Solving A2J Problem-Replace Cottage Industry Production Legal Services With Support Services Production

Solving A2J Problem-Replace Cottage Industry Production Legal Services with Support Services
Production
Ken Chasse1
No. Table of Contents Page

1. Introduction to the Access to Justice Problem of Unaffordable Legal Services 1
2. Law Societies Don’t Try to Solve the A2J Problem—It’s Not Theirs to Solve They Say 4
3. Support Services Take Advantage of the “Fixed Costs Factor” and Greater Specialization 6
4. Recommended Improvements Cannot Produce Affordability for Legal Services 8
5. Lawyers Are Giving Up Their Connection with Middle-Income and Lower-Income People 10
6. A Civil Service for Law Societies 15
7. The Application of the Support Services Method to Establish a Legal Services Support Services 16
8. Lawyers’ Technological Competence as to Electronically-Produced Evidence 23
9. Legal Aid Ontario’s 80 Clinics as a Network of Interdependent Support Services 27
10. Paying for a national civil service for law societies 29
11. LAO LAW is Now a Different Kind of Research Service 31
12. The Solution to the A2J Problem Will Not Happen in the Near Future 31
13. The Big Law Firms Will Develop Their Own Support Services Method of Production 34
14. Conclusion 35
1. Introduction to the Access to Justice Problem of Unaffordable Legal Services

The solution to the access to justice problem (the A2J problem) of unaffordable lawyers’ services is to
transition the legal profession from its present very obsolete cottage industry method of production to a support
services method, as has all of the production of all other goods and services for more than 120 years. “Cottage
industry method” means the producer of the finished product makes all parts of it itself.2 The production of
medical services and automobiles are examples of production by way of support services methods, i.e., many
parts of the finished product are made externally by special parts producers that each produce different ones
of the several or many parts of the work and materials necessary to the manufacturing of the finished product.
1
Ken Chasse, J.D., LL.M., member of the Law Societies of Ontario and British Columbia, Canada.
2
The use of the phrase, “cottage industry” in describing the legal profession’s method of producing legal services is
also used by Richard Susskind, a well-established authority on the present and future disruptions to the practice of
law and to lawyers, caused by machine technology (artificial intelligence). His several books emphasize the fact that
solo and small law firms are under considerable threat of soon being replaced (all published by Oxford University
Press (OUP)); see: Online Courts and The Future of Justice (2019); The Future of the Professions (2015), with his
son, Daniel Susskind); Tomorrow’s Lawyers (2013); The End of Lawyers (2008); Transforming the Law (2000); and
the, CBA Legal Futures Initiative’s, A Guide to Strategy for Lawyers, by Richard Susskind (2012, but no longer
available online). See also Wikipedia
Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

2
Such comparisons of such very different products are valid because the A2J problem is not one concerning the
contents of various goods and services in comparison with legal services, but rather their different methods of
production. They should be analyzed, each one with the other for their similarities, methods of achieving cost-
efficiency, and thereby, their needed economies-of-scale that affordability requires. Most important of all is,
how to maximize the benefit obtained from the fixed-costs factor, along with the greatest cost-efficiency from
the highest degree of specialization.
And, I discovered in creating and operating a highly specialized, high volume legal research support service,
producing several thousands of legal opinions per year for lawyers in private practice, that my staff of research
lawyers did not get bored doing only legal research to write those legal opinions, and doing it only one major
area of the law. In fact, none of them wanted to switch to another area of law. Instead, they developed ever-
increasing pride in their very extensive knowledge within their field of expertise. That is the desired
combination necessary: the greatest speed of production, along with the greatest safety of production due a
very high degree of specialization. A higher degree of specialization of all major factors of production, beyond
what law firms can themselves afford, is mandatory if such problems as the A2J problem are to be solved. And
because all lawyers produce their legal services in the same very obsolete way, the A2J problem is every
lawyer’s production problem.
Without the use of support services, it is not possible to produce legal services affordably for middle- and
lower-income people. And, when the problem becomes a significant threat to their profits, the big law firms
will themselves gradually move to a support services method of production. But when those same lawyers
serve as law society managers (benchers)3, they will not have enough time free from serving their own clients
to bring about a support-services method for all lawyers, but only within their own law firms, for their own
clients. That is to say, the bencher-building-block of law society management, has become the justice system’s
“bencher-burden” that greatly impairs the justice system’s ability to do justice and ensure the rule of law.
Those lawyers won’t be helping-out the general practitioners, who are the lawyers that serve middle- and
lower-income people. But they could help them, because the bigger is the volume of production, the larger are
the economies-of-scale obtainable, and therefore, the bigger will be the profits made. Therefore, law societies,
working with the big law firms, should establish a much larger support service system that is able to serve all
lawyers and thereby, all of their clients.
For example, without the parts industry that serves the automobile industry, it would not be possible to
produce automobiles affordably for middle-income people. Volume matters! In the first decade of the 20th
3
“Bencher”-Canadian usage: the terms bencher and treasurer are in use by the legal profession in Canada. A
bencher in the Canadian context is a lawyer elected by the other lawyer-members of the law society, for a fixed
term, to be its board of directors (referred to as “Convocation”). The treasurer is elected by the benchers to function
as the chair. Paralegals are also elected as benchers in those provinces where the law societies govern the paralegal
profession.

3
century, the “horseless carriages” that were the very first automobiles, were affordable only by wealthy people.
But then competition created a desire for larger markets, which forced the creation of the parts industry, which
in turn brought affordability for a much greater market.
Beginning in July 1979, I learned the cause and solution of the A2J problem “the hard way,” by establishing
a high-volume, highly specialized legal research support service for lawyers in private practice. There was no
precedent to follow or how-to-do-it manual to read. Described below are the methods and principles of
production used to achieve a greater cost-efficiency in production than is possible for a law firm to achieve,
because law firms cannot achieve the very high volumes of production that affordability requires. But support
services can. Several support services, each producing different parts of the work to produce legal services
would greatly reduce the costs of producing legal services. Thereby legal services would be rendered more
affordable for more people within all income levels of society, and lawyers would make more money, as has
all of the manufacturing of goods and services by adopting support services methods of production.
But instead, the suggestions made by lawyers and law societies to improve cost-efficiency to lower costs,
accept the traditional law firm as being the only production to be used. But affordability can never be achieved
by embellishing an obsolete method of production. The traditional law firm cannot make the necessary high
volumes of production needed for affordability. Going from cottage industry production to support-services
production is not merely improving the same old method of production. It is a different method and technology
of production.
For a law firm, worries as to the costs and cost-efficiency of producing legal services may begin with clients
saying “no more hourly billing; we want fixed-cost billing.” That transfers the onus and obligation to obtain
greater cost-efficiency to the law firm, which leads to greater interest in cost-efficiency to create greater
economies-of scale. In turn, that leads to law firms beginning to “contract out” parts of their lawyers’ work to
be done by lawyers of lower cost. If done with significant volume and regularity, lawyers working outside of
those law firms will come to depend upon such work which will evolve to become a support services method
of production. Without it, the practise of law will become increasingly financially unviable.
For example, in the U.S., and now beginning in Canada, the general practitioner is disappearing, and the
commercial producers of legal services are taking over their markets. But commercial producers have
customers, while lawyers have clients. If the gap between what lawyers’ services cost and what middle-income
people can afford could be made substantially smaller, then advertising the protections and safeguards provided
by the professional lawyer-client relationship that the buyer-seller relationship does not have, could become
very effective advertising. People know the difference, just as they know the different between their
relationship with their family doctor, and the risks of buying a commercial market. Unless there’s a special
contract between them, the duties between buyer and seller are merely to be honest and be legal, but after that,

4
each is free to try to get “the best of the deal.” Doctors and lawyers are much safer than that, if you can afford
them.
But regardless that it is very likely that law societies will remain deeply entrenched within and wedded to
their late 18th century and early 19th century origins, lawyers will not disappear. The big law firms and lawyers
in institutional law departments and lawyers who have highly specialized law practices serving the business
community and wealthy people, working together, will create their own support services method of production.
And they will do so when the consequences of remaining with a “cottage industry method” of production
become sufficiently threatening to their profits. History proves that, “organizations do not change until the fear
of the consequences of not changing, is greater than the fear of the consequences of not changing.” But they
don’t yet show those necessary fears of the consequences of not changing.
Governments are to blame for that. That is because, being political entities, governments live by the alleged
political wisdom that states, “there are not votes in justices,” meaning, that there are no significant quantities
of votes to be gained by spending significant quantities of taxpayers’ money on justice system problems. So
they don’t, with the result that they never hold law societies to account for the way in which they use their
powers and perform their duties. And so, law societies have in fact always lived above the law. The rule of
law does not apply to them in fact. As a result, being the product of the concept of the “gentlemen lawyer,”
which only in the earliest decade of the 20th century gave way to the concept of “the professional,” they still
act as would a private gentlemen’s club (that now includes ladies, of course). That is the mentality that
underlies the A2J problem, i.e., a gentlemen’s club is owned by its members, free to decide what they will do
and why they will do it. In fact, they exist unaccountable to the political-democratic process of rule by the
voting public.
2. Law Societies Don’t Try to Solve the A2J Problem—They Say It’s Not Theirs to Solve
Canada’s law societies—the regulators of its legal profession and therefore the regulators of lawyers’ and
paralegals’ responses to the A2J problem—have been allowed to live comfortably in the second half of that
proposition as to fearing merely the consequences of changing. And so it is that their management structure
has not changed since they were created, more than 220 years ago.4 That structure is the “bencher-building-
bloc of law society management.”5 In contrast, producers in truly competitive commercial markets must live
in the first half, coping with the ever-present, worrying about the consequences of not being able to keep pace
with the changes made to their products and pricing by their competitors. That requires taking chances and
4
To understand the history that has made all of Canada’s law societies as they are, see: Christopher Moore, The Law
Society of Upper Canada and Ontario’s Lawyers 1797-1997 (University of Toronto Press Inc., 1997). “Upper
Canada” was the province of Ontario’s British colonial name until Canada became a country on July 1, 1867.
5
“Bencher”-Canadian usage: supra note 3.

5
accepting the risks that a new product will fail when brought to market, its long and expensive development
period thereby having been wasted. That is why commercial markets are so very productive in bringing us new
products with new forms of marketing etcetera—their producers are forced to take chances and accept the
uncertainty of success.
In contrast, because they are not effectively and sufficiently challenged by governments, or anyone else,
such as by the general practitioners who are disappearing, law societies’ management concept and structure
has left them no more capable than an early 19th century law society. As a result, the A2J problem exists
because law societies have gone unchallenged when they express their purpose and duty as in the following
very narrow terms:6
The role of the Law Society is not to “deliver access to justice.” That is the responsibility
of the government and the courts. The Law Society is to regulate legal services so as to
facilitate access to justice. This presumably means determining who may provide legal
services and determining the required competence and conduct of licensees with access to
justice being a central consideration.
The result is that law societies will do only that which they have always done, and if that isn’t enough to
produce justice, they say it’s the government’s problem. Decisions as to such necessary changes concerning
the production of legal services are to be left to law firms and not made by law societies.7 As a result, there is
no attempt being made to solve the A2J problem, nor to learn its cause.
Unfortunately, we cannot expect an early 19th century law society management structure to be a competent
21st century law society in a 21st century justice system. And so it is that: (1) no law society has a program the
purpose of which is to solve the A2J problem; and, (2) the general practitioner is disappearing because that
type of law practice is increasingly becoming financially unviable, even though needed more than ever before
by middle- and low-income people. But Canada’s law societies are doing nothing to make their legal services
affordable. The cottage industry method of production makes it so. But our law societies do not see the
obsolescence of the method by which lawyers produce legal services is a problem for them to solve. It is
something that lawyers within their own law firms are responsible for, with the aid of law society
recommendations of course. The end result will be that middle- and lower-income people will not have lawyers
to help them deal with their more serious, difficult, frightening, and potentially life-changing legal problems.
But, the very large, charitable “access to justice industry” relief effort has no presence or solution in regard to
those kinds of legal problems. And neither do law societies, which should not be tolerated. This great failure
6
This was stated as part of the published comment of the Treasurer of the Law Society of Ontario (its chief
executive officer), in response to my blog article, entitled, “Law Society Policy for Access to Justice Failure” (Slaw,
July 25, 2019). See also infra notes 19 and 20, and accompanying text.
7
See infra note 18 and accompanying text.

