Legal Clinic in the United States

A law office that performs routine legal services at discount fees. Legal clinics largely serve middle-income clients who need legal assistance with wills or divorces. Clinics depend on high volume to be successful, and they engage heavily in media advertising to reach a wide clientele. Law clinics began to appear in the mid-1970s after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down many restrictions on lawyer advertising in the case of Bates v. State Bar of Arizona (433 U.S. 350: 1977). Removal of restrictions permitted clinics to advertise widely for prospective clients. Beyond volume, key to the financial success of legal clinics is efficiency. Greater efficiency comes from handling only certain kinds of cases, usually those that are quite straightforward. The economy of volume and efficiency allows clinics to charge lower fees. The low fees, in turn, provide the market appeal necessary to attract volume.

See Also

Legal Insurance (Judicial Personnel issue) (Judicial Personnel issue).

Analysis and Relevance

Legal clinics attempt to draw clients from a population that would probably not use lawyers from the more traditional practices. Like Legal Insurance ( U.S.), legal clinics have made professional services more widely accessible, particularly to the economic middle class. Many are critical of the clinic approach to the marketing of legal services and are skeptical about the quality of services rendered. Advertising aside, concerns about quality may be misplaced. Legal clinics largely confine themselves to several particular kinds of common legal problems. It appears that an efficient, high volume approach is possible without compromising the quality of service.

Notes and References

1. Definition of Legal Clinic from the American Law Dictionary, 1991, California