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6 Ind. J.L. & Soc. Equal. 1 (2018)

handle is hein.journals/injlaseq6 and id is 1 raw text is: 






       Offering  Transactional Legal Aid to Low-income Entrepreneurs

                                   Jared Nicholson*




INTRODUCTION

       Transactional  legal aid practices have been  growing  throughout  the country.'
This  is particularly true  at law  schools,  whose  clinics share  a joint  mission  of
educating  law   students  and  serving  their communities.2   But   it is also true  at
traditional legal  aid agencies.3 In  the field of community economic development
(CED)  more   generally, programs   assisting entrepreneurs   are on the rise.4 All this
suggests  that the number  of transactional legal aid lawyers will continue to grow.
       Starting  a transactional  practice  at a  traditional legal  aid agency   raises
difficult questions  that  all poverty  lawyers  face  about  how   to allocate limited
resources.5 As  the  practice area  grows,  these  are questions  that  more  legal  aid
lawyers  will have to confront. The goal of this Paper is to help transactional legal aid
lawyers  make  hard  decisions about how  to allocate resources to meet client needs.
       This Paper  builds upon  the  rich literature on triage in legal aid, both in the
sense of designing  a transactional legal aid practice and  selecting individual clients
for that practice, by extending  the  triage literature to the context of transactional
legal aid. As  the  transactional legal  aid practice area  has  grown,  the  literature
surrounding   it has begun to grapple  with the questions  of triage that the literature
on legal services has  dealt with for decades. This Paper  builds  on the transactional
legal  aid literature  by  addressing   those  questions  about  triage  based  on                the


*      Associate at Latham & Watkins LLP. A.B. Princeton University; J.D. Harvard Law School. The author
       thanks Amanda Kool, Scott Cummings, Susan Jones, Sumbul Siddiqui and Andrea Matthews for their
       helpful comments and advice.
1      See generally Paul R. Tremblay, Transactional Legal Services, Triage, and Access to Justice, 48 WASH.
       U. J.L. & POL'Y 11 (2015) [hereinafter Tremblay (2015)] (presenting arguments for and against the
       allocation of legal resources to entrepreneurs and emerging businesses).
2      See generally Susan R. Jones, Small Business and Community Economic Development: Transactional
       Lawyering for Social Change and Economic Justice, 4 CLINICAL L. REV. 195 (1997) [hereinafter Jones
       (1997)] (analyzing the benefits of transactional clinics to legal education).
3      See, e.g., Community Development, PUBLIC COUNSEL,
       http://www.publiccounsel.org/practice-areas/community development (last visited Aug. 27, 2017) (Los
       Angeles); Community and Economic Development, BROOKLYN LEGAL SERVS. CORP. A, http://bka.org/our-
       work/community-and-economic-development (last visited Aug. 27, 2017) (Brooklyn); Our Services, CHI.
       LAW. COMM. FOR C.R., https://www.clecrul.org/services (last accessed Sept. 18, 2017) (Chicago).
4      See, e.g., Susan R. Jones, Promoting Social and Economic Justice Through Interdisciplinary Work in
       Transactional Law, 14 WASH. U. J.L. & POL'Y 249, 252-53 (2004) [hereinafter Jones (2004)]; Active
       Grantee Locations, U.S. DEP'T HEALTH & HUM. SERVS., http://www.acf.hhs.gov/ocs/programs/ced/ced-
       grantees (last accessed Aug. 27, 2017); Small Business and Community Development Programs, U.S.
       DEP'T TREASURY, https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sb-programs/Pages/default.aspx (last
       updated Nov. 19, 2015).
5      See, e.g., I. Glenn Cohen, Rationing Legal Services, 5 J. LEGAL ANALYSIS 221, 222 (2013); Paul R.
       Tremblay, Acting A Very Moral Type of God: Triage Among Poor Clients, 67 FORDHAM L. REV. 2475,
       2499 (1999) [hereinafter Tremblay (1999)].

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