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Another alternative for the middle-income consumer is the cut-rate "legal clinic." One, located amidst a tangle of shops in Van Nuys, Calif., is a storefront law office run by Leonard Jacoby and Stephen Meyers, both 32-year-old lawyers. They sprinkle their office with brochures listing prices and permit customers to pay by credit card. Most important, they charge fees that families earning $8,000 to $18,000 a year can afford. At the clinic, an uncontested divorce goes for $100 instead of the $350 charged by the average law firm; a typical bankruptcy case brings $225 instead of $350 to $500; a will generally costs $35 instead of $75.
In the two years that the Jacoby-Meyers operation has been in business, some 3,500 consumers have taken advantage of its budget prices. The staff manages to hold costs down and make a slight profit by relying heavily on nonlawyers. Clients pay an initial $15 fee, then are interviewed by paralegal workers who take down the facts and fill out routine forms for uncontested divorces and other straightforward cases. Later, the client confers with a staff lawyer or an outside specialist, who will wind up the details of the case and, if necessary, take it to court.
In Phoenix, the Bates and O'Steen clinic has been in business since last March with a similar procedure and fee schedule. One of the few nonprofit organizations, the District of Columbia-based Law Offices of Washington, charges a flat $25 per hour for a lawyer's time and relies on law students for initial client interviewing.
Clinical Mavericks. Resistance to the new approaches is widespread. Though lawyers across the nation concede that open legal-insurance plans might well bring in more clients, the majority want no part of the closed plan. This, they say, will siphon clients from regular law firms, especially in small towns where one major employer might control most of the area's law business under its group-insurance scheme. Clinics, too, have come under attack because they frequently ignore professional bans against advertising. In Los Angeles, the California Bar Association this week begins disciplinary proceedings against Jacoby and Meyers. The charge is that the attorneys solicited clients by discussing their organization on TV and in the press, thus violating the codes against advertising. The clinical mavericks reply that prohibiting solicitation is an infringement upon the freedoms of speech and the press. Moreover, they claim the right to announce their services because clients have a right to know.
Former U.S. Attorney Cecil Poole of San Francisco agrees: "It's not too important how you get the message out," he says, "as long as you don't make the practice of law look like a garage sale." Whether or not his colleagues accept that argument, the bar will probably have to learn to live with some form of legal clinic.