Jim Sandman L’76 recently joined the Law School faculty as a Distinguished Lecturer and Senior Consultant to the Future of the Profession Initiative (“FPI”).
Jim Sandman L’76, Distinguished Lecturer and Senior Consultant to the Future of the Profession Initiative (“FPI”), recently moderated “Regulatory Reform and Expanding Access to Justice,” the second episode of “Talk Justice, an LSC Podcast.”
Sandman is the President Emeritus of the Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which he led from 2011 to 2020, and was joined by leading jurists from two states in the vanguard of regulatory reform: Utah Supreme Court Justice Constandinos “Deno” Himonas and Arizona Supreme Court Vice Chief Justice Ann A. Scott Timmer. The panel also included Upsolve Co-Founder Rohan Pavuluri and William Henderson, Professor of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and the editor of Legal Evolution.
The panelists discussed the impact of reforms such as licensing paraprofessionals to provide legal services and easing restrictions on fee-sharing and non-lawyer ownership of law firms. They also examined the relationship between the current regulatory system and dysfunction in the legal market and whether this system presents barriers to equal access to justice and contributes to racial injustice.
A vocal advocate for change to the regulatory framework governing lawyers, Sandman has already used his role with the Law School’s FPI to argue in support of reforms designed to expand access to justice that recently took effect in Utah. He will work to advance similar efforts in other jurisdictions as the regulatory reform movement accelerates and will develop related projects through FPI that focus on developing new approaches to delivering legal services that are more accessible and useful to small business owners and individuals across the income spectrum.
Legal Services Corporation (LSC) is an independent nonprofit established by Congress in 1974 to provide financial support for civil legal aid to low-income Americans. The Corporation currently provides funding to 132 independent nonprofit legal aid programs in every state, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories.