Start with the number that ought to end every smug conversation about the American legal profession.
The Legal Services Corporation’s 2022 Justice Gap study found that low-income Americans get no legal help, or not enough of it, for 92 percent of the substantial civil legal problems they face. Not 92 percent of some odd subset. Ninety-two percent of the whole thing. 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. We’re talking about evictions, garnishments, custody, debt collection, benefits cutoffs, domestic abuse — the problems that decide whether a family stays housed, solvent, and together.
Over roughly a century we’ve built an elaborate, well-meaning machine for making sure the person who gives legal help is competent, honest, insured, supervised, and answerable. And we’ve built almost nothing for the 92 percent, because that machine only looks at the deal between a lawyer and a client. It has next to nothing to say about the person who never becomes a client at all.
Nobody voted on that trade. This essay is about what it costs.
I’m not saying lawyers should go unregulated. I’m not saying the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility is full of bad actors. It isn’t, and the people there are doing the job the profession gave them. My point is narrower, and it’s harder to wave off: build a system to prevent every possible bad outcome for the client who has a lawyer, and you’ll get fewer lawyers, more nervous lawyers, and higher prices — and the bill goes to people who aren’t in the room when the rules get written.
Two locked doors
Before you even get to discipline, look at the two doors that set the price floor for everything else.
Door one: who’s allowed to 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 …”
Breaking it is a misdemeanor. County attorneys are directed to prosecute, and the attorney general or a county attorney can sue to stop it. And it doesn’t stop at the courtroom door. It reaches advice, counsel, and document preparation. In other words, it reaches nearly everything a person holding an eviction notice actually needs.
The rule’s there for a good reason: unlicensed people handing out legal advice have hurt a lot of clients. But look at what the rule doesn’t weigh. It lines up a licensed lawyer against an unlicensed provider and, rightly, picks the lawyer. The only question it ever asks is “lawyer or non-lawyer?” The 92 percent have a different one: “trained non-lawyer, or nobody?” A rule that only answers the first question will always overprotect on the second.
Door two: who’s allowed to pay for the work. Minnesota Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4, titled “Professional Independence of a Lawyer,” says “[a] lawyer or law firm shall not share legal fees with a nonlawyer” except in a handful of listed 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 can’t practice in a firm where a nonlawyer holds an ownership interest or governance authority.
The purpose is real: keep the investor’s thumb off the lawyer’s judgment. So is the fallout. Legal services is one of the only big sectors of the American economy that can’t raise outside money. Every other industry that drove its unit cost way down did it by pouring money into systems, technology, and process, and that money came from people who weren’t practitioners. We banned that. Then we acted surprised when the price of an hour of legal help kept climbing.
The discipline machine, by its own numbers
Now the part lawyers feel in their gut, and the part I think people outside the profession understand least.
The Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board and the Office of Lawyers Professional Responsibility put out an annual report. Here’s calendar year 2024, from the report filed in July 2025:
- 1,278 complaints received — up from 1,151 in 2023, roughly a 10 percent jump. Only four of the previous twenty-five years saw more.
- 1,228 files closed, with 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 put 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 year before.
Now do the math the report doesn’t do for you. Count every file that ended in discipline of any kind, public or private, and you get something like 128 out of 1,228 closed files. Roughly nine of every ten complaint files close with no discipline at all.
That’s not a scandal. With about 30,000 licensed lawyers in Minnesota, it’s close to what you’d expect, and maybe what you’d want: not much actual misconduct, and a screen that catches what there is. The disciplinary system isn’t broken.
Now look at that same number from the lawyer’s chair. Every one of those roughly 1,100 files that went nowhere started as a letter landing on a lawyer’s desk, demanding a written response under oath-like conditions, on a deadline, about a client relationship that had already gone sideways. It ate hours nobody could bill. It sat in the back of the lawyer’s head for months; the report tracks the average number of months a file stays open, because the wait is its own burden. Plenty of them went to a District Ethics Committee investigator, and the report admits DEC workload has “outpaced volunteer availability,” with several committees periodically asking that new assignments be halted.