6
justifies law societies being substantially reformed to be managed by permanently employed expertise in
addition to lawyers.
3. Support Services Take Advantage of the “Fixed Costs Factor” and Greater Specialization
Support services methods use a series of different external support services to produce various different
parts of the finished product, be it services or hard goods. They can each produce their different parts of a
compete legal service at a far greater volume than any law firm is capable of. Thereby, each achieves far greater
economies-of-scale than any law firm is capable of, and thereby a lower cost of production than any law firm
is capable of—meaning, scaling-up the volume of production to achieve a greater ability to spread costs that
are not increasing in proportion to those increasing volumes. That is what is called, “the fixed costs factor”:
“in the production of anything and everything, not all of the costs of production increase in proportion to the
volume of production.” It becomes progressively less expensive to produce more and more.
For example, if a law firm has 50 lawyers, it doesn’t buy 50 copies of every book for its law library.
Therefore, as the firm produces an ever-increasing volume of legal services, each legal service pays for an
ever-decreasing part of total law library costs because of the increasing ability to spread costs. But because
law library costs are but a very small part of the total costs of a law firm, that is but a small example of the
economic advantage gained by putting as much distance as possible between the volume of production of
finished work-product and the producer’s slowly increasing costs. But it does explain why commercial
producers want to quickly expand from being merely local, to national and then international producers, i.e.,
the greater the volume of production, the greater is the advantage gained from the fixed costs factor. The
producer’s profit-margins steadily increase as volume increases, which means that, that part of one’s price to
the consumer that is profit, steadily increases. And the other part, that pays for costs, steadily decreases.
Volume of production thereby determines the volume of profits. Such unaffordability is due to the constant
rapid increase in the volume of law, its complexity, speed at which it changes, and its increasing dependence
upon technology that has to be understood. In addition, the transition from paper-based to electronic records
has greatly increased the volume, convenience of making and using records, and greatly lowered the cost of
making, storing, and transmitting the records that everyone has to deal with. All of which has greatly increased
the time and therefore the cost of producing legal services and their unaffordability over the last several decades.
At present, it is well established that there are no economies-of-scale in the practice of law. That is the
cause of the A2J problem, i.e., no law firm has a sufficient volume of production in relation to each different
type of legal service produced to prevent its services becoming increasingly unaffordable.
Secondly, the higher the degree of specialization in relation to each cost-factor of production determines
the degree of cost-efficiency attainable. But the degree of specialization that is affordable is dependent upon
the volume of production. A producer is too specialized when it doesn’t have enough volume of specialized
work to pay for its specialists.

7
To summarize: the costs of production are greatly reduced by high volumes of production, because: (1)
economies-of-scale are thereby maximized due to the fixed costs factor; and, (2) cost-efficiency is maximized
by making a higher degree of specialization affordable, which is determined by the volume of production.
It follows that the A2J problem is not one that a lawyer’s expertise is capable of solving unaided. It is not
a problem concerning issues of law and fact. It is a problem concerning the production of a service—lawyers
in private practice work in a service industry. Therefore, it is a problem for an economist specialized in the
interplay of simple economic factors in the production of various types of goods and services. But, given that
it is the duty of a law society to regulate the legal profession so as to make legal services adequately available,
it is a problem that law societies should have been attempting to solve by obtaining that necessary advice and
expertise. And, because it is a problem that is caused by the way in which lawyers do their work to produce
legal services, it is not a problem that law societies should expect governments to solve. It is law societies that
regulate lawyers, not governments. Lawyers’ problems as to, competence, ethics, and affordability, are all
produced by the way lawyers do their work. It is law societies that regulate lawyers and our legal profession
as a whole. Therefore, law societies should not be able to choose which ones of those three types of problems
they will deal with, and which they won’t.
Just as the need to use support services methods for the manufacturing of automobiles affordably for
middle-income people requires the existence of an auto-parts industry, similarly, the infrastructure whereby
medical services are produced is so very different and much more sophisticated than that used to produce legal
services. Choosing a law firm provides only the resources of the law firm chosen. But calling a specialist doctor
for an appointment, results in one being directed to see one’s family doctor first. The family doctor is also a
specialist—specialized in carrying out that sorting-triage process whereby the family doctor decides what
treatment he/she can provide, and where to send the patient for the rest of it, i.e., which specialist doctor,
technical test, technician, clinic or hospital service, the latest from medial science, drugs, etc. The innovation
in the way of doing the work for producing these various medical services never stops. In the legal profession,
it never started. Lawyers produce legal services in the same way that they have always produced them for the
last 300 years.
And all doctors’ work is specialized to a far greater degree than that of lawyers. For example, surgeons
confine their work to a single organ or system of the body, while a specialist lawyer does all the various types
of work within his/her specialty: interviewing clients; composing pleadings and proposals; negotiating; doing
legal research; going to court or tribunals; supervising subordinates; and perhaps having to do some law office
management work. Law firms don’t have the volume to afford a higher, more refined degree of specialization.
And so are the special-parts companies that collectively constitute the huge parts industry more specialized
than are the vendors of automobiles. A person works within a narrow specialty, but goes into it deeply, being

8
able to apply it in complex, demanding situations with greater efficiency and therefore greater volume of
production per unit of time.
4. Recommended Improvements Cannot Produce Affordability for Legal Services

But all of the recommendations that have been made in response to the present crises condition of the A2J
problem are restricted to improvements within the traditional law firm context as being the complete and sole
unit for the production of legal services, particularly so, making more use of computer programs.8 That means
attempting to obtain the desperately needed affordability that lawyers need by merely embellishing the very
obsolete cottage industry method of producing legal services. That is not possible. For example, no matter how
much one improves a bicycle’s performance by adding a motor, etcetera, it cannot solve a transportation
problem that requires an automobile or an airplane. Some improvement will be obtained in the use of the
bicycle, but a different technology of transportation will be required for the more demanding transportation
problems that require automobiles. Similarly, a different technology of production is required by lawyers if
their services are to remain affordable.
And such recommendations as to improving law office cost-efficiency come with no analysis as to what
impact such improvements will have on the state of the A2J problem, and, as to what additional efforts and
procedures are necessary to adequately cope with the problem. It is all well intentioned and commendable, but
it is driven forward with only a lawyer’s expertise. And therefore, there is no adequately expert analysis of
what the perpetuation of the present performance of law societies and governments within the justice system,
will do to the future of the legal profession.
Affordability cannot be achieved by merely embellishing an obsolete method of production, which is what
law societies recommend, e.g., lawyers should use more “apps” and other electronic technology within the law
office. Of course they should, but that is not going to re-establish affordability and an end the A2J problem. In
addition to achieving greater volumes of production than possible by law firms, there are procedures that
further maximize cost-efficiency that a support service can use that a law firm cannot use.
But no one within Canada’s justice system shows any interest in knowing the cause of the A2J problem, let
alone trying to solve and end it. The A2J effort being made is now huge, involving thousands of legally-trained
people who are involved with many different types of programs, government departments, law societies, retired
judges, and law professors and their students, and lawyers.9 Hereinafter, I refer to this consolidated body and
8
See infra note 30 and text.
9
For example, see the many, “Action Committee Members” of the Action Committee on Access to Justice in Civil
and Family Matters, and its prominent, “Justice Development Goals.” Its founder, in 2007, was the former Chief
Justice of Canada, Beverley McLachlin. There are other national projects such as, The National Self-Represented
Litigants Project providing assistance to civil and criminal court litigants without lawyers. And the Canadian Forum
on Civil Justice, produces its AJRN Roundup of summaries of published literature from several types of publications
and jurisdictions.

9
its efforts as, “the A2J industry.” And in no part of the very large volume of literature that has been written
about the A2J problem does one see questions such as, “why is it that the way in which lawyers do their work
to produce legal services is not capable of producing affordable legal services for middle- and lower-income
people?” That would be the first thought of a new commercial producer of legal services, and of any person or
agency determined to solve the A2J problem.
That is to say, in relation to the more serious legal problems that require the services of lawyers, nothing
that is being done within the A2J industry seeks to: (1) control the growth of the A2J problem’s ability to cause
misery and damage by making lawyers’ services sufficiently affordable; and, (2) challenge the inadequate
performance of law societies and governments. For those thousands of people who are attaching themselves
and their careers to the efforts of the A2J industry, the above analysis of the A2J problem’s cause and cure is
irrelevant.
As a result, the per capita number of general practitioners of law is steadily decreasing, law society efforts,
and the efforts of the huge “A2J industry,” notwithstanding. As a result, the per capita number of lawyers in
private practice has been steadily decreasing for several decades—a process speeded-up by the growing
presence of the producers of commercially-produced legal services.10 It is a process that is leading to the de
facto de-regulation of the legal services market.11
The regulatory powers and resources of law societies cannot cope with all of the new competitors. But they
don’t try to cope. Their law practices are not yet sufficiently threatened by the unaffordability of their legal
services. Because there is no interest in knowing the cause of the problem, lawyers are not effective in making
themselves more competitive. Lawyers and law societies will not know how best to compete with all of the
10
For sources of statistics as to the shrinking per capita number of lawyers in private practice in the province of
Ontario; see: (1) Colin Lachance, “Law’s Reverse Musical Chair Challenge” (Slaw, June 16, 2016); see also the
many comments thereto, both ‘for’ and ‘against’); (2) the Law Society of Ontario’s, “Final Report of the Sole
Practitioner and Small Firm Task Force,” pages 50-54 (paragraphs 117-130) (March 24, 2005, reviewed in
Convocation, April 28, 2005, but no longer available online); and, (3) Christopher Moore, The Law Society of Upper
Canada and Ontario’s Lawyers 1797-1997, supra note 2 at p. 313, as to the decrease in lawyers in private practice
in the 1990s; and p. 380, as to the decrease in the number of lawyers in private practice between 1973 and 1982.
11
As to the extensive presence of commercial producers of legal services and the resulting de facto de-regulation of
the legal services market; see: (1) Suzanne Bouclin, Jena McGill, and Amy Salyzyn, “Mobile and Web-Based Legal
Apps: Opportunities, Risks and Information Gaps” (SSRN, June 16, 2017); (2) Ken Chasse, “Artificial Intelligence:
“Will it Help the Delivery of Legal Services but Hurt the Legal Profession?” (Slaw, November 21, 2018); (3)
University of Toronto Law Journal, vol. LXVI, No. 4, Fall 2016, “Focus Feature: Artificial Intelligence, Big Data,
and The Future of Law,” pp. 423-471; and, (4) University of Toronto Law Journal, vol. LXVIII, Supplement 1, 2018,
“Artificial Intelligence, Technology, and the Law,” pp. 1-124; and, Benjamin H. Barton, infra note 12, particularly
chapter 5, “LegalZoom and Death from Below”, pp. 85-103..

