A Legal Blue Cross?

Ambulance chasing, barratry, capping, running, soliciting -- by whatever name it is known, the practice of stir ring up law business is condemned by lawyers and laymen alike. The American Bar Association's canons of ethics are so strict that even "lay intermediar ies" -- nonlawyers who aid in the choice of a lawyer -- are banned from the one-to-one relationship between lawyer and client. Canon 35 allows lawyers to represent an organization, but not its members "in respect to their individual affairs." Canon 47 expressly forbids "the unauthorized practice of law by any lay agency, personal or corporate."

Such strictures protect the right of a client to seek legal help in his own way and out of his own needs. But in a counsel-conscious age, the system may be a trifle obsolete. One effect of U.S.affluence for example, is that millions of new property owners need legal aid to buy, sell and bequeath. Yet, by all reports, many Americans go on shunning lawyers, either because they fear high fees or have no idea of how to hire a lawyer they can trust.

Old Odds. To make legal aid more accessible, a few bold souls have suggested the establishment of group legal practice, modeled on company medical plans or union health insurance. The organized bar, however, is still hotly opposed. The very idea raises the old specter of "lay intermediaries." Last week the Supreme Court itself raised the specter by upholding, 6 to 2, a legal-aid plan set up years ago by the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen.

The plan had its roots in the accident-prone 1880s, when the odds against a brakeman's dying a natural death were almost 4 to 1. Employers later became liable for injuries, but trainmen had a hard time hiring good lawyers to protect their rights. In 1930 the brotherhood opened a legal-aid department -- a pioneering plan offering injured trainmen the services of 16 highly skilled lawyers. Stationed around the U.S., these lawyers agreed to limit their fees to 25% of the amount recovered, and they returned part of their fees to the brotherhood.

Wisest Counsel. Challenged in the courts ever since (and outlawed in California in 1950), the plan was recently enjoined by Virginia's highest state court on the ground of illegal "channel ing" -- meaning that most brotherhood injury cases go to brotherhood lawyers. Appealing to the Supreme Court, the trainmen argued that the Virginia injunction clearly denies rights guaranteed by the First and 14th Amendments.

"We agree with this contention," wrote Justice Hugo Black in last week's majority opinion. Though Virginia is undoubtedly empowered to regulate law practice, said Black, it cannot forbid trainmen "to gather together" and seek "the wisest counsel" in pursuit of their legal rights. In sharp dissent, Justice Tom Clark argued that the decision "overthrows state regulation of the legal profession and relegates the practice of law to the level of a commercial enterprise." Even so, Railroad Trainmen v. Virginia means that lay organizations across the U.S. may now attempt all sorts of experimental group plans to put more lawyers in touch with more people who need them. Conceivably, the result may one day lead to a legal-service Blue Cross.

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