New UA program aims to ease Arizona's lawyer shortage

Arizona has one of the most severe lawyer shortages in the country. Considered a legal desert, two-thirds of counties in the state had fewer than one lawyer per 1,000 residents in 2020, according to data from the American Bar Association.

For residents living in rural and low-income areas, especially, finding affordable legal representation — the average lawyer in Arizona costs around $260 per hour — is a challenge. It’s so challenging, in fact, that more than 75% of cases in the state involve at least one party who chooses to represent themselves.

“I’ve seen instances where the person is representing themselves, and some of them do as good of a job as you could expect, but you kind of grimace because they’re still missing all of these opportunities to present an effective case and they just don’t know it,” Keith Swisher, a law professor at the University of Arizona, said. “It’s certainly helpful to have an advocate in your corner who understands those technicalities, and some studies indicate that the outcomes are better with (legal counsel).”

New options for affordable legal representation

In an effort to ease Arizona’s lawyer shortage, the UA received approval from the Arizona Supreme Court earlier this month to launch a pathways program that will allow UA students pursuing a bachelor’s or master’s degree in law to simultaneously become a licensed legal paraprofessional.

That’s significant because, earlier this year, the court approved a recommendation from the Task Force for Legal Services Delivery to allow legal paraprofessionals — qualified by education, training and licensing — to provide legal counsel and advocacy within one of the following four areas: family law, administrative law, limited civil procedure (think debt collection), and low-level criminal cases that don’t involve jail time.

The idea is that offering an alternative to enrolling in traditionally expensive and time-consuming law schools will create a bigger pool of affordable legal advisors in Arizona.

“Unfortunately not everyone is bursting with money, and legal services are expensive,” Swisher said. “The Supreme Court had this idea of creating a new tier of legal professional who could practice law in those four areas and presumably do so at lower prices than lawyers have historically charged to provide those services. That is the underlying goal — to serve Arizonans of more modest means who typically go without a lawyer.”

It’s similar to the nurse practitioner model in the medical field, in which licensed nurse practitioners receive training in a much more limited scope than medical doctors, but are authorized to offer some of the same services as doctors.

The court’s approval of legal paraprofessionals to provide limited legal representation earlier this year created two routes for a person to get licensed:

Experiential: They would have spent at least seven of the last 10 years working as a paralegal to be eligible to sit for the licensing exam.

Educational: If they take specific courses that make them eligible to sit for the licensing exam.

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UA’s program first of its kind

Without a formal program like the one UA just launched, those pathways could prove arduous, expensive and counterproductive to the goal of closing Arizona’s so-called justice gap.

Swisher, who oversees the legal studies programs at the UA, which is offered through a partnership between the James. E. Rogers College of Law and the School of Government and Public Policy, said he watched that play out in Washington, which experimented with a similar, but not nearly as broad as Arizona’s, legal paraprofessional licensing option.

“They tacked on a bunch of experience and education requirements, and there was never the pipeline that the court in Washington wanted to see,” he said. “The applicant had to invest so much time and money and effort that if they were going to do that they may as well become a lawyer. With the additional education and cost associated with (law school), they’d be more likely to charge clients more money.”

Avoiding that result in Arizona is why Swisher and his colleagues are starting the new program at the UA, which starts next semester.

Both the bachelor’s and master’s of law programs paired with the legal paraprofessional concentration are designed to ensure that students meet the educational requirements they need to sit for the licensing exam in the specialty of their choosing right after graduation. Once they pass the exam, which is not nearly as lengthy or involved as the state bar exam lawyers must pass, they can start offering legal services to the thousands of Arizonans who may not be able to access it otherwise.

“The University of Arizona’s bachelor of law program is radically different than any other undergraduate degree that has the word ‘law’ or ‘legal’ in it because it teaches substantive law — the law that’s taught in law schools,” Linus Kafka, assistant director of the UA’s undergraduate and graduate law programs, said. “Because of those radical differences, it met the curricular standards of the LP requirement in the code, while other programs that may have the word ‘law’ in them don’t.”

To his knowledge, the UA’s legal paraprofessional pathway program is the first of its kind in the nation to offer a “clear track that’s been designed to meet the code requirements.”

Both the undergraduate and graduate law programs are accepting applications for next semester.

“The goal of these programs is to reach a broader audience of people who are interested in legal education,” Swisher said. “Spots aren’t an issue. If we have students who are ready to go and meet the university requirements, we’ll make spots.”

If you’re interested in applying or learning more about this program, visit https://law.arizona.edu/legal-paraprofessional.