which a nonlawyer holds an ownership interest or governance authority.
The purpose is real: keep the lawyer’s judgment free of the investor’s thumb. The consequence is also real. Legal services are one of the only significant sectors of the American economy that cannot raise outside capital. Every other industry that dramatically lowered its unit cost did so by investing heavily in systems, technology, and process, funded by people who were not themselves practitioners. We forbade that. Then we expressed surprise that the cost of an hour of legal help kept climbing.
The discipline machine, by its own numbers
Now the part that lawyers feel personally, and that I think is the least understood outside the profession.
The Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board and the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility publish an annual report. Here is calendar year 2024, from the report filed in July 2025:
- 1,278 complaints received — up from 1,151 in 2023, an increase of roughly 10 percent. Only four of the previous twenty-five years saw more.
- 1,228 files closed, against 551 open at the start of the year and 604 at the end.
- 27 lawyers publicly disciplined: five disbarred, fourteen suspended, eight reprimanded, two of those also placed on probation.
- 101 lawyers privately disciplined: 95 admonitions and six private probations. The Office’s own summary: “Overall, eight percent of files were closed with an admonition.”
- In the first months of 2025, new complaints were running more than 25 percent above the prior year.
Do the arithmetic that the report does not do for you. Count every file that ended in discipline of any kind, public or private, and you get something on the order of 128 out of 1,228 closed files. Roughly nine of every ten complaint files close with no discipline at all.
That is not a scandal. In a system with about 30,000 licensed Minnesota lawyers, it is close to what you would expect and arguably what you should want: a low base rate of actual misconduct, and a screening process that catches it. The disciplinary system is not broken.
But now look at the same number from where a lawyer sits. Every one of those roughly 1,100 files that ended in nothing was, at some point, a letter that arrived at a lawyer’s office demanding a written response under oath-like conditions, on a deadline, about a client relationship that had already gone wrong. It occupied hours that were not billable to anyone. It sat in the back of the lawyer’s mind for months — the report separately tracks the average number of months a file stays open, because duration is itself a known burden. In many cases it went to a District Ethics Committee investigator; the report candidly notes that DEC workload has “outpaced volunteer availability,” with several committees periodically asking that new assignments be halted.
And the standard for the most common form of discipline is, by design, extraordinarily low. Under Rule 8(d)(2) of the Rules on Lawyers Professional Responsibility, the Director may issue an admonition where “the Director concludes that a lawyer’s conduct was unprofessional but of an isolated and non-serious nature.” Read that again: isolated and non-serious, and it still goes on your record as discipline. Ninety-five Minnesota lawyers received one in 2024.
One more fact from the report, and it is the one I would put on a billboard: Minnesota does not have a diversion program, though a majority of states do. The Court has taken public comment on adopting one, and the report notes that the comment and hearing “showed wide support.” A diversion program is the mechanism by which a minor, correctable lapse gets fixed — through education, a practice audit, a trust-account course — instead of becoming a disciplinary record. We are one of the states that has been doing it the other way.
What deterrence actually deters
Here is the thing the numbers cannot show you, and where I have to rely on what I see and hear.
I know several people who went to law school, passed the bar, and never practiced a day — not because they could not find work, and not because they lost interest in law, but because they looked at the regulatory exposure of actually representing human beings and decided it was not worth it. They read the rules, correctly understood that a sincere judgment call made under time pressure can become a complaint, noticed that the standard for the most common sanction is conduct that is “isolated and non-serious,” and went in-house, or into compliance, or into something else entirely. Every one of them would have been a good lawyer. That is a real cost, it is invisible in every statistic anyone collects, and I do not think I am describing anything unusual.
Then there is what deterrence does to the lawyers who do practice. It is not that we become more ethical — the honest ones were already honest, and the dishonest ones are not reading the annual report. It is that we become defensive, and defensive practice is expensive practice:
- The difficult client gets declined. Not the client with a weak case — the client who is disorganized, or in crisis, or angry, or hard to reach, or who has already been through two other lawyers. Those traits correlate with poverty and with trauma far more than they correlate with a meritless claim. They also correlate with complaints. Every experienced lawyer has an internal screen for this, and that screen is calibrated on risk, not on need.
- Limited-scope work gets avoided. Unbundled representation — coaching a pro se litigant, drafting one document, appearing for one hearing — is the single most promising way to give partial help to people who cannot afford full representation. It is also the arrangement most likely to end in a misunderstanding about what the lawyer agreed to do, which is to say the arrangement most likely to generate a complaint. So most lawyers do not offer it.