And the bar for the most common kind of discipline is set low on purpose. 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 got one in 2024.
One more fact from the report, and it’s the one I’d 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 says the comment and hearing “showed wide support.” Diversion is how a small, fixable lapse gets fixed — with education, a practice audit, a trust-account course — instead of turning into a disciplinary record. We’re one of the states that’s been doing it the other way.
What the fear actually stops
Here’s what the numbers can’t show you, and where I have to go on what I see and hear.
I know several people who went to law school, passed the bar, and never practiced a day. They could’ve found work. They hadn’t lost interest in the law. They looked at the regulatory exposure that comes with representing actual human beings and decided it wasn’t worth it. They read the rules and got them right: an honest judgment call made in a hurry can turn into a complaint. They 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’ve been a good lawyer. That’s a real cost, it doesn’t show up in any statistic anybody keeps, and I don’t think I’m describing anything unusual.
Then look at what the fear does to the lawyers who do practice. We don’t get more ethical. The honest ones were already honest, and the dishonest ones aren’t reading the annual report. We get defensive, and defensive practice is expensive practice:
- The hard client gets turned away. Not the client with a weak case. The client who’s disorganized, or in crisis, or angry, or hard to reach, or who’s already burned through two other lawyers. Those traits track poverty and trauma a lot more than they track a bad claim. They also track complaints. Every experienced lawyer runs a screen for this in his head, and that screen is tuned to risk, not need.
- Limited-scope work gets skipped. Unbundled representation — coaching a pro se litigant, drafting one document, showing up for one hearing — is the single most promising way to give partial help to people who can’t afford the whole thing. It’s also the setup most likely to end in a misunderstanding over what the lawyer agreed to do, which makes it the setup most likely to draw a complaint. So most lawyers don’t offer it.
- The file grows to fit the fear. A good chunk of what a careful lawyer does on a small matter doesn’t move the client’s case forward. It builds the file that would clear the lawyer. The client pays for that.
- New theories get dropped. Pushing an unsettled theory means being wrong in public now and then. A profession that treats being wrong as a threat to your license gets fewer test cases, and test cases are how the law gets better for people without political power.
- The small case gets sent down the hall. A $4,000 dispute carries nearly the same regulatory exposure as a $400,000 one and a sliver of the fee. The rational lawyer passes. The person with the $4,000 problem joins the 92 percent.
None of that is misconduct. It’s rational people doing exactly what the incentives tell them to do.
The political problem
There’s one more piece, and it’s gotten impossible to ignore.
On July 2, 2024, the New York Appellate Division, First Department, disbarred Rudolph Giuliani. The court sustained sixteen charges of misconduct arising from his 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 they were knowing falsehoods made with intent to deceive, in violation of New York’s Rules 4.1 and 8.4. His First Amendment defense had been “considered and rejected.”
That’s not a hard case on its facts. Deliberate falsehoods to courts are exactly what a disciplinary system is for, and a profession that couldn’t sanction them wouldn’t be much of a profession. If you’re reaching for that one as a martyr story, you grabbed the wrong case.
But the bigger point doesn’t depend on the merits at all: once the disciplinary system becomes a known place to fight politics, its deterrent effect stops aiming at misconduct and starts aiming at controversy. The ordinary lawyer doesn’t walk away from a headline case with the holding. He walks away with something simpler and cruder: take a charged matter and it can cost you your livelihood. That lesson lands the same whether the discipline was deserved or not, and it lands on lawyers who have no plan to lie to anybody.
And it cuts every direction. The same rules that reached Giuliani are there for anyone who wants to make a lawyer’s life miserable for taking an unpopular client — the protester, the immigrant, the defendant everybody’s already convicted, the plaintiff suing an institution with friends. Filing a complaint costs nothing. Answering one doesn’t.
When lawyers learn to duck controversy, the powerful don’t lose. They’ll always find counsel. The people who lose are the ones whose causes are unpopular precisely because they don’t have power. That’s an access-to-justice harm, and the profession rarely counts it as one.
