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18 Legal Ethics 78 (2015)
Access to Justice and Legal Profession Regulation in Canada: To ABS, to Not ABS Or to ABS+

handle is hein.journals/lethics18 and id is 79 raw text is: LEGAL ETHICS, 2015 VOL. 18, NO. 1, 78-83 Routledge http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1460728x.2015.1084789 Taylor& Francis Group REPORTS, COMMENTS AND NOTES Access to justice and legal profession regulation in Canada: to ABS, to not ABS or to ABS+? David Wiseman Assistant Professor, Faculty of Common Law, University of Ottawa, Canada It appears that 2015 will be the year in which regulators of the legal profession in common law Canada decide whether to allow so-called alternative business structures (ABS) in the Canadian legal services sector.' Briefly put, allowing ABS involves approving non-lawyer ownership of entities providing legal services and is done with the intention of enabling significantly greater application of 'corporate' investment and expertise in the private market for legal services.2 ABS was authorised in Australia in 2000 and in England and Wales in 2011.3 It is not yet allowed in the United States, but a debate appears to be re- opening there.4 A noteworthy aspect of the Canadian debate on ABS is the emphasis being given to the potential for liberalised business structures to improve access to justice through inno- vations in legal services processes and 'products'. In this report I provide a brief overview of the consideration of ABS in Canada. I then offer some observations on why the poten- tial gains in access to justice from allowing ABS are unlikely to reach people living on low income and, in turn, sketch an argument for a need to explore the possibility of designing an 'ABS+' model. The state of the ABS debate in Canada Only a limited range of legal business structures are currently permitted in common law Canada. Generally, licensed legal professionals (lawyers and paralegals) must own and control the relevant practice entities. The most common business structures are traditional sole practices and legal partnerships, along with limited liability legal partnerships and professional corporations, all of which are by their nature 100% licensee-owned and con- trolled. Moreover, these structures must confine themselves to the delivery of legal services CONTACT David Wiseman 0 david.wiseman@uottawa.ca 'In the predominantly civil law jurisdiction of Quebec it is already possible to use a form of ABS, provided that non-lawyer ownership does not exceed 49%. See Regulation respecting the practice of the profession of advocate within a limited liability partnership or joint-stock company and in multi-disciplinarity, RRQ, c B-1, r 9. 2By using the label 'corporate' I am adopting a concept used by Gillian Hadfield in her work in this area: see, in particular, G. Hadfield,'The Cost of Law: Promoting Access to Justice Through the (Un)Corporate Practise of Law' (2104) International Review ofLaw and Economics (forthcoming); USC CLASS Research Paper No. 13-4; USC Law Legal Studies Paper No. 13-16. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2333990. See also N. Semple, 'Access to Justice: Is Legal Services Regulation Blocking the Path?' (2013) (20)3 International Journal of the Legal Profession 1. 3A multi-jurisdictional analysis of the introduction of ABS is undertaken in R. Devlin and 0. Morison,'Access to Justice and the Ethics and Politics of Alternative Business Structures' (2012) 91(3) Canadian Bar Review 483. 4See Devlin and Morison, ibid 536-37. 0 2015 Taylor & Francis

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