Ep 055: Utah’s Bold Experiment to Reimagine Legal Services

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In August, a Utah task force on access to justice issued a report that called for “profoundly reimagining the way legal services are regulated in order to harness the power of entrepreneurship, capital, and machine learning in the legal arena.” </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Two days later, the Utah Supreme Court voted unanimously to approve the report’s recommendations, including substantially loosening regulatory restrictions on lawyers and creating a “regulatory sandbox” to allow a market of non-traditional legal entities to provide legal services in the state. </span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this episode of LawNext, we take an in-depth look at this unprecedented experiment in enhancing access to justice through regulatory reform. Joining host Bob Ambrogi to discuss the report,</span> <a href= "https://www.utahbar.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FINAL-Task-Force-Report.pdf"> <em><span style="font-weight: 400;">Narrowing the Access-to-Justice Gap by Reimagining Regulation</span></em></a><span style= "font-weight: 400;">, and its implementation are the cochairs of the Task Force, who will now continue as cochairs to oversee the implementation of the recommendations: </span></p> <p><a href= "https://www.utcourts.gov/judgesbios/showGallery.asp?dist=10&ct_type=S#2769"> <strong>Justice Constandinos “Deno” Himonas</strong></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">was appointed to the Utah Supreme Court in February 2015 by Gov. Gary Herbert. Prior to his appointment, he served as a trial court judge for over 10 years. A 1989 graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, he began his legal career as a litigator with the law firm of Jones, Waldo, Holbrook & McDonough, where he focused on complex civil litigation.</span></p> <p><a href= "https://www.parsonsbehle.com/attorneys/john-r-lund/"><strong>John R. Lund</strong></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">is past-president of the Utah State Bar and partner with Parsons Behle & Latimer</span><span style="fo