10
new sources of legal services—both those that exist now and will exist.12 Richard Susskind, an acknowledged
expert on the failings of law society management, provides this warning to the legal profession:13
In Tomorrow’s Lawyers,14 we predict that the legal world will change ‘more radically over the
next two decades’ than ‘over the last two centuries.’ Numerous commentators have echoed this view
of a legal profession on the brink of unprecedented upheaval. In truth, the working practices of lawyers
and judges have not changed much since the time of Charles Dickens [1812-1870].
[footnotes omitted]
5. Lawyers Are Giving Up Their Connection with Middle-Income and Lower-Income People
As a result, the legal profession, by way of the state of its law society leadership, is passively giving up
lawyers’ connection with middle- and lower-income people; they being the people who are the majority of
society, its taxpayers, and voters. As to the adequacy of that type of leadership of the legal profession,
Christopher Moore states:15
Around the world, legal scholars increasingly speculated that the century of the modern, self-
governing profession was coming to an end. The foremost local exponent, Professor Harry Arthurs of
Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, declared that self-governance by the legal profession
was quite simply ‘a dead parrot.’16 Since the drafting of the first Law Society Act in 1797, the one
central function of the Law Society has been to enable the profession to govern itself in the public
interest. If the Law Society is judged to have ceased to perform that function, then it perhaps ceases
to be an essential institution. As the Law Society of Upper Canada approached the end of its second
century, solid reasons could be found to doubt that it would complete its third.
What impact will that have upon the position of the legal profession within society? Won’t the profession’s
purpose, power, and prestige be significantly lessened? And in what state will we, the profession’s senior
lawyers, be leaving the legal profession in for the present young lawyers and law students who will be serving
the next 40-50 years or more, in the practice of law coping with that very poor legacy while we are comfortably
retired? Our law societies should have altered themselves to be able to do more, much more of what is
commendable than merely engaging in the very corrupt, self-interested work that being a bencher provides to
an ambitious practicing lawyer.
12
As to such competitors, see: (1) Richard and Danial Susskind, The Future of the Professions, (Oxford University
Press, 2015), at pp. 66-71; (2) Noel Semple, Legal Services Regulation at the Crossroads, (Edward Elgar Publishing
Limited, 2015); (3) Trevor C.W. Farrow, and Lesley A. Jacobs (eds.), The Justice Crisis-The Cost and Value of
Accessing Law, (UBC Press, 2020); (4) generally the other books authored by Richard Susskind, supra note 2; and,
(5) Benjamin H. Barton, Glass Half Full-The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession, (Oxford University Press,
2015).
13
Susskind, The Future of the Professions, (2015), supra note 2, at p. 66.
14
Supra, notes 2 and 11 and texts.
15
Christopher Moore, The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario’s Lawyers 1797-1997, supra note 3, at p. 339.
“Upper Canada” being Ontario’s title while still a British colony until, July 1, 1867. “Upper Canada,” because it is
further up the St. Lawrence than is Lower Québec, the province of Quebec.
16
H.W. Arthurs, “The Dead Parrot: Does Professional Self-Regulation Exhibit Vital Signs?” (1995), 33, no. 4
Alberta Law Review.

11
It is law societies that should be helping lawyers to make significantly smaller the gap between the size of
lawyers’ fees and what middle-income and lower-income people can afford. Then lawyers and law societies
could effectively advertise the substantial protections provided by the lawyer-client relationship, which are:
(1) the fiduciary duty devotion to the client, who is not a mere customer in the commercial
buyer-seller competitive world as are some of the other sources of legal services;
(2) law society financial oversight;
(3) law society discipline procedures, i.e., an investigation of a client’s complaint can lead
to a prosecution of the lawyer;
(4) a code of professional conduct to be obeyed;
(5) professional insurance to provide financial compensation for damage done by one’s
lawyer; and,
(6) continuing professional development requirements (CPD/CLE obligations) to maintain
competence and ethical practice.
Like the doctor-patient relationship, it has no equal competitor in the provision of legal services. People know
that, and make that comparison. Potential clients will pay a little more, or somewhat more for those safeguards
and protections. But most cannot pay a lot more as is too often required now by the size of lawyers’ fees.
In 2005, LSO acknowledged that A2J problem was in a “crises stage.”17 But the managers and workers of
the A2J industry are devoted to providing only legal information of various types including how to avoid legal
problems, and very simplistic legal services provided by paralegals and other persons of lesser legal training
than lawyers, and by lawyers doing short, simple cases pro bono. It is all a necessary part of coping-best with
the problem of unaffordable legal services, but only if one is somehow justified in not trying to solve the A2J
problem. The benefits obtained from such A2J industry efforts will be minor in comparison with the much
greater benefits that could be obtained from solving the A2J problem. The most necessary benefit being
affordable lawyers for the more difficult, threatening, and potentially life-altering legal problems. The A2J
industry’s efforts and large presence aids the law societies in their failure and refusal to seek a solution for
their unaffordability, i.e., a solution for the much greater part of the A2J problem’s ability to cause misery and
damage. Canada’s law societies always limit the scope of their activities and declared duties so that they do
not have to change, and most definitely not have to change their bencher-building-block management structure
because of its career-promoting purpose for ambitious lawyers.18
But there is no such solution of the problem being sought so as to help general practitioners be financially-
viable lawyers, e.g., no law society has a program the purpose of which is to solve the problem. General
practitioners are the lawyers who provide legal services for middle- and lower-income people, they being the
majority of the population. As a result, the A2J problem has made most lawyers short of clients because no
17
See: the Law Society of Ontario’s Minutes of Convocation, March 24, 2005.
18
See also supra note 7 and accompanying text.

12
effort is being made by law societies and governments in Canada to understand the cause of the problem let
alone try to solve it. 19 The A2J industry’s efforts are necessary and commendable, but they should be
accompanied by equally diligent efforts to challenge law societies and governments to do what is ethically
required and necessary to solve and end the A2J problem. Because they don’t, the A2J industry in effect,
supports and helps to perpetuate a state of affairs in the management of the legal profession and of the justice
system that is frightening and sinister. Professor Emeritus Michael Trebilcock of the Faculty of Law of the
University of Toronto has stated it well:20
… . Fourth, in an era of widespread public cynicism about the competence and integrity of
government generally, the self-regulatory model of governance of the legal profession is increasingly
under challenge, fuelled by apprehensions that it is motivated less by regulation in the public interest
and more by regulation in the interests of members of the legal profession, and reflects an abdication
of responsibility by democratically elected governments.
Law societies should be replaced with permanently employed lawyers, other types of expertise and staff
members. Are not the present efforts being made by the vast A2J industry merely an attempt to provide
remedies without eliminating causes, which has the character of being “wilfully blind” to the need for a
complete solution?
As an example of a law society’s opinion of the scope of its duty to regulate the legal profession, in 2019
the Treasurer of the Law Society of Ontario (LSO’s chief executive officer), stated in effect, that the A2J
problem is the government’s problem.21 And, the Law Society is to regulate legal services so as merely to,
facilitate access to justice, so he said.22 But, shouldn’t “facilitate” include regulating the method by which
lawyers produce legal services so that it has the necessary cost-efficiency to produce affordable legal services
for middle- and lower-income people? If not, we should debate whether it is appropriate now in the 21st century,
for law societies to state their regulatory duties in such modest early 19th century terms, i.e., what interpretation
should be given to statutory statements as to a law society’s statutory and regulatory duties? 23 A rule of
19
As to lawyers’ shortage of clients, see for example, Nandini Ramanujam and Alexander Agnello (of McGill
University), “The Shifting Frontiers of Law: Access to Justice and Underemployment in the Legal Profession,
(2017), 54, Issue 4, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, 1091-1116 (article 6).
20
See Professor Trebilcock’s written “Foreword” to this book by Professor Noel Semple, Legal Services Regulation
at the Crossroads, supra note 11 at p. vi.
21
See supra note 6 and text.
22
As to such a limited formulation of law society duties, see: Ken Chasse, “Law Society Policy for Access to Justice
Failure,” Slaw, July 25, 2019. For my reply to the Treasurer’s comment, see: (1) “Law Society Policy for Access to
Justice Failure, Part Two,” Slaw, April 9, 2020. (2) “Society’s Income-Inequality Unrest and Law Society Access to
Justice Failure,” Slaw, May 29, 2020; and, (3) “Law Societies’ ‘Bencher Burden’ Causes the Access to Justice
Problem,” Slaw, August 6, 2020. And there are other relevant comments attached to those blog articles.
23
For example, in the province of Ontario, the Law Society Act, s. 4.2, states in relevant part:
In carrying out its functions, duties and powers under this Act, the Society shall have regard to the following
principles:
1. The Society has a duty to maintain and advance the cause of justice and the rule of law.

13
statutory interpretation states: “the law is always speaking,” i.e., words in a statute don’t remain fixed like a
museum piece regardless of the need for a more modern interpretation.
That is to say, the duties stated in s. 4.2 of Ontario’s Law Society Act are not to remain fixed in their
interpretation to a 19th century era of “gentlemen’s club” type law societies wherein Canada’s law societies
wish to dwell. The Treasurer of the Law Society of Ontario choses only word, “facilitate,” among all of the
words used to express the four stated duties in s. 4.2. Law societies are required to regulate lawyers, particularly
so, the way lawyers do their work to produce legal services, i.e., lawyers are to be, competent, ethical, and
affordable. If law societies will not willingly broaden their scope of perceived duty, Canada’s Attorneys
General should replace them with institutions of much greater competence and devotion to serving the public.
Why don’t governments hold law societies to account for the performance of their statutory duties as to
regulating the legal profession? The answer is that elected governments want to spend that money on the more
fruitful vote-getting activities of the voters. So, the relevant politically-wise question is, how much does the
average voter think about his/her need for judges, courts, court administrative staff, law societies, prosecutors,
and Legal Aid’s funding? Not very much at all, if they think about it at all. And to put forward a creditable,
fear-inducing threat of replacing law societies would require governments to know: what to replace law
societies with; how much would it cost; how disruptive would it be; and, how long would such a threatening
government be tied up in the courts fighting desperate, outraged law societies that have been put in fear of the
extinction of their very cherished early 19th century gentlemen’s club, career-promotion existence. So it is that
governments leave law societies alone because there are no significant quantities of votes to be gained by
replacing them.
That has shaped the whole history and institutional culture of Canada’s law societies since they were created
more than 220 years ago. 24 They act like private gentlemen’s clubs, that now include lady lawyers. 25
2. The Society has a duty to act so as to facilitate access to justice for the people of Ontario.
3. The Society has a duty to protect the public interest.
4. The Society has a duty to act in a timely, open and efficient manner.
24
For example, the Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC), was created on July 17, 1797, by ten practitioners at the
little town now known as, Niagara-on-the Lake, which is at the north end of the Niagara River where it flows into
Lake Ontario, bringing waters from the eastern end of Lake Erie. As of January 1, 2018, LSUC now has the title, the
Law Society of Ontario (LSO).
25
The concept of the “gentleman lawyer” in the British colony of Upper Canada (now the province of Ontario), and
within its Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC), as being a gentlemen’s club, persisted from its beginning and
throughout the 19th century, i.e., being a “gentleman” appears to have been given priority over being a lawyer, which
was somewhat like having a hobby-farm. But thereafter, the concept of “professionalism” displaced” the
“gentleman” in priority. But law societies’ institutional culture of “the private gentleman’s club” persists with no
signs of being displaced; see: Christopher Moore, The Law Society of Upper Canada and Ontario’s Lawyers, 1797-
1997, supra notes 4 and 15, at: pp.20-26; 43-45; 144-147; and 152. LSUC moved into Osgoode Hall, in what is now
downtown Toronto, in 1832, which is when its construction by way of beautiful early-nineteenth century
architecture was completed; see: Moore, at p 82. William Osgoode became the first Chief Justice of Upper Canada
and established its courts system (1792-94); see Moore, pp. 20-26.

