The Arizona Supreme Court says it’s starting a new program aimed at increasing the number of attorneys in the state. According to the court, Arizona ranks 49th in the country in the number of lawyers per capita.
In order to practice law in Arizona, applicants need to score a 270 on the bar exam. The Arizona Lawyer Apprentice Program will allow those who score 260-269 to practice, with some oversight. Those applicants will also need to practice for two years in either rural parts of the state or in a public law practice.
For more, The Show spoke to Stacy Leeds, the Willard H. Pedrick Dean at ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law.
Leeds said both she and her counterpart at University of Arizona Law meet regularly with the Supreme Court and have had ongoing conversations about the bar exam and its cut score.
Full conversation
MARK BRODIE: Stacy, first off, what do you think about this plan from the court?
STACY LEEDS: Well, we’re very excited about it. I think it’s a good compromise to some of the national dialog around alternative pathways to licensure and bar exam scores. It’s unlike what any other jurisdiction has done at this point. And I think it’ll be a good thing for graduates but also employers in the rural sectors and in the public service arena throughout our state.
BRODIE: What is the difference between somebody who gets a 260 and a 270? Like, how does the scoring work? What is the difference between those two scores?
LEEDS: The margins are razor thin. And the National Board of Bar Examiners determined that a threshold competency score is 260. And then it gave the states the ability to decide anywhere between 260 and 280, where they were going to come down for their particular state.\
Arizona has been at the high end of the national cut scores for quite some time. And all of the states around us — New Mexico, Utah, several other states throughout the country — in the last few years have consistently lowered their score toward that 260 threshold. So, it'll be an interesting data set to look at a year or two out: How many extra attorneys stayed in Arizona because of this new program, where they could have taken that same cut score and gone to one of these neighboring states and immediately began practicing law?
BRODIE: Are you seeing that happen a lot, that students or applicants take the bar exam, don’t get the 270 that’s required in Arizona and just leave and go somewhere else with the score that they got?
LEEDS: I wouldn’t say we see it a lot, but we see it significantly enough that we raised this issue. We definitely had graduates who — let’s say scored 265 — and instead of waiting and taking the bar exam twice here in Arizona, they chose to go ahead and go to one of these other states and immediately began their career.
So there certainly is the case that as to some lawyers, Arizona was losing talent, to go to one of these other states. So the numbers might not be substantial, but it was significant enough to address.
BRODIE: I’m curious about the optics of this in terms of maybe somebody who needs a lawyer going to somebody who didn’t quite get the 270, maybe they got a 265 or 268 or 262. Is there a challenge in maybe explaining that to potential clients that, “Look, I get it. This is what my score was. I’m still a very competent lawyer.”
LEEDS: Well, I think when you look at other jurisdictions that either do not require the bar exam at all, like Wisconsin, or the jurisdictions that have a slightly lower cut score, they haven’t seen substantial numbers of extra complaints against lawyers for not being able to practice law with those same capacity. So at least in the data sets, it hasn’t led to greater incompetency in the legal profession.
That’s some of the critique nationally about the bar exam. Are these numbers arbitrary, or are they numbers that provide a different barrier of protection for the consumers? You know, a 1- or 2-point difference in a bar exam score probably is unrecognizable in terms of what that person can do in practice.
BRODIE: In announcing this program, the chief justice of the state Supreme Court pointed out that Arizona ranks 49th in the country in the number of lawyers per capita. What are the implications of that? Like, what does that mean for Arizonans who need legal representation?
LEEDS: Well, it means that we are squarely in an access to justice crisis, right? People can’t always access the attorneys that they need, but it goes deeper than that. When you look at — even in Maricopa County, in the more populous areas of the state — when you look at the job advertisements, you’ll often see vacancies for attorneys for months and months.
So there’s jobs that are not filled right now because there’s not a steady enough pipeline of new attorneys coming for those jobs. So this will help those government service positions, but it also will target opportunities in the rural areas of the state.
And everyone has recognized that this is a problem, this concept of legal deserts, where in some smaller counties you might have just a handful of attorneys — including the judges — that are pursuing their career there.
And it just creates a number of gaps in the justice system and delays in terms of getting relief. So for that rural component as well as the government service component, I think that it will be a great start in trying to address those problems.
Now, you likely know that Arizona was a leader in this concept of licensed paraprofessionals. People who are not attorneys but they have some legal education that will equip them to take on certain kinds of cases in the system.
And so it’s the same rationale as that paraprofessionals program. Several years ago, when the Supreme Court began that program, it was for these same issues. There were all of these unmet needs.
BRODIE: What kind of dent do you think that this program might be able to put into that problem of clearly not having enough attorneys? Like, is this the answer? Is this one of the answers, do you think?
LEEDS: I think it’s one of several solutions. But I think it's a very promising one. In the first few years, it might be just a handful of new attorneys who enter into this — maybe something like 25 or 30. But if you take that 25 and 30 and then you magnify that over several years, it really starts to make a difference. So it’s not the solution, but it’s a certainly good step toward that solution.
BRODIE: What else do you think the state can and should be doing here?
LEEDS: There’s another piece of it than the obvious piece that it would impact the two public law schools that we have here in Arizona. We have a vibrant economy in Arizona, where people are looking to come to the state. Programs like this that would apply to graduates of any law school might tip the scale, where some students who are graduating from law schools elsewhere around the country might consider coming here and working in Arizona as well.
To that extent, it can help the state be a net importer of talent. And I think that everyone would agree that that’s a good idea.
