The access-to-justice movement—comprised of lawyers, activists, and scholars—has traditionally focused on ensuring people have access to legal resources, tribunals, and lawyers to pursue remedies or mount defenses. As Kathryne Young says in Getting Help, the conventional approach asks: “How do we, as lawyers, serve those seeking help? How do we provide more legal services to lawyerless parties?” But this framework rests on two problematic assumptions: that people recognize their problems as legal in nature, and that the primary barrier to justice is a lack of affordable legal services. Young’s research exposes the error in both assumptions.
To explore this gap, Young conducted an empirical study using a nationally representative survey, gathering quantitative and qualitative data about how Americans approach complex problems with legal implications. Her findings reveal significant variations in how different demographics conceptualize legal problems, whom they trust, and what kinds of assistance they find valuable. These variations correlate with factors including race, gender, political affiliation, and religiosity, painting a nuanced picture of help-seeking behavior in legal contexts.
Getting Help highlights a crucial disconnect in current regulatory frameworks, between providing information and providing actual advice. While many organizations provide legal information, they are barred from offering legal advice due to licensing restrictions and rules about who can practice law. The data shows that this distinction between information and advice undermines effectiveness—people often find mere information unhelpful for addressing legal issues, making them less likely to seek help from these organizations in the future, knowing they cannot receive the personalized guidance they need.
The root of this problem lies deeper than simple regulatory constraints. Current rules governing legal practice emerged from an adversarial model of lawyering, viewing legal advice as proprietary guidance within the exclusive attorney-client relationship. This model envisions lawyers as zealous advocates in disputes, rather than as general problem-solvers helping clients navigate legal challenges. While many lawyers operate beyond this narrow conception, the adversarial framework continues to influence regulatory bodies, maintaining lawyers’ monopoly on legal advice-giving.
This creates a troubling paradox: organizations can provide information about most aspects of a problem but must leave the legal components unaddressed. As Young argues, this regulatory structure fails to “connect ordinary people to legal solutions.” The result is that legal aspects of problems “fester and worsen” while other dimensions receive attention and support.
Young correctly blames this problem on the rules regulating lawyers and lawyering. But it is worth considering whether a deeper problem stands in the way of conceptualizing regulatory reform that would broaden the pool of practitioners who could lawfully dispense legal advice. In an adversarial system, “legal advice” is clothed in the exclusive relationship of zealous representation and the tight bond of attorney/client privilege. The lawyer is there to help her client win, not simply to find a solution to a legal problem in which the client may or may not have distinct adversaries. Of course this does not describe the work of many lawyers who provide legal services and dispense advice. But that platonic picture of lawyer as advocate in a dispute makes it difficult for regulatory bodies to conceive of and to understand advice-giving in the broader sense. Even when lawyers are dispensing non-adversarial advice, the specter of possible adversarial entanglement elevates licensed lawyers to their monopoly position. Thus emerges the trap in which people seeking advice are presented only with information, leaving people free to “seek guidance about most other aspects of their problem” while the legal dimensions of their problems, left unattended, intensify.
Solutions to access-to-justice problems require not just regulatory reform to expand who can provide legal advice. They require a fundamental reconceptualization of how legal guidance fits into broader problem-solving frameworks. Understanding how people seek and use help—rather than how we assume they should—must inform any meaningful reforms to improve access to justice.
Young’s most urgent cry is for changes to the rules for who can provide legal advice. Until states relax the regulations that restrict advice-giving to the small supply of formally credentialed lawyers, the legal profession will serve more as “gatekeeper than guide.” But Young’s research shows that relaxing barriers on the practice of law is a necessary but not sufficient solution to the problem. Once more actors are empowered to provide or connect people with legal advice, these systems must be matched with the specific ways in which people seek help and they must be attentive to the fact that the manner and places in which Americans seek help can differ based on the identity of the client. Young contends that a glib reliance on tech-based solutions are likely to fall short. Instead, help should be embedded in a holistic ecosystem in which access to legal help is intimately connected to the resources needed to address the non-legal aspects of people’s problems.