14
Gentlemen’s clubs are self-owned, so it is that they will determine what in fact their purpose is, and what duties
they will perform. They live above the law. De facto, the rule of law does not apply to Canada’s law societies.
Putting into words what exactly has been their overriding purpose, a law society is to provide that career-
promoting and embellishing mechanism for an ambitious lawyer by serving as a bencher. Such service can
provide: greater prominence and name-recognition in the legal profession; proof of one’s popularity in the
profession which is what gets a lawyer elected to be a bencher; helping to provide the appearance of a
successful lawyer, which can impress some types of clients; and, it is a type of community service by helping
a law society to fulfill its purpose to serve the community. Therefore such “bencher-service,” can be helpful
in becoming a judge.
But a bencher is also a practising lawyer, and must always be careful to have enough time to be a good
lawyer for one’s clients or institutional employer. That also limits the kind of work that a bencher can do—
they don’t become involved in bringing about any significant innovation or large-scale change without
significant assistance from other sources. Such endeavors require development periods of uncertain length,
difficulty, and cost. One doesn’t become a bencher to risk being associated with an expensive failure. Such
conditions of uncertainty and risk-taking are incompatible with the working situation of a practising lawyer.
Therefore, the continuation of the concept of the bencher-building-block of law society management means
that law societies cannot change in any significant way. So, they don’t, and they won’t because history dictates
that, “organizations do not change until the fear of the consequences of not changing are greater than the fear
of the consequences of changing.” Canada’s governments clearly do not wish to instill that greatly needed
therapeutic fear, and its law societies show no signs of enduring that fear. Indeed, they evince a mentality and
institutional culture that is quite the contrary. And so it is that our law societies are no more competent they
have always been, i.e., since they were created more than 220 years ago. However, we cannot expect that what
is now at best, an early 19th century law society in fact, in mentality and motivation to be a competent 21st law
society in performance. But that has long been considered to be “business as usual,” what each new generation
finds to be normal, commendable, traditional, deserved, and most likely the only way to be a law society.
For example, creating a support service system for the production of legal services is very incompatible
with the working situation of the bencher-lawyer. They would have to decide which parts of lawyers’ work
could be more cost-efficiently done by support services. Then they would have to marshal the necessary human
and physical resources to set them up and get them functioning, which would probably best be done by securing
some private financing and investment. But by applying investment money to the creation of such support
services instead of allowing law firms to become investment properties themselves (“Alternative business
structures” they are called), the legal problems as to non-lawyers owning law firms and thereby potentially

15
controlling the production of legal services, won’t happen.26 But then, benchers will have to perform what I
found to be the most difficult part of establishing a successful support service—the marketing function of
getting lawyers to use such support services. Difficult because being dependent upon something that is not
under a lawyer’s control in servicing a client’s needs, especially something as important as the doing of good
legal research, is contrary to the belief that a good lawyer has control of all of the work and assistance that
goes into the production of legal services. Especially so even though legal research done by a support service
can be the source of the necessary cost-saving in the production of legal services.
6. A Civil Service for Law Societies

All of that will involve a development period of an uncertain length, cost, and difficulty. Benchers cannot
afford the time necessary to carry out or endure such a development process. Therefore, given present
circumstances and entrenched thinking, it isn’t going to be made to happen for all lawyers. Nor is the A2J
problem ever going to be solved. But they could both be made to happen if there were a national civil service
for law societies. Our law societies operate as would an elected government without a civil service, which
makes the A2J problem inevitable.
But also, such a badly needed civil service is not going to happen as long as the present state of an
entrenched stasis of the major institutions of the justice system exists. It has created the A2J problem.
Governments don’t want to hold law societies to account for the performance of their duties, and law societies
don’t want to change in any significant way from their early 19th century origins and concepts of management.
And so far, the legal profession has no interest in changing its method of producing legal services—at least
not until lawyers fear the loss of their law practices because they have become very unaffordable, which will
happen because all lawyers practice law in the same very obsolete way. That will force a conversion to support
services methods of production. But by then, the general practitioner will have disappeared. And the vast A2J
industry shows no interest in challenging this situation of incompetent management of the justice system and
its legal profession. Therefore, the A2J industry doesn’t challenge law societies and governments as to the
need for them to work towards creating a solution to the A2J problem. Thus, this state of justice system affairs
will result in the permanent and ever-dynamic, fast moving and destructive presence of the A2J problem.
In other words, Canada’s law societies are managed by part-time amateurs and our law societies perform
as would an elected government without a civil service. So, for them and us, we should give them a civil
service—just one national civil service for all law societies because their major problems are the same national
problems. A civil service has the essential features for good government that an elected Cabinet government
does not have: (1) it is permanent; (2) it has all of the necessary different kinds of expertise; (3) it has a long-
26
See: Ken Chasse, “Alternative Business Structures’ ‘Charity Step’ to Ending the General Practitioner” (SSRN,
September 30, 2018.

16
term knowledge of, and experience dealing with the justice system’s and legal profession’s most difficult,
intractable problems; and therefore, (4) it can carry out projects needing long-term development that can bridge
elections thereby maintaining a long-term continuity of knowledge and effort because its chief executive group
is permanent. It does not have much more important career commitments elsewhere, and a more substantial
source of income elsewhere as do benchers. But bencher-management cannot do that because it has only one
type expertise which it makes available only part-time, and only for an elected period (Ontario-4 years; British
Columbia-2 years). Instead, there needs to be 21st century permanent and competent administration. And,
bencher-management has no long-term experience as does a civil service. Such a civil service could do all the
various types of work and promotion necessary to establish a support-services method of producing legal
services. That will take some few or several years, plus on-going permanent maintenance duties, which bencher
self-interest is not motivated or able to provide. But a civil service for law societies would have both the
necessary skills and motivation, being a national institution for a very important profession.
The elected Cabinet ministers serve for only the short term between elections and don’t engage in
sophisticated long-term planning that a civil service can become very expert at providing. Thus, if benchers
can act like a government’s cabinet ministers without having also to be their own civil service, that would
remove much of, or all of the conflict of interest between benchers’ serving their personnel, career-promotion
interests, which are very incompatible with also being able to be competent managers of a law society lacking
a civil service. Financing the daily operations of this civil service for Canada’s law societies is described below.
7. The Application of the Support Services Method to Establish a Legal Research Support Service
I learned the above analysis of the cause and solution to the A2J problem by establishing a large volume,
highly specialized legal research support service that produced thousands of legal opinions for several
hundreds of lawyers per year. I was hired by what is now entitled, Legal Aid Ontario (LAO)27 to provide a
sufficient response to a government complaint that too much money was being paid out on lawyers’ accounts
for legal research hours billed to LAO.28 The service created, did the legal research for those lawyers instead
27
By way of the Legal Aid Services Act, 1998, the Law Society of Upper Canada (now entitled the Law Society of
Ontario as of January 1, 2018), was removed as the manager of the Ontario Legal Aid Plan (OLAP, “the Plan”), that
Act incorporating OLAP to become, Legal Aid Ontario. Such was the government’s reaction to two investigative
reports of the law society’s management of OLAP, both dated 1997: (1) the McCamus Report (by Professor
McCamus): Report of the Legal Aid Review – A Blue Print for Publicly Funded Legal Services, Executive
Summary; and, (2) Professors Zemans & Monaghan, From Crisis to Reform: A New Legal Aid Plan for Ontario
(available in hardcopy at the Osgoode Hall Law School Library, and, the Great Library at Osgoode Hall. Both
concluded that the law society should not be the manager of legal aid for reasons of, conflict of interest and failure
to innovate. As to the McCamus Report, see online: Volume 1; Volume 2; and, Volume 3. Ontario’s Legal Aid
Services Act, 1998, was replaced in October 2021, by the, Legal Aid Services Act, 2020.
28
The province of Ontario has a judicare system of legal aid, as distinguished from a public defender system. The
judicare system depends entirely on lawyers in private practice to provide the legal services. For a public defender

17
of having them billing LAO for doing their own legal research. After several years of development, my staff
were producing close to 5,000 legal opinions per year for those lawyers in private practice willing to service
Legal Aid cases. Rare is the law firm that can produce that volume of legal services. The legal opinions were
meant to replace or supplement lawyers’ doing their own legal research.
I highly specialized these factors of production: (1) my staff of lawyer-legal researchers; (2) the volume
and kinds of analytical legal materials available; and, (3) the principles of database management. In addition,
there are procedures and materials that such a support service can use that a law firm cannot have. Thereby the
cost-efficiency that a support service can achieve is far greater than that of any law firm. That is why the legal
profession should use a support service method of production. Inter alia, law firms using a support-service
method of production will be able to serve their clients with greater convenience, and they will make more
money.
My lawyer-researchers did legal research all day; all year. And they did their research in only one major
area of law—most of which was in criminal and family law, as are the great majority of cases for which LAO
provides financial assistance by way of paying for services of lawyers in private practice. I had a group of
researchers doing only criminal law research, and another doing only family law research. And another lawyer
did research in other areas of law for the small number of cases for which LAO provides such assistance.29
Such a high degree of specialization provides a very high degree of cost-efficiency. Lawyers working in such
very narrow fields of specialization can produce a high volume of their type of work-product per unit time
because of the very high degree of efficiency thereby obtained by doing only one of the several types of work
required to produce any legal service.
No law firm can afford that degree of specialization. Specialized lawyers in law firms do all of the various
different types of work within their specialty, such as: drafting pleadings and proposals; negotiating;
interviewing; meeting with colleagues; going to court and tribunal proceedings; legal research; supervising
subordinates; and, perhaps carrying out some office management functions; etcetera. They do not do only one
of those types of work such as legal research. And similarly, is the work-pattern of any lawyers or law students
assisting each such specialized lawyer. And they won’t have the same degree of facility and cost-efficiency as
does a lawyer doing only legal research as a long-term specialization in only one major area of law. A large
law firm may have a legal research group of lawyers. But they will be on-call by all of the various practice
groups in the law firm. Therefore, they cannot confine their research work to only one major area of law. That
limits their cost-efficiency and therefore their speed of production. Perhaps a single practice group could afford
system, the legal aid organization has its own employee-lawyers. Most provinces in Canada use a mixed method of
providing legal assistance to substantially financially-stressed people.
29
LAO also finances an extensive independent system of legal clinics which provides legal services in several other
areas of law. See section 9 below (p. 27).

18
to have a lawyer doing only legal research in only one major area of law. But could it afford to have four, five,
or six lawyers doing only legal research, as can a legal research support service functioning as I have described
them above?
`And, career-dedicated legal research lawyers are far more cost-efficient than are law students or newly
licensed lawyers without experience. But it is the least experienced people that most law firms use to do the
bulk of their legal research work. And, such highly specialized lawyers are much less likely to make errors.
Thus, the lawyer working in a support-service can provide that desired combination of the greatest cost-
efficiency in achieving the highest volume of production and the greatest safety of production.
Medical doctors are more specialized than lawyers. For example, surgery is a specialty. Surgeons are each
confined to very small parts of the human body such as a single organ. And medical science is constantly
producing new procedures, practices, as well as new drugs. Innovation in the way that medical doctors do their
work never stops. In the legal profession it never started; lawyers do their work to produce legal services in
the same way that they have always done it for the last 300 years.
Secondly, as to the analytical materials used, I wanted them to be more up-to-date than the textbooks and
other materials that one can purchase from law book companies. Their currency is limited by the time needed
to produce them for purchase. Because I had been an editor of one of the serious of criminal law reports for
eleven years, I became aware of what I called “high volume issues of law and fact,” that are dealt with in the
caselaw much more frequently than other issues, e.g., “drunkenness as a defence” in criminal law, and, “the
best interests of the child” in family law, are such high-volume issues.
To have such issues researched from “ground zero” each time they were part of a fact-pattern submitted by
a client-lawyer, would require a lot of duplication of effort that would significantly reduce our cost-efficiency.
Therefore, I had my staff create standard memoranda (memos) for each such high-volume issue. Because we
were producing a very high volume of legal opinions, very quickly, “drunkenness as a defence” became 2
memos, then 3 or 4 memos—that defence in different contexts. Within a few years, we had 400 standard
memos in criminal law alone, and a few hundred in family law. Several years later, a lawyer servicing a Legal
Aid case could go online to that research unit to download one or more of a thousand standard memos in
criminal law alone. But it was the legal opinions that lawyers wanted, not the memos.
I assigned groups of those memos to each researcher to be kept up-to-date. If a court produced a judgement
having sufficient content, I wanted it entered into the relevant memos by the next day. But to have such a
system for maintaining the currency of the analytical materials used, to work well, a very high degree of
specialization of one’s legal research staff is necessary. Therefore, because no law firm can afford the
necessary degree of specialization, it cannot make such a volume of analytical materials work sufficiently well
to justify the time and work needed.

19
Thirdly, the most powerful procedure for achieving the greatest cost-efficiency in the production of legal
opinions involved the principles of database management. Particularly so the first principle, which is, capture
all finished work-product to maximize its re-use. Therefore, each opinion was created for at least two lawyers;
the client-lawyer (our “customer,” so to speak), and the legal researchers that would re-use it. That added to
the motivation to create high quality opinions, not only as to content, but also as to their quality of writing. I
wanted them to be able to be used without the need to spot-check any aspect of their quality. And as to the
quality of the writing, I emphasized the need for clarity, ease of understanding, and persuasiveness.
To establish such a reputation for our work would greatly facilitate increasing the number of lawyers using
the service, which in turn would increase the cost-saving that I could generate for LAO. That was essential to
avoid having the project to establish such a research service cancelled. Unlike its existence now, it had only
one purpose—save LAO money by reducing what it was paying-out for legal research hours being billed by
lawyers to LAO, for providing legal services for their Legal Aid cases.
I know from experience that a law firm cannot achieve anything near that degree of re-use of finished work-
product. Even in the biggest law firms, finished work-product cannot be effectively centralized in a single
database for re-use by all lawyers. The duty to maintain the confidentiality of client information and the identity
of other persons who may be involved, powerfully dictates that what is done for the client stays within the
client’s file. It is not to be routinely shared with unknown persons for unknown purposes, even within the same
law firm. But there is no such concern within a legal research support service. The client is not known, and not
identified in the resulting legal opinion. Because the names of the people or places involved are not used, there
need be no comparable “confidentiality concern” as to sharing and re-using finished work-product within a
support service. The lawyer having the client may submit the fact-pattern to be researched in any form thought
to be necessary to ensure confidentiality and privacy.
A researcher can very quickly produce a first draft of a new legal opinion by accessing all relevant
previously created legal opinions and standard memos, and then copy-pasting whole groups of paragraphs and
sections so as to form the first draft of a new legal opinion. Because of the high degree of specialization such
selection can be quickly made. Because of the volume of legal opinions produced, the materials re-used are of
recent date. That high volume also shortens the period of time for which additional research is needed.
Secondary legal literature sources can similarly be accessed and used. Then the resulting draft can be edited to
fit the submitted fact-pattern like a hand in a glove. As a result, each researcher is able to produce close to, two
legal opinions per day, except in regard to particularly complex fact-patterns. That is made possible only by a
sufficient degree of standardization of materials and procedures used, by researchers of a very high degree of
specialization, training, and experience.
The second principle of database management is indexing. Every legal opinion is to be indexed to a very
refined degree so as to maximize speed and accuracy of retrieval for re-use. Such indexing not only uses the

20
key words and phrases by which issues and law and fact are formally named, but also to identity particular
major facts and circumstances. Such a refined degree of indexing is greatly facilitated by the high degree of
specialization of the researchers. And each index string is made to end with a six-digit date so that the currency
of each opinion is stated in the indexing, and not only on the first page of each legal opinion and standard
memo. Although the electronic “search and find” facilities of database retrieval were always available, our
own indexing proved to be more exact and faster.
The third principle of database management was “purging”—purging the database of repetitive legal
opinions. Maximizing the re-use of finished work-product will quickly create a very duplicative database of
repetitive and overlapping material. Therefore, when a legal opinion is completed, the researcher knows to
what degree the new opinion can serve in place of those opinions used in regard to the issues of law and fact
for which they were re-used. But reducing such repetition is not carried out by deleting such legal opinions,
but rather by deleting the index strings for those issues for which legal opinions are re-used. The database of
legal opinions is thereby kept “lean” by reducing repetitive “fat.” But all legal opinions are preserved as
supplementary sources of materials for use again if needed.
There are three such factors that work very powerfully to produce much greater, cost-efficiency, speed of
production, and to reduce to a minimum the errors made in production, than a law firm can achieve: (1) the
much higher degree of specialization of all cost-factors of production including the unique design of the system
used to produce legal research work-product; (2) the much greater currency of its analytical materials by way
of thousands of standard memoranda; and, (3) the much greater degree of re-use of finished work-product.
That is why today, no finished product, including services, is made without the use of a support services method
of production—except of course, legal services.
Even though I offered researchers the opportunity to switch to another area of law for variety and
stimulation, none of the them wanted to switch. Each wished to stay in the single specialty for which they had
built-up considerable knowledge, speed, ease of production, and pride of knowledge.
In addition, to make marketing more attractive to lawyers for serving their Legal Aid clients, I emphasized
convenience—convenience sells. A poorer product can out-sell a better product if it is more conveniently
obtained and used, e.g., factors of convenience such as, lower price, better response time and access, and back-
up and support services such as a client-lawyer being able to talk to a researcher about any legal opinion
received or fact-pattern submitted. Therefore, I emphasized the quality of writing of the legal opinions to
facilitate the ease of applying their contents, so as to shorten the time when the case could be billed-out to
LAO. And therefore, every finished legal opinion was proof-read by another researcher, mainly for quality of
writing as well content. Potentially we were going to re-use every opinion, therefore each was created to
facilitate such re-use by ensuring that the content and quality of writing need be re-done to a minimal degree.
Thereby, ease of use, and the cost-efficiency of re-use were maximized. In other words, it is very necessary

21
that a researcher, “do it right when it’s created.” Thus cost-efficiency in production is maximized and costs of
production minimized.
The second most important aspect of convenience is response time. I wanted a lawyer who submitted a
fact-pattern for research today, to have the legal opinion by tomorrow, again, except when the fact-pattern was
particularly complex or unique. I know that lawyers on occasion, leave too late the doing of necessary legal
research, or doing no legal research at all. And therefore, they have to go to court, tribunal or a meeting, having
done insufficient legal research with that worry in mind. Therefore, having a legal research service that can
compensate for such inadequacies and emergencies, can quickly lead to lawyers becoming very dependent
upon such a service.
And as to the convenience of various forms of pricing one’s services and products, legal research in itself
is often difficult to price except when hourly billing is used, which often becomes too expensive. Frequently,
to keep clients, and to keep them satisfied, and their lawyers feeling assured that they have done good work in
devotion to their clients, lawyers often spend more hours doing legal research than they bill their clients for.
In contrast, a support research service can standardize its costs and prices. Therefore, when the fact-pattern is
submitted, the research service can provide a very narrow range of price to be paid. Or, prices can be fixed for
different categories of work using the strategy that states, “what you lose on the hard ones, you more than
make-up for on the easier ones.” Standard pricing is very attractive to consumers because they know what the
price to be paid will be before they commit themselves to using the service.
The research done for lawyers’ Legal Aid cases was not paid for by them. Instead, it was expected that they
would be billing LAO less for legal research by using the service. They could be questioned as to why they
didn’t use the service, although using the service was not mandatory. The client was theirs, and the
responsibility for the quality of the service provided to the client was theirs. Therefore, the choice as to how
the work was to be done was also theirs. But the pressure upon me was to maximize the cost-saving that I
could deliver to LAO. I was always at risk of the project being cancelled if the cost-saving was deemed to be
insufficient. Therefore, I wanted to maximize usage of the service, which necessitated maximizing the
attractiveness of using it. Operating with the pressures comparable to those imposed by a highly competitive
commercial market, but doing so in the context of social welfare service economics was very challenging.
Using such a research service does not mean that lawyers will do no legal research of their own. They
themselves can further perfect the use of such legal opinions, particularly so as facts and circumstances change
while servicing a client. But the cost-saving obtained by having such a highly specialized legal research support
service do the original or first stages of the legal research work and the bulk of the legal research work to be
done, will always provide a cost-saving beyond what law firms can achieve. Using analytical textbooks can
shorten the time doing one’s legal research, and a legal research support service can greatly magnify and
supplement the benefits obtainable from such textbooks.

22
However, even though in starting-up such a service I had all of the pressures upon me that one endures
when creating a new business and production system in a highly competitive commercial market, its purpose
was to produce a cost-saving in regard to the dollar amount LAO was paying-out to lawyers for their legal
research hours billed. But I was doing so within a social welfare organization, LAO, wherein the economic
principles and purposes are significantly different. The rewards for success in a commercial market are more
money earned and other financial benefits. In that social welfare agency, the reward was better service to the
community, and successfully inventing a new method of producing legal services. Therefore, being only one
of many units within, and services provided by LAO, my unit was not given a greater amount of money
regardless its continuously increased volume of production, which steadily increased the cost-saving provided
to LAO. If I had received more money as I increased that cost-saving, I would have further specialized my
staff and its size, along with the other major factors of production, and paid my staff better.
The nature of the history, unaccountability, and institutional culture of our law societies have kept the
production of lawyers’ legal services deeply rooted in the very obsolete method of cottage industry production.
But only a law society has the authority and presumed sufficiently professionally-comprehensive ability to
bring about the transition of the whole of the legal profession from cottage industry to support services
production. No lawyer or single law firm, or doctor or doctor’s office can itself create its own support services
production and thereby achieve the large economies-of-scale that affordability requires. It wouldn’t have the
necessary high volume of production. Such a transition in production method requires an agency having overall
regulatory control of an industry or profession, which for lawyers is their law societies.
But our law societies are managed by part-time amateurs meaning that the position of a bencher is not full-
time, and it brings only one type of specialized knowledge to the management of a law society—that of a good
lawyer. But that is the only specialized skill that a law society’s management has. As a result, a law society
operates as would an elected government without a civil service. Such a government cannot govern, as is well
proved by the existence and size of the A2J problem and its continued growth.
And, the A2J industry’s methods and motivations are very discrete and careful so as never to challenge law
societies’ refusal to do whatever they possibly can to solve the A2J problem. It never talks such “truth” to what
is the power-structure of Canada’s justice system, particularly so its law societies and governments. And so,
the A2J industry’s impact upon the A2J problem is but at most, very modest when it should have added an
intention to solve the A2J problem along with what it is doing now, which is commendable and desired by
everyone. But its leaders are only legally-trained people, with only a lawyer’s expertise, and no apparent desire
to challenge the power-structure within which their careers have been made and shaped, if not controlled, and
their success obtained. But it is the population as a whole, and the general practitioner who suffer the
consequences of such overdone and self-protective discretion, along with an undeserved respect for law

23
societies’ desire to remain unchanged in their management structure and institutional culture since they were
created more than 120 years ago.
The major institutions of the justice system—governments and law societies--serve self-interest and only
consequentially, if at all. what should be the main purpose of Canada’s justice system—justice. There is no
coordination or competent leadership provided. The justice system is further plagued by the legal profession’s
failure to examine the ability of its production method to produce affordable legal services for all income levels
of society. Benchers say that, that is the government’s problem, meaning that the profession is free—without
any obligation to the population—to remain using a very obsolete method of production. Only when lawyers
are made sufficiently fearful that their profits are diminishing will they seriously consider the cost-efficiency
by which they produce legal services. But that motivation is not one of community service. But in fact, it could
serve both such motivations if it wanted to answer with the necessary action, such questions as: why is it that
the way in which lawyers do their work to produce legal services is not able to produce legal services
affordability for middle- and lower-income people? In all of the many aspects and services provided by the
A2J industry, and within all of the literature that has been written about the A2J problem, that question is not
asked, nor is the A2J problem sought to be solved. The victims are, the population, the legal profession itself
(the general practitioner is disappearing), and the future of those lawyers and law students who will serve
another 40 to 50 years in the legal profession that, as a whole, is diminishing in its purpose, power, and prestige.
8. Lawyers’ Technological Competence as to Electronically-Produced Evidence

There is another service that a legal research support service can provide that law firms cannot adequately
provide, nor can CPD/CLE obligations for maintaining competence and ethical practice—advice as to
challenging the reliability of the electronic systems and devices from which almost all of the evidence now
comes that is used for legal proceedings and legal services. Electronic systems and devices are a very complex
technology that involves rapid change, and the need for constant familiarity with the voluminous, complex,
and rapidly changing technical literature involved. Such familiarity lawyers cannot be asked to obtain and
maintain without the help of such a support service.
However, lawyers’ formal writings and presentations about technological competence requirements, as
might be imposed by law societies, have been limited to competence in carrying on the practice of law within
lawyers’ offices, and communicating with courts and colleagues serving that purpose. There have been a
significant number of published articles and sections of books providing relevant recommendations as to
various new computer programs (“apps”), that lawyers can use within their law offices to achieve greater cost-
efficiency in the practice of law.30
See for example: 1. Amy Salyzn’s blog articles: (a) “A Taxonomy for Technological Competence, (Slaw,
30
December 18, 2020); (b) It’s Finally (Sort Of) Here!: A Duty of Technological Competence for Canadian

24
But, as to adequately challenging the reliability and evidentiary value of electronically-produced evidence,
“electronic” means software code which, the technical literature warns: (1) has many errors; and, (2) that such
systems and devices are not sufficiently challenged as to their ability to produce reliable evidence. As a result,
they are treated as though they were infallible, but in fact, they are very far from that.
Therefore, a more challenging and often more important type of technological competence is being able to
knowledgeably adduce, and challenge the reliability of evidence produced by electronic systems and devices,
i.e., evidence to be used for legal services as well as for legal proceedings. I don’t mean all such systems and
devices. Only those that produce frequently used types of evidence such as: (1) records produced by electronic
records management systems (ERMSs), records being the most frequently used kind of evidence; (2) cellphone
tracking evidence used for locating a person at the time of a call to or from his/her cellphone, which evidence
is now frequently used in police investigations; (3) technology assisted review devices (TAR devices) used to
conduct the records-review process by which to make records-discovery in civil proceedings, and to make
production of, “the fruits of the investigation,” to the accused, as is required in criminal proceedings31; and, (4)
breathalyzer devices used in impaired driving and “over 80” prosecutions (Criminal Code s. 320.14(1)).
There are error rates in the software code that should be part of the assessments of the ability of such
electronic systems and devices to produce reliable evidence. For example, ERMSs operate on many millions
of lines of software code that have a high error rate. In comparison, breathalyzer devices are considered to be
simple devices because they operate on only tens-of-thousands of lines. For example, the Draeger 7110 device
has 53,774 lines of code that print out on 896 pages. Applying the industry average of 25 errors per 1,000 lines
of software code, there are potentially 1,344 defects in that code. But that establishes merely a degree of
probability of error, not an inevitability. And, there is an important safeguard that requires the police operator
of the device, immediately before obtaining and testing a breath sample from the suspect, must put through the
device a water-alcohol solution of known concentration to check the accuracy of the device. So, one may ask,
are there comparable safeguards used in relation to other electronic systems and devices that produce
frequently used kinds of evidence? The point is, in addition to knowing the electronic make-up and
vulnerabilities to error of an electronic source of evidence, counsel-in-court should also know how each is
used; i.e., what are the safeguarding practices and procedures used, if any?
And here is another statistic as to such error rates: a 2002 study commissioned by the U.S. Department of
Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), concluded that, “software errors cost the
Lawyers, , (Slaw, November 26, 2019), and, (c) “A Taxonomy of Judicial Technological Competence,” (Slaw, June
24, 2021); and, 2. Professor Noel Semple’s book, Legal Services Regulation at the Crossroads, (Edward Elgar
Publishing Limited, 2015), at pp. 161-179. They provide excellent suggestions as to improving law office cost-
efficiency that should be used. However, as explained herein, they will not provide a solution to the A2J and thereby
the affordability of legal services for middle- and lower-income people.
31
See: R. v. Stinchcombe, 1991 CanLII 45 (SCC).

25
U.S. economy $59.5 billion annually.” About that study the Internet Archive WayBack Machine news journal
states:
Software is error-ridden in part because of its growing complexity. The size of software
products is no longer measured in thousands of lines of code, but in millions. Software
developers already spend approximately 80 percent of development costs on identifying and
correcting defects, and yet few products of any type other than software are shipped with
such high levels of errors. Other factors contributing to quality problems include marketing
strategies, limited liability by software vendors, and decreasing returns on testing and
debugging, according to the study. At the core of these issues is difficulty in defining and
measuring software quality.
The increasing complexity of software, along with a decreasing average product life
expectancy, has increased the economic costs of errors. The catastrophic impacts of some
failures are well-known. For example, a software failure interrupted the New York
Mercantile Exchange and telephone service to several East Coast cities in February 1998.
But high-profile incidents are only the tip of a pervasive pattern that software developers and
users agree is causing substantial economic losses.
This NIST study identified three major causes of high software code error rates: (1) the great complexity
of the product; (2) the absence of legal infrastructure controlling its manufacture; and, (3) the very high-
pressure rush to get the product to market because development periods are expensive with no revenue coming
in until “market success,” hopefully. So, remember: “electronic” means software, which means, error rates.
How should counsel-in-court cope? What help should law societies’ “competence of lawyers guarantee” to
society, require? And there are, and will be many more such electronic systems and devices that will produce
frequently used kinds of evidence. Can an early 19th century bencher-building-block concept of law society
management be sufficiently helpful to its members in the 21st century?32
But, because of the complexity, volume, and speed of change of the many uses of such electronic
technology, this is not a type of technology-competence requirement that can be adequately satisfied by
CPD/CLE requirements.
For example, to conduct an adequate cross-examination of: (1) the reliability of an ERMS; or, (2) a
cellphone tracking technical expert’s opinion evidence as to a person’s location at the time of a call to or from
that person’s cellphone, the technical information needed cannot be adequately provided by CPD/CLE
conference and seminar presentations and materials. But we cannot ask lawyers to be reading the technical
literature on various electronic systems and devices in a continuous fashion. And I suspect, very few are the
32
“Bencher”-Canadian usage, supra note 3.
the terms bencher and treasurer are in use by the legal profession in Canada. A bencher in the Canadian context is a
lawyer elected by the other lawyer-members of the law society, for a fixed term, to be its board of directors (referred
to as “Convocation”). The treasurer is elected by the benchers to function as the chair. Paralegals are also elected as
benchers in those provinces where the law societies govern the paralegal profession.

26
lawyers who have had the training to understand most of it or enough of it. Also, very few are the clients that
can afford to pay for the technical experts who can teach counsel what he/she needs to know.
Nevertheless, we do have an obligation to challenge the reliability of those electronic systems and devices
that frequently provide important evidence that could have a large impact upon a client’s needs, such as in a
criminal prosecution or a large civil case. For example, in good conditions, the data produced by every
cellphone call, which includes its date, time, duration of the call, which cellphones, and which cellphone towers
facilitated that call, can be used to locate a person within 100-200 metres of the nearest cellphone tower. For
example, used in regard to an issue such as, how close was the accused (or suspect) to the dead body at the
time of a particular call to or from his/her cellphone?
Cellphone communication involves a very complex technology, as is exemplified by the judgements in the
Oland murder case in New Brunswick.33 But adequately challenging the reliability of the evidence it produces
requires some detailed knowledge of cellphone technology as was dealt with in the Oland judgments.34
33
See the Oland judgements listed infra note 34. At the first trial, a jury trial, cellphone tower location evidence
played an important part in convicting Oland of second-degree murder. But at the non-jury re-trial, by way of
technical information obtained by the defence team, that evidence was substantially weakened, with the result that
Oland was acquitted. But that defence team consisted of three experienced criminal lawyers. However, we all use
cellphones. Therefore, the use of such evidence is not restricted to the crimes alleged to have been committed by
wealthy defendants who can afford to retain such defence teams and technical experts. But, if an accused person
cannot afford such a team, or even one lawyer, what is available besides putting forward an inadequate defence, or,
pleading ‘guilty,’ in the hope that on sentencing, such an acknowledgement of guilt evokes judicial sympathy and
the hope of reformation?
34
See: R. v. Oland judgements that show the complexity of cellphone tracking evidence, in regard to the prosecution
and conviction of Dennis Oland for second-degree murder, and his subsequent acquittal:
-Oland #2, 2015 NBQB 243; (NBQB, June 10, 2015) – admissibility of search warrant evidence.
-Oland #3, 2015 NBQB 244 (July 29, 2015) - admissibility of expert opinion evidence, based upon CDR data (call
data records of cellphone tower activity), that would be ruled admissible in Oland #4, as to the approximate location
of victim’s cellphone, based upon the cellphone tower data as to a call made to that cellphone (ruled admissible,
subject to admissibility of CDR data which was later ruled admissible in Oland #4).
-Oland #4, 2015 NBQB 245 (September 2, 2015) – admissibility of the Rogers Communication’s CDR (call data
record of cellphone tower activity), [These 2 pre-trial voir dires held in reverse order due to witness attendance
difficulties.]
-Oland #5, 2015 NBQB 246 (September 10, 2015) – admissibility of Telus Mobility CDR, it was admissible – plus,
issues as to whether it was logically relevant and/or whether its prejudicial effect would outweigh its probative value
in light of the ruling in Oland #3. And,
-Oland #12, Oland acquitted of murder at the non-jury re-trial, July 17, 2019:
A PDF copy of Justice Terrence J. Morrison’s decision acquitting Oland can be downloaded from this site:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/dennis-oland-not-guilty-murder-retrial-decision-1.5216556
And near the bottom of that CBC News webpage, dated, July 20, 2019, are these words, “Mobile users: View the
document,” whereat a PDF copy of the trial judge’s decision can be downloaded, (150 pages)). Note: that the CanLII
citation, “2019 NBQB 151,” shown at the top left-hand corner of the downloaded manuscript text of that judgment,
is wrong – it doesn’t work. And see also:
-Ken Chasse: “Guilt by Mobile Phone Tracking Shouldn’t Make ‘Evidence to the Contrary’ Impossible” (SSRN,
October 13, 2016; 91 pages).

27
But where else is a lawyer to obtain such information about this technology, in particular its software code
error rates? If a client is wealthy, a technical expert can be retained to advise counsel. But few are the clients
who can afford such expert advice and testimony. And, electronically-produced evidence is used not only in
the cases of wealthy people and the institutions that they own and control.
The only way to equip lawyers adequately in regard to such evidence-producing technology is a support
service that is available to advise lawyers on the vulnerabilities of those parts of electronic systems and devices
that are prone to making errors or other forms of inadequate performance. It would be staffed by one or two
full-time legal research lawyers (available to do legal research, at cost), but who also have the specialized
knowledge of the technical literature as to such electronic systems and devices that produce frequently used
kinds of evidence in legal proceedings and for legal services. They wouldn’t have to be as knowledgeable as
electronic engineers and technicians, but sufficiently so, to be able to advise all lawyers as to such uses and
vulnerabilities of electronic systems and devices, e.g., help in the preparation of competent cross-examinations.
They could also provide related literature.35
9. Legal Aid Ontario’s 80+ Clinics as a Network of Interdependent Support Services
University of Toronto Faculty of Law Professor Trebilcock’s Report of the Legal Aid Review 2008,
provides the following description of the status, purpose, and operation of the independent clinic system
that is financed by Legal Aid Ontario (LAO):36
As recommended by the McCamus Report,37 clinics continue to be the foundation for
the provision of poverty law legal aid services in the province. Clinics are independent,
non-profit organizations that provide services in areas such as social benefits, housing,
and worker's compensation.
The Act grants LAO the authority to provide funding to clinics for up to three years at
a time. In deciding whether to fund a clinic, LAO may consider matters such as the legal
needs of the individuals or community served, the cost-effectiveness of providing services
through a clinic, the past performance of an individual clinic, and the legal needs of other
communities also seeking funding. Funding must comply with government transfer
35
As to the admissibility of evidence provided by electronic systems and devices; see: by Ken Chasse: (1)
“Technology, Evidence, and Its Procedural Rules” (October 1, 2020); (2) “Challenging Electronic Systems’ and
Devices’ Ability to Produce Reliable Evidence” (January 1, 2020); (3) “Making Sufficient Knowledge of
Technology Available to Counsel” (October 1, 2018); (4) “Electronic Records as Evidence” (Jan. 1, 2020); (5)
“No Votes in Justice Means More Wrongful Convictions” (Sept. 22, 2020); (6) “Guilt by Mobile Phone
Tracking Shouldn’t Make ‘Evidence to the Contrary’ Impossible” (Oct. 13, 2016); and see also: Stephen Mason
and Daniel Seng (eds.) “Electronic Evidence and Electronic Signatures,” 5th ed., (University of London Press,
2021, 606 pages, pdf).
36
Copied from the following part of the Trebilcock Report, Report of the Legal Aid Review 2008: Section III – The
Statutory Framework for Legal Aid Ontario; part 2. Legal Aid Services; d) Clinics. The “Act” referred to is the,
Legal Aid Services Act, 1998, which was replaced in October 2021, by the, Legal Aid Services Act, 2020.
37
The McCamus Report 1997, is the, Report of the Legal Aid Review – A Blue Print for Publicly Funded Legal
Services [the Executive Summary is at: https://archive.org/details/mag_00048761/page/n5/mode/2up].

28
payment accountability requirements, and LAO may impose any other terms on the
funding that it considers appropriate.
Under the Act, LAO designates a person to consider applications for funding by clinics.
This person may make a decision or may refer the matter to the clinic committee of the
board of directors. An applicant may request that the clinic committee reconsider a
decision.
LAO is required to monitor the operation of a clinic. Clinics must provide LAO with
audited financial statements, a summary of legal aid services provided, a summary of
complaints received by the clinic and any other information requested. LAO's board of
directors may reduce or suspend clinic funding if it believes a clinic is not complying with
the Act or with the terms and conditions of the funding.
The board of directors of a funded clinic is responsible for ensuring that the clinic
complies with the Act, the terms and conditions attached to the funding, and the
operational standards established by LAO. The clinic board must also ensure that the
clinic provides clinic law legal aid services in accordance with the needs of its community.
There are currently 80 clinics in Ontario.
In addition to performing their present functions, those clinics could be made to serve one another as a mutually
interdependent network of support services. Each clinic would take-in clients, and each would specialize in
providing one or more types of legal services, which would serve all of the other clinics or groups of clinics in
a particular part of the province, as needed. There being a large number of clinics in the network, they could
be divided into regional groups throughout Ontario. The many electronically-based forms of communication
now commonly used, make such an integrated network possible and affordable. Because of the volume of
services provided, it could achieve a cost-efficiency and reduced-cost-of-services delivery for every
participating clinic, which could not be matched by any single law office.
The same concept of networked support services is used to provide medical services. Each doctor is a
specialist, among whom the many parts of the human body have been, to a highly refined degree divided and
subdivided for purposes of applying all of the available treatments and remedies. Together, as a network of
interrelated medical services and doctors, the population is provided the means by which good health may be
restored and maintained.
Such greater usage of the services and capacities of LAO’s clinic system is consistent with this statement
within Professor Trebilcock’s Report of the Legal Aid Review 2008, (p. 77):
... both LAO and the Government of Ontario, through the Ministry of the Attorney
General, need to accord a high priority to rendering the legal aid system more salient to
middle-class citizens of Ontario (where, after all, most of the taxable capacity of the
province resides).
Once proved successful in its financial viability and profitable marketing, such model of networked law
offices could be readily copied by many lawyers and law offices.

29
10. Paying for a national civil service for law societies

I have described present law society management structure as being like, “an elected government without
a civil service.” Therefore, law societies should be provided with a civil service—just one national civil service
for all of Canada’s law societies because all of their major problems are national problems. Such a service
would largely remove the conflict-of-interest aspect that afflicts the bencher-manager of law societies—the
conflict between having to be a good practicing lawyer, as well as a competent manager of a law society, able
to adequately fulfill the purpose of a law society. The more than 220-year history of law societies in Canada
proves that the bencher-building-block management concept has not been able to produce the significant
changes and innovations necessary to have kept them competent. They haven’t changed significantly since
they were created. That is why the access to justice problem of unaffordable legal services that afflicts the
majority of society and the legal profession itself, exists.
Benchers, being fulltime practicing lawyers, do not have the time and necessary skills to construct a support
services system for the production of legal services that would end the unaffordability of legal services. But a
national civil service for law societies could. Such a project to convert the legal profession from its present
very cost-inefficient cottage industry method or producing legal services to a support services method, would
require a development period that would be uncertain as to its length, difficulty, and cost. That uncertainty is
incompatible with the bencher’s need to be always certain of having enough time to be a good lawyer. But a
national civil service for law societies would have both the time and the necessary expertise, plus the
permanence to provide the necessary continuity of management that lengthy, complex development projects
require.
Elected Cabinet ministers serve for only the short term between elections and don’t by themselves, engage
in sophisticated long-term planning that a civil service can become very expert at providing. Thus, if benchers
can act like a government’s cabinet ministers without having also to be their own civil service, that would
remove much, if not all of the present conflict of interest between serving their personnel career-promotion
interests as lawyers, which are very incompatible with also being able to be competent managers of a law
society without a civil service.38
In comparison, a civil service can be: (1) permanent and not part-time as are benchers; (2) have all of the
necessary types of expertise, which benchers do not have; (3) can carry-out projects requiring long-term
development, development that requires the bridging over elections, which benchers cannot do; (4) has
knowledge of the history of difficult, intractable, long-existing problems, which benchers do not have; (5) can
See: by Ken Chasse, (1) “Access to Justice—Unaffordable Legal Services’ Concepts and Solutions,” (SSRN,
38
August 5, 2020; and, (2) “Law Society Policy for Access to Justice Failure,” (SSRN, September 28, 2020).

30
detect emerging problems when they are new, when they are easiest and less costly to deal with; and, (6) can
implement the decisions made by benchers, including those requiring long-term development projects.
Therefore, such a civil service for law societies could carry out the lengthy and complex transition of the
legal profession from its present cottage industry method of producing legal services to a support services
method.
As to financing such a civil service: the high volume, highly specialized legal research service at LAO
described above, should be the model for a similar national service. It would not have the limitations that LAO
LAW has—its services are available only for those Ontario lawyers willing to service Legal Aid cases, and
only in those areas of law for which LAO provides assistance to people who cannot afford lawyers. A national
version could be available to all lawyers in Canada, and provide legal opinions in all major areas of law, in
both official languages, English and French. Such a research service could be based upon CanLII. Because it
would produce a very large volume of finished work-product, its very large economies-of-scale would enable
it to provide its legal opinions at a very low cost. And, do so “at cost” plus a comparatively small profit. That
profit would pay for the civil service for law societies.
In addition, private investment sources could be used, particularly so for setting-up and operating the
various individualized support services, which together, would constitute the basic system for which the
transitioning of the legal profession to the necessary support services method of producing legal services would
be based. Establishing such a civil service for Canada’s law societies could be sponsored by the Federation of
Law Societies of Canada, (the sponsor of Canada’s most successful and widely used legal research service,
CanLII), or with the assistance of a university, as was done by LSO to create its bilingual Law Practice Program,
with the help of Ryerson University in Toronto, and the University of Ottawa.
And such a national legal research service could have a separate division for judges—to provide the
necessary research assistance so that all judges in Canada could produce their judgements in a more cost-
efficient and timely manner. Such assistance would be provided by specialized legal research lawyers—not by
law students or graduates “clerking” for judges. Such “clerking” should be considered to be obsolete, i.e., the
least qualified legally-trained person in the justice system, providing assistance in the creation of its most
important court- and tribunal-oriented product: judgements, which are the great caselaw creators and evolvers
of the law.
Such a research division serving judges would feed off of the database of finished legal opinions and
memoranda collected into the single database produced by the whole of this national research service. And it
would contribute to that database as decided by its own research staff as to what would be appropriately
provided. Because of the more professionally qualified researchers providing the necessary legal research
assistance, such a judges’ research division would be able to respond more quickly to emergency references
from Parliament and other governments for decisions on issues of law needing quick, but detailed responses.

31
In addition, with such professional and experienced assistance, judges would always have enough time out of
court to write their judgments. And, such a national judges’ legal research division would be managed by the
judges it serves.
11. LAO LAW is Now a Different Kind of Research Service

LAO is now under different management, and LAO LAW has a different purpose than it did when I began
to create it on Tuesday, July 3, 1979. Its purpose is no longer to generate a cost-saving for LAO by providing
an alternative to lawyers’ doing their own legal research and billing LAO for it. The size of the cost-saving
was determined by the volume of such legal opinions produced. Therefore, there was substantial pressure to
maximize the number of lawyers in private practice who were using the service for their Legal Aid cases, and
the number of times per year that each lawyer used it. The research unit had to produce a significant cost-
saving for it to escape being cancelled.
That legal research unit was called the Research Facility. And legal aid was the Ontario Legal Aid Plan.
However, the Legal Aid Services Act, 1998, incorporated legal aid, and its title was changed to the present,
Legal Aid Ontario (LAO). And the Research Facility became LAO LAW (Legal Aid Ontario Law). However,
that statute is now “repealed or spent since 2021-10-18,” having been replaced by the Legal Aid Services Act,
2020.
LAO LAW’s website now states that it provides, “case specific research for certificate cases and for duty
counsel and staff lawyer cases.” But its purpose being different, its functioning is not devoted to lowering the
cost of paying for lawyers’ doing their own legal research. But it could be made to do so again, particularly so
by providing legal research services by way of legal opinions for the more than 80 legal aid clinics that LAO
finances.
12. The Solution to the A2J Problem Will Not Happen in the Near Future
However, do not expect the above analysis of the A2J problem to be applied soon to serve middle- and
lower-income people. In the 9th year of development of the above legal research support service, I suggested
that I could significantly help LAO’s chronic funding problems by allowing me to provide this legal
research service for lawyers’ paying clients, i.e., for their non-Legal Aid clients. At that time, the Law
Society of Ontario (LSO), was the manager of LAO. The answer was simply “no,” I couldn’t do it, with no
reason given. And there was no interest, as there should have been, in duplicating the service for the benefit
of all lawyers. That is typical of law society management. Such innovations are to occur, if at all, within
law firms, and not made to happen by law societies. The bencher work-situation of also being a practicing
lawyer doesn’t provide the time, and therefore the ability to get involved in such projects that involve
development periods of uncertain length, difficulty, and cost. As a result, law societies in Canada have

32
never changed significantly since they were created, more than 220 years ago. Their history of steadfastly
maintaining in place the bencher-building-block concept of law society management, for the career-
promotion benefit obtained by ambitious lawyers serving a term as bencher-managers, regardless what
changing circumstances might have made necessary, does not allow for significant change. And so, the A2J
problem will continue to exist and grow, claiming an ever-increasing majority of society as victims,
including the legal profession itself. If the majority of people cannot afford lawyers, the majority of lawyers
is very short of clients.
Therefore, in regard to state of Canada’s legal profession’s response to the A2J problem of unaffordable
legal services that currently victimizes an increasing majority of society and the legal profession itself,
thousands of legally-trained people are committing their enthusiastic support and the advancement of their
careers to the work of what can succinctly be called, the “A2J industry.” But there is no interest in solving
the A2J problem which would bring far greater benefits than the A2J industry can produce. Unfortunately,
that provides further protection for Canada’s law societies’ resisting any pressure to change, so as to be able
to provide a sincere and significant effort to solve the problem. Nonetheless, participants within the A2J
industry, show a strong desire to remain loyal in word and deed with their professional or social group—
what sociologists refer to as being, “part of one’s social capital.”
Therefore, only mild criticism, if any, is tolerated by those within the A2J industry, and therefore
definitely not tolerated is the more direct, penetrating, and therapeutic kind of criticism, which argues that:
(1) all efforts should be devoted to ending the A2J problem because that would bring far greater benefits
to its victims—Canada’s population, justice system, and its legal profession (the general practitioner is
disappearing)—than what the A2J industry can ever achieve;
(2) the cause of the A2J problem is the extreme devotion of law society managers (its lawyer-benchers)
to preserve the bencher-building-block of law society management with all of its early 19th century
limitations that make solving the A2J problem impossible; i.e., theirs is a very self-interested management
structure that has little to do with serving the purpose of a 21st century law society—such a conflict-of-
interest must be obvious to them, and one potentially damaging to the law society’s reputation;
(3) governments are equally to blame for failing to enforce the performance of the duties of law societies
(e.g., the duties set out in section 4.2 of Ontario’s Law Society Act). Instead, each serves but to perpetuate
a form of self-interested performance within the justice system, thus making large victims of the population
and of the legal profession itself. The A2J problem has been caused and perpetuated by the incompetent
and self-interested power structure of Canada’s justice system, particularly so its law societies and
governments;
(4) unfortunately, the A2J industry effort (i.e., the work of the many people, programs, and governments,
that provide commendable and charitable relief from the misery and damage caused by the A2J problem)

33
shows no interest in ending the A2J problem, thereby perpetuating that inherently incompetent and self-
interested power-structure, and the ability of the A2J problem to grow, claiming an ever-increasing majority
of society and of the legal profession itself as its victims;
(5) the A2J problem will continue to claim victims until the legal profession learns the need to change
its method of producing legal services from its present very obsolete cottage industry method to the much
more cost-efficient support services method; and,
(6) the A2J problem will cause the general practitioner to dwindle and then disappear, but other forms
of the practice of law, being more capable of protecting themselves from the causes of the A2J problem,
will develop their own support services method of production; but,
(7) such will not be done for those lawyers who serve middle- and lower-income people (who are the
majority of the population, its taxpayers, and voters), with the result that they will not have lawyers available
for them at reasonable cost as could be made available by the production of legal services by way of a
support services system for the production of legal services.
This phenomenon of large groups, even a highly educated and professional group as are the legal
profession’s participants in the A2J industry, engaging in its practices that will work against their own
interests during the many years that they will serve in the profession. Such irrational behaviour was recently
found by university-based, health and social policy, and psychology scientists to be a very strong causal
factor motivating large groups of people to resist vaccination and the other protective behaviours that are
very necessary for minimizing the life-threatening and fatal progression of the Covid-19 virus pandemic.
Among their findings is this statement:39
Identifying with positively valued groups provides a sense of meaning and purpose,
satisfies a need to belong, strengthens self-esteem and self-efficacy, and supports health
and well-being (Vignoles et al., 2005). We attribute this finding to how ingroup bonds
reinforce risky health behaviours through the phenomenon of behavioural contagion (see
review by Villalonga-Olives and Kawachi, 2017). High trusting and affiliated societies
may be more susceptible to misinformation about the severity of COVID-19, bogus
treatments, or dismissive attitudes towards physical distancing (Zmerli, 2010). Trust
interferes with efforts to contain transmission through physical distancing. Dezecache et
al. (2020), Drury (2018), and others have argued that social affiliation and contact are
natural responses to threat and these inclinations were adaptive in our evolutionary past.
39
See: Frank J. Elgar, Anna Stefaniak, and, Michael J.A. Wohl, “The Trouble with trust: Time-series analysis of
social capital, income inequality, and COVID-19 deaths in 84 countries” Social Science & Medicine 263 (2020)
113365, at 3. The authors are associated with McGill University in Montreal, and Carleton University in Ottawa,
Canada. (Copies of this article may be purchased from, Elsevier-ScienceDirect.)

34
Taylor's (2012) “tend and befriend” psychological theory of stress describes the innate
human desire to affiliate when threatened. We “tend to offspring to ensure their survival
and affiliate with others for protection and comfort” (Taylor, 2012, p. 32). Despite their
evolutionary significance, these social cravings pose a barrier to public safety in the
context of COVID-19. The lesson here is that social capital, in all its forms, is generally
agnostic about whether it has positive or negative influences on health. Its various
dimensions and outcomes are neither fungible nor consistently beneficial to good health.
Stating the resulting loss of one’s “social capital” in my less scientific terms, if writing articles such as this
article, don’t expect to be well-received or tolerated by the group thus challenged, let alone praised by those
within the professional and social groups that make up the A2J industry. That is why bringing about significant
and much-needed change, no matter how obviously and desperately needed, is so very difficult and slow to
happen. Speaking such “truth to power” has its costs in professional “social capital,” even among lawyers.
13. The Big Law Firms Will Develop Their Own Support Services Method of Production
Because all practising lawyers do their work in each law firm or institutional legal department, in the same
way, using the same obsolete method of producing legal services, the A2J problem will affect all such lawyers.
However, the big law firms and institutional legal departments will learn how to solve the A2J problem by
gradually developing their own support services method of producing legal services. But they will do it only
for themselves. They are not required to do it for other types of law practice or for clients other than their own.
The rudimentary beginnings of support services production by a large law firm could be made necessary
by clients saying, “no more hourly billing.” If law firms are to be able to put forward quotations as to
prospective fees payable, that will keep their clients satisfied, and also enable law firms to make their desired
profits, that demand will cause law firms to more diligently seek greater cost-efficiency in the production of
legal services. An example of the resulting innovations is the contracting-out of parts of the work to produce
legal services. Richard Susskind states in one of his books:40
More generally, larger firms are responding to cost pressure by establishing a new division of
labour. Lawyers are breaking down legal work into more basic tasks, and finding alternative ways of
sourcing the more routine and repetitive work, such as document review in litigation, due diligence
work, routine contract drafting, and rudimentary legal research. Legal tasks in this way are now being
outsourced, offshored, passed along to paralegals, subcontracted, and sold to clients on a fixed-price
basis. Some leading firms are setting up their own low-cost service facilities. [footnote omitted]
But contracting-out work to be done by lawyers who will work for lower fees than the law firms own
lawyers, is not the creation of a true support service. However, if such contracting-out work becomes a
40
Richard & Daniel Susskind, The Future of Professions, supra note 2, at p. 68.

35
continuously available and dependable source of work which steadily increases in volume, lawyers doing such
work will group together, and being ambitious and wanting to increase their incomes, they will gradually
discover the principles and practices of support services production just as I did. I had to learn what is stated
above in order to generate a sufficiently large cost-saving for LAO, otherwise my legal research support service
would have been cancelled.
And as stated by Richard Susskind in the quotation immediately above,41 there are several kinds of lawyers’
work that can be substantially more cost-efficiently done by support-services methods of production.
14. Conclusion
However, when the loss of the general practitioner is near completion, and, still nothing has been done to
make lawyers more affordable for people’s more serious, difficult, and frightening legal problems—problems
for which a paralegal or other person of lesser legal training than a lawyer is not adequate help, then:
(1) at least half of the membership of each law society will be gone;
(2) the remaining lawyers in private practice will have to be specialists whose clients will be
institutions of various types, and rich people;
(3) the legal profession will have given up its connection with that majority of Canada’s
population that is its middle- and lower-income people, i.e., a passive acquiescence to
the lack of leadership from its law societies, except by taking on another big mortgage,
or selling their houses or apartments;
(4) to help them with their more difficult, serious, and fear-inducing legal problems, middle-
and lower-income people will no longer have lawyers;
(5) those peoples’ income, they being the majority of society, will determine the quality of the
legal services obtainable, and the degree of legal training and expertise of the person
that provides it, e.g., a paralegal, or other persons of lesser education and lesser legal
training than a lawyer;
(6) having given up serving more than half of society, no longer can it be said truthfully that:
(a) the legal profession operates as an essential part of the foundation of Canada’s liberal,
constitutional democracy; and, (b) that lawyers are available to the population to help
defend people’s rights, freedoms, and the certainty of the rule of law;
(7) thus, the legal profession will have a very different position in society—it will have lost a
lot of its purpose, power, prestige, and reputation as to being in the service of the
community; and therefore,
41
Ibid. and accompanying text.

36
(8) the legal profession will be seen as having created yet another egregious example of one
of the most persistent and long-standing disruptive forces in western societies today, as
it has many times in history—income inequality.42
That is the legacy that law societies, governments, and the legal profession itself, are leaving to the next
generations of lawyers, i.e., to the present group of young lawyers and law students who will serve the next 40
to 50 years or more in a legal profession much reduced in many ways. Reduced because there is no competent
leadership of Canada’s legal profession, and of its justice system as a whole. The bencher- building-block of
law society management has become the bencher-burden of Canada’s justice system
But, because our lives are continuously legally-demanding, particularly due to electronic systems and
devices becoming the complete foundation of the way we live, it is becoming increasingly difficult for people
to deal effectively with their legal problems by themselves—particularly so for their more serious, fear-
inducing, and potentially substantially life-changing legal problems. The A2J industry provides no relief and
appears not to be interested in doing so. As a result, the legal profession is becoming a profession of much less
purpose, power and prestige within society.
And because of the ever-increasing legal-complexity of everyone’s life, our law societies should be leading
us in the opposite direction. Our goal as a profession should be: we fulfill our duty to society by increasing our
ability to adequately serve the time when a community’s legal health is as important to it as its medical health,
and therefore, its lawyers are as important to it as are its doctors.
-o-
[completed, Dec. 20, 2021]
42
As to the history of the destructive power of income inequality see: Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler-Violence
and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st Century, (Princeton University Press, 2017). Walter
Scheidel is a professor in the humanities, classics, and history, at Stanford University.

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No. Table of Contents Page

1. Introduction to the Access to Justice Problem of Unaffordable Legal Services

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

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4. Recommended Improvements Cannot Produce Affordability for Legal Services

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

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6. A Civil Service for Law Societies

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3989039

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8. Lawyers’ Technological Competence as to Electronically-Produced Evidence

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9. Legal Aid Ontario’s 80+ Clinics as a Network of Interdependent Support Services

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10. Paying for a national civil service for law societies

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11. LAO LAW is Now a Different Kind of Research Service

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