William Hubbard, immediate past president at the ABA and currently partner at Nelson Mullins Riley & Scarborough, said that 80 percent of the poor as well as 50 percent of people of “moderate means” currently don’t have adequate access for addressing their legal concerns, while some 96 million Americans are currently qualified for legal aid.

Among his suggestions, Hubbard urged the audience to “think more creatively about how we deliver legal services,” which means attorneys should “embrace technology and the benefits technology can bring to provide new avenues to provide legal services to those in need.”

While technology is an oft-cited remedy to life’s economic hardships, a concern with this approach frequently cited in legal circles is that many lawyers “believe there isn’t a role” in delivering legal services “for anyone but the lawyer.” Though this concern persists, millions in venture capital funds per year are going to legal technology providers, not law firms, he noted.

Judy Perry Martinez, chair of the American Bar Association’s presidential commission on the future of legal services, the organization behind the report, suggested that lawyers need to begin working with technologists and engineers on new solutions for persisting legal problems. She said that the ABA group behind the report currently has a governing council that includes a founder of the MIT Innovation Lab and an angel investor.

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