The Problem

There is a serious issue within the legal industry right now. While millions of people are priced of out even basic legal services, there are thousands of underemployed and even unemployed lawyers in Canada, leading to what Janelle Orsi, in her book Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy, calls an artificial scarcity. This is especially frustrating for emerging law students to hear, as it grows more and more difficult to find a job as an articling student despite this need for lawyers.

However, there are technological and practice changes that the legal industry could make which have the potential both to improve both access to justice and address the plight of unemployed/underemployed lawyers. This solution is to engage with the new commercial and technological trend of the “sharing economy”.

The Sharing Economy

Sharing economy businesses use technology to efficiently redistribute, share, or use a surplus capacity of goods and services. Users are able to conveniently browse providers of the good or service through an app, and usually receive information on the person providing it, the type of good or service, price options, and customer reviews. Sharing economy businesses usually charge lower prices overall for equivalent goods and services. Profit margins are maintained through the increased volume of products offered through access to these latent markets. Latent markets could have had thousands or even millions of people who needed an efficient and cost-effective means of accessing those goods or services, which means that suppliers can offer them for a lower price. This sharing economy model may be just what the legal industry needs: through the use of current technologies, lawyers can connect Canadians who desire access to justice with those lawyers who are not working to their full capacity

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How does it work with the legal industry?

Realities of providing people now want faster, cheaper, and more certain alternatives to current legal practice. The sharing economy model would likely direct lawyers to practicing in a manner that is more user-friendly, by using similar apps and practices to Uber and Airbnb.  For example, an app could provide a map with a breakdown of services provided, costs, and user reviews.

With the sharing economy, lawyers also do not necessarily need to affiliate with a firm to receive clientele. Their participation in a sharing economy app means that clients can be funnelled towards lawyers with particular expertise they need, which in turn makes the market for legal services more about the individual lawyer rather than a particular firm. While working at firms would not necessarily become obsolete, it provides a viable alternative for those seeking the solo practitioner route.

While taking some pieces from the sharing economy business may not solve the access to justice problem in Canada absolutely, it does appear to have some interesting ways of providing alternative legal services that favour both lawyers and their potential clientele.