Alternative Business Structures Proposals or Solving the Unaffordable Legal Services Problem
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Alternative business structures (ABS’s) are proposals: (1) to allow law firms to be owned by non-lawyer investors; (2) to automate routine legal services; and, (3) to allow legal services to be provided with related non-legal services. They have no capacity to solve the national problem of unaffordable legal services which is afflicting the majority of the population and jamming the courts with self-represented litigants, and therefore impairing Canada’s constitutional democracy. ABS’s are investment proposals to buy-up strings of law firms and enfranchise them for the purpose of competing to obtain control of the legal services market. The legal profession, being very short of clients, is vulnerable to accepting these proposals without adequately evaluating their impact upon the economic future of the legal profession and upon its professionalism and independence. The fiduciary duty owed to clients would be in danger of being suppressed as a result of the greater pressure to produce profits for such investors.Therefore, this article sets out the multiple reasons why a new management structure is needed for law societies. They are a non-politically accountable regulator of an important public service. Law society managers (benchers) are elected by the lawyer-members of each law society, usually for a 4-year term. As a result, the public has insufficient opportunity to influence the making of law society policy and practice.The theme of this article is that the practice of law is not a business, and business is not the only agency that can make the providing of legal services as cost-efficient as necessary, and legal services as affordable as needed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.021 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.028 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".