The People’s Law School

March 3rd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt

Richard Alderman is the man behind the People’s Law School at the University of Houston Law Center. Twice a year, the People’s Law School offers a morning of instruction to non-lawyers about basic legal issues.

A Houston Chronicle columnist raves about the free instruction, which more than 50,000 people have now attended. To get a taste of the sessions, you can view some materials from former classes here.

Alderman doesn’t limit his outreach to the People’s Law School. He also maintains a website, The People’s Lawyer, where members of the public can find information about the legal system and legal rights, ask questions, and find links to other materials. Both the People’s Lawyer and the People’s Law School are initiatives of the Center for Consumer Law at Houston’s Law Center.

In today’s challenging economy, programs like the People’s Law School or People’s Lawyer may seem like unnecessary luxuries at a law school. But I think just the opposite is true: more law schools should consider establishing “people’s” law programs for two reasons.

First, if there is an untapped market for legal services, it lies in people’s law. Legal jobs serving corporations are contracting due to improvements in technology, management, and outsourcing. Law graduates will continue to counsel corporate clients, but that sector will not absorb nearly all of the students that law schools graduate. If there is hope for supporting those lawyers, it lies in tapping the market for middle-income clients.

It is not clear how deep that middle-income market is, but innovators like Rocketlawyer and Legalzoom are finding out. If law schools want to keep up with those companies, and to place their graduates in jobs serving middle-income clients, they need to understand more about people’s law. It’s not enough to tell students, “go draft wills for middle-class clients,” we need to understand how that market works and whether it’s feasible for lawyers to support themselves through that work.

Second, we need to explore the role that lawyers actually play in people’s law. How much legal work can consumers do on their own, with just basic instruction? How much can they do with well prepared forms or computer software? Can third-year students or new lawyers provide cost-effective service to these clients, with just the right amount of supervision from higher priced lawyers?

Answering these questions is key to probing the future of law practice for our graduates. The answers may be sobering: it may turn out that online services, staffed by a limited number of lawyers, address most of the legal needs of ordinary people. It may be that very few of our graduates can make a living in people’s law. On the other hand, law schools may be able to help map new, profitable, and satisfying practice routes in these areas. We won’t know until we try, and we owe it to our students to find out.

Alderman has just become Interim Dean at Houston, so he will have plenty of balls to juggle in addition to People’s Law. I’m curious, however, how this initiative might fit with the future of the University of Houston Law Center–as well as with other law schools around the country.