Designing Just Solutions at Scale: Lawyerless Legal Services and Evidence-Based Regulation

Around the world, billions of people lack access to justice, often because they cannot access help in resolving their justice issues. An important reason for this is that many access models rely centrally on lawyers, and such models simply cannot scale. Some jurisdictions allow lawyerless legal services. We offer a new framework for understanding lawyerless legal services that breaks away from lawyer-centric logic. Inspired by experiments in reregulating the practice of law in the United States, we propose a paradigm shift: just solutions. A just solutions framework has two distinct characteristics: it is evidence-based and it is outcome-focused. We draw on experience from other lawyerless models to imagine what a just solutions framework could look like in practice, including a growing body of evidence on legal needs and effective services, as well as scalable funding innovations. Freed from the lawyer-centric paradigm, a just solutions framework is closer to people’s actual needs and, unlike the lawyer-centric model, has the potential to scale to meet them. KEYWORDS: Legal services; access to justice; unbundling; regulatory reform; evidence-based policy and practice.