- Documentation expands to fill the fear. A meaningful fraction of what a careful lawyer does in a small matter is not advancing the client’s interest; it is building the file that would exonerate the lawyer. The client pays for that.
- Novel claims get abandoned. Advancing an unsettled theory means being wrong in public sometimes. A profession that treats being wrong as a risk to your license gets fewer test cases — and test cases are how the law improves for people who lack political power.
- The small case gets referred away. A $4,000 dispute carries nearly the same regulatory exposure as a $400,000 one and a fraction of the fee. The rational lawyer declines it. The person with the $4,000 problem joins the 92 percent.
None of that is misconduct. All of it is the predictable behavior of rational people responding to how the incentives are actually set.
The political problem
There is a further dimension that has become impossible to ignore, and it deserves candor rather than partisanship.
On July 2, 2024, the New York Appellate Division, First Department, disbarred Rudolph Giuliani. The court sustained sixteen charges of misconduct arising from statements about the 2020 election — that votes were cast in the names of dead people, that voters were brought from Camden to vote illegally, that a ballot was cast in the name of Joe Frazier — and found them to be knowing falsehoods made with intent to deceive, violating New York’s Rules 4.1 and 8.4. His First Amendment defense had been “considered and rejected.”
I am not going to pretend that is a hard case on its facts. Findings of deliberate falsehoods to courts are the core of what a disciplinary system is for, and a profession that could not sanction that would not be a profession. Anyone reaching for that matter as a martyrdom story is reaching for the wrong one.
But the structural point survives the merits entirely, and it is this: once the disciplinary apparatus becomes a recognized venue for political contest, its deterrent effect stops being aimed at misconduct and starts being aimed at controversy. The lesson the ordinary lawyer takes from a high-salience case is not the holding. It is simpler and cruder: representation in a charged matter can cost you your livelihood. That lesson lands identically whether the underlying discipline was righteous or not, and it lands on lawyers who have no intention of lying to anybody.
And the machinery runs in every direction. The same rules that reached Giuliani are available to anyone who wants to make a lawyer’s life difficult for representing an unpopular client — the protester, the immigrant, the defendant everyone has already convicted, the plaintiff suing an institution with friends. Filing a complaint costs nothing. Answering one does not.
The people who lose when lawyers learn to avoid controversy are not the powerful, who will always find counsel. They are the people whose causes are unpopular precisely because they lack power. That is an access-to-justice harm, and it is one the profession rarely counts as such.
Where the perfect eats the good
Every piece of this has the same logical structure, and it is worth naming, because once you see it you cannot unsee it.
Regulation of the legal profession consistently asks: is this provider, this arrangement, this fee structure as good as a fully licensed, fully insured lawyer in a traditional firm? And when the answer is no — as it often honestly is — the arrangement is prohibited.
But that is the wrong comparison. For the 92 percent, the alternative to an imperfect provider is not a perfect one. It is nothing. It is a person standing in housing court alone, with no idea that they have a defense, losing a case they should have won. Measured against a lawyer, a trained non-lawyer with a limited license looks like a downgrade. Measured against the actual counterfactual, it looks like the difference between some help and none.
Washington State ran this exact experiment and then made this exact error. In 2012 it created the Limited License Legal Technician — a licensed non-lawyer who could advise in family law matters. In 2020 the state Supreme Court sunset the program, concluding it was “not an effective way to meet these needs.” Perhaps it was not. But “not effective” against what baseline? The program was small and slow to grow. So is every new profession in its first decade. It was judged against the ideal, and the people it was serving went back to having no one.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. In this profession it is not a proverb. It is the operating principle.
What is actually being tried
The encouraging part is that this has stopped being theoretical, and Minnesota is not on the sidelines.
Minnesota’s Legal Paraprofessional Program began as a pilot and is now permanent: the Supreme Court adopted rule amendments on September 16, 2024, authorizing the program effective January 1, 2025. Legal paraprofessionals, supervised by a licensed Minnesota attorney, may give legal advice in selected matters and in some case types represent a client in court. It is deliberately narrow. It is also the first meaningful crack in the “licensed lawyer or nobody” binary in this state in a very long time, and it happened here.
Utah replaced Rule 5.4 with a two-track structure and opened a regulatory sandbox — authorized entities operating under supervision and data reporting, running through August 2027. Arizona went further, eliminating Rule 5.4’s ownership and fee-sharing restrictions entirely and licensing Alternative Business Structures.
Five years of data on both, published by Stanford Law School in June 2025, is more interesting than either side’s predictions. Arizona’s authorized ABSs grew from 19 in 2022 to 136 as of April 30, 2025. Utah’s sandbox went the other way — from 39 entrants in 2022 down to 11, under tighter eligibility criteria. And the finding that matters most: in both states, the primary beneficiaries are individual consumers and small businesses, not corporate clients. Utah’s sandbox specifically includes nonprofit entities serving low-income populations. The researchers concluded this “supports our finding that UPL reform is important for addressing the legal needs of the most vulnerable in society.”
The study also flags real concerns, and honesty requires repeating them: private equity concentration among Arizona ABSs, a drift toward personal injury and mass tort work, and unresolved questions about oversight of generative AI in service delivery. These are reasons to watch carefully and regulate the entity. They are not reasons to have kept the door shut.
Five things that would help
None of these requires anyone to believe that lawyers should be unregulated.
1. Adopt a diversion program. Minnesota is in the minority of states without one, the Court has heard public comment, and that comment showed wide support. A trust-account error made by an overwhelmed solo should produce training and an audit, not a permanent disciplinary record. This is the single cheapest, most obvious fix available, and it is already most of the way through the process.
2. Screen earlier and say so. If nine of ten files end in no discipline, a substantial number of them could be resolved before the lawyer is put to a full written response. Front-end screening protects the public just as well and costs the profession dramatically less.
3. Create a real safe harbor for limited-scope representation. Make the rules for unbundled work explicit, standardize the disclosure, and make clear that a lawyer who does three hours of honest work under a clear written scope has not thereby assumed the whole case. Unbundling is the highest-yield access reform available and fear is what suppresses it.
4. Expand the paraprofessional program on evidence. It exists, it is permanent, and it is narrow. Widen the authorized case types as the data justifies it — and commit in advance to the data being the test, so the program is not judged against perfection the way Washington’s was.
5. Require an access impact analysis in rulemaking. When a new restriction on practice is proposed, the record should have to say what it will cost the people who currently get no help at all. Right now that consideration enters the process only if someone volunteers it. The client who is never in the room should have a standing seat.
The measure
I began by saying I am not against regulating lawyers, and I mean it. I have seen what an unscrupulous practitioner does to somebody’s life. Trust accounts should be audited. Lawyers who steal should be disbarred, promptly and publicly. The disciplinary system in this state is run by serious people doing serious work, and the 27 lawyers publicly disciplined in 2024 were, on the record, disciplined for cause.
But a regulatory system has to be measured by all of its consequences, not just the ones it was designed to produce. We have gotten extremely good at ensuring that the person who gets a lawyer gets a competent one. We have accepted, largely without discussion, that most people will not get one at all.
If 92 percent of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans go unaddressed, the binding constraint on justice in this country is not lawyer quality. It is lawyer scarcity and lawyer price. Every rule that raises the cost of entering this profession, of staying in it, of trying something new inside it, or of taking the hard client, is a rule that trades a small amount of protection for a large amount of absence.
That trade might still be worth making. But we should at least admit we are making it, and we should stop pretending the cost is zero. The measure of a regulatory system is not how few bad lawyers it permits. It is how many people get a lawyer at all.
Sources
- Legal Services Corporation, The Justice Gap: The Unmet Civil Legal Needs of Low-income Americans (2022)
- Minn. Stat. § 481.02 (unauthorized practice of law)
- Minn. R. Prof. Conduct 5.4 (Professional Independence of a Lawyer)
- Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board & Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility, Annual Report (July 2025) (statistics for calendar year 2024)
- Minnesota Judicial Branch, Legal Paraprofessional Program
- Stanford Law School, Regulatory Innovation at the Crossroads: Five Years of Data on Entity-Regulation Reform in Arizona and Utah (June 2025)
- Matter of Giuliani, N.Y. App. Div. 1st Dep’t (July 2, 2024)
Rules and statutes quoted above were verified against the Revisor of Statutes and the Minnesota Judicial Branch rather than cited from memory. This is general commentary on the regulation of the legal profession. It is not legal advice, it is not ethics advice, and reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship.