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The Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future is supporting a concept being built and tested by students at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law: a nonprofit law firm model that could help the state’s legal community better serve clients of modest means.
“People above the legal-aid (income) threshold can’t afford lawyers, and there’s nobody in their county that can give legal advice at that particular price point. So we’re trying to fill that gap,” said Bill Henderson, the Stephen F. Burns Professor of Law at Maurer.
Alongside students and faculty at the Indiana University Kelley School of Business, Henderson is piloting the first steps toward introducing a new nonprofit law firm model in Indiana that would help address the state’s lawyer shortage.
The commission’s interim report, released last August, highlights the rising cost of legal services that leaves a growing gap between low-income applicants who qualify for legal aid and higher income applicants who can afford full-price legal services.
This gap, referred to as a “modest means” and “middle class” access to justice, is further magnified by shrinking number of lawyers who can serve these clients, according to the commission. The interim report suggests launching a nonprofit operating business, meaning it’s not wholly funded by the state or foundations, to serve clients in need of affordable legal advice.
How it works
Henderson runs the Applied Research Practicum course at Maurer alongside Kelley School of Business professor Anjanette Raymond. Since the fall 2024 semester, law and business students have been researching how best to support the state’s civil legal system, asking how to serve “ordinary people” in both urban and rural parts of the state.
With the Indiana Supreme Court as the practicum’s client, Henderson is putting together a proposal and prototype that shows how nonprofit law firms could successfully serve underserved residents.
Because the concept involves building a brand-new business model, Henderson anticipates that the initial nonprofit would start out in seven Indiana counties, including Monroe County (where the Bloomington campus is located), as well as Brown, Greene, Jackson, Lawrence, Owen and Morgan counties.
“We need high quality, a good client experience and low per unit cost, as we are targeting a market that currently has no options for receiving legal services,” Henderson said in an email. “These systems and processes need to be developed before the model can scale to a larger geography.”
Last year, the practicum did a stakeholder analysis in the seven-county area, assessing information from judges, prosecutors, legal aid organizations and others to locate gaps in the legal market.
This semester, students in the course are building process maps based on the stakeholder analysis, which determined that the nonprofit business model would be most beneficial in the areas of debt collection and family law.
The process mapping will help students decide what steps of a legal process are “high complexity,” calling for the work of a licensed attorney, and which are “low complexity,” meaning the work could be done by allied legal professionals or law students.
The mapping will help set guidelines for training and risk management when the nonprofits are operational.
Allied legal professionals
One way the group could build the nonprofit law firm concept is through the use of allied legal professionals.
Allied legal professionals are individuals who are qualified to provide certain legal services without being a licensed attorney. In the nonprofit law firm setting, these professionals would take care of clients with low complexity legal needs.
“It sets guidelines for training and experience and other requirements that would allow a non-attorney to do a limited scope practice of law in limited areas,” said Bob Rath, chief innovation officer for the Indiana Judicial Branch’s Office of Innovation. “A paralegal can do a lot of work, but they can’t actually practice law or advise clients directly or represent clients, and the allied legal professional model extends those barriers a little bit.”
Several other states have taken the same approach with differing levels of involvement by these professionals, including Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Minnesota and New Hampshire.
In 2022, the Oregon Supreme Court approved recommendations for the framework of a licensed paralegal program, the state’s equivalent to Indiana’s allied legal professionals.
Licensing began in January 2024 for licensed paralegals to practice in family law and landlord-tenant disputes, according to the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System.
The Commission on Indiana’s Legal Future is addressing the use of these professionals separately from the nonprofit business model concept, but the goal is to be able to use them in entities like nonprofits as well as in government agencies and pro bono providers, according to the Indiana Supreme Court’s Innovation Committee.
The professionals working in those spaces would be managed by licensed attorneys, the committee said.
Henderson said that by incorporating allied legal professionals into the nonprofit business model concept, they can hopefully find professionals already in the counties that need the most legal services, rather than solely relying on bringing more attorneys into those places.
“It’s not like we’re going to get lawyers to move to all 92 counties…this is a real opportunity to train people, to serve people in their local community for legal needs that we know exists there,” he said.•
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