Where the perfect eats the good
Every piece of this has the same shape, and once you see it you can’t unsee it.
Lawyer regulation keeps asking one question: is this provider, this arrangement, this fee structure as good as a fully licensed, fully insured lawyer in a traditional firm? When the answer’s no — and plenty of times it honestly is — the thing gets banned.
That’s the wrong comparison. For the 92 percent, the alternative to an imperfect provider isn’t a perfect one. It’s nothing. It’s a person standing alone in housing court with no idea they have a defense, losing a case they should’ve won. Next to a lawyer, a trained non-lawyer with a limited license looks like a step down. Next to what actually happens, it’s the difference between some help and none.
Washington State ran this exact experiment and then made this exact mistake. In 2012 it created the Limited License Legal Technician, a licensed non-lawyer who could give advice in family law matters. In 2020 the state Supreme Court sunset the program, concluding it was “not an effective way to meet these needs.” Maybe it wasn’t. But “not effective” compared to what? The program was small and slow to grow. So is every new profession in its first decade. It got measured 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 that’s not a proverb. It’s the operating manual.
What’s actually being tried
The good news: this isn’t theory anymore, and Minnesota isn’t sitting it out.
Minnesota’s Legal Paraprofessional Program started 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, can give legal advice in selected matters and, in some case types, represent a client in court. It’s narrow on purpose. It’s also the first real crack in this state’s “licensed lawyer or nobody” setup 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: it threw out Rule 5.4’s ownership and fee-sharing restrictions entirely and started licensing Alternative Business Structures.
Stanford Law School published five years of data on both in June 2025, and it’s 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 main beneficiaries are individual consumers and small businesses, not corporate clients. Utah’s sandbox specifically includes nonprofits serving low-income people. 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 flags real worries too: private equity concentration among Arizona ABSs, a drift toward personal injury and mass tort work, and open questions about who oversees generative AI in service delivery. Those are reasons to keep a close eye on things and regulate the entity. They aren’t reasons to have kept the door shut.
Five things that would help
You don’t have to think lawyers should go unregulated to back any of these.
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 mistake by a buried solo should get training and an audit, not a permanent disciplinary record. It’s the cheapest, most obvious fix on the table, and it’s already most of the way through the process.
2. Screen earlier, and say you’re doing it. If nine of ten files end in no discipline, a lot of them could be resolved before the lawyer has to write a full response. Screening up front protects the public just as well and costs the profession a whole lot less.
3. Build a real safe harbor for limited-scope work. Spell out the rules for unbundled work, standardize the disclosure, and make it clear that a lawyer who does three hours of honest work under a clear written scope hasn’t signed up for the whole case. Unbundling is the biggest access win available, and fear is what keeps it down.
4. Grow the paraprofessional program on the evidence. It exists, it’s permanent, and it’s narrow. Widen the case types as the data supports it, and agree up front that the data is the test, so the program doesn’t get measured against perfection the way Washington’s was.
5. Require an access impact analysis in rulemaking. When somebody proposes a new restriction on practice, the record should have to say what it’ll cost the people who get no help at all right now. Today that only comes up if somebody volunteers it. The client who’s never in the room ought to have a seat at the table.
The measure
I’m not against regulating lawyers, and I mean it. I’ve seen what a crooked practitioner does to somebody’s life. Audit the trust accounts. Disbar the lawyers who steal, fast and in public. 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 you judge a regulatory system by everything it does, not just the things it was built to do. We’ve gotten very good at making sure the person who gets a lawyer gets a competent one. We’ve accepted, mostly without talking about it, that most people won’t get one at all.
If 92 percent of the civil legal problems of low-income Americans go unaddressed, lawyer quality isn’t what’s holding justice back in this country. Lawyer scarcity and lawyer price are. Every rule that raises the cost of getting into this profession, staying in it, trying something new inside it, or taking the hard client trades a little protection for a lot of absence.
Maybe that trade’s still worth making. But let’s at least admit we’re making it, and quit pretending it’s free. The measure of a regulatory system isn’t how few bad lawyers it lets through. It’s 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.