Editor's Note: U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff of the Southern District of New York received the Learned Hand Medal for Excellence in Federal Jurisprudence at the Federal Bar Council's Law Day dinner Wednesday night at the Grand Hyatt New York. He used the occasion to ask the guests to find a way to make legal services more affordable. The New York Law Journal is running his remarks on that in their entirety.

It is a terribly sad fact that our legal system has priced itself out of the reach of most ordinary Americans. Let me start with some rather dismal statistics, most of them compiled by the National Center for State Courts.

It used to be the case, according to the National Center, that the overwhelming majority of individual litigants, whether plaintiffs or defendants, were represented by counsel. But today, according to the National Center statistics, approximately two-thirds of all individual litigants in the state courts are pro se. And in the two courts where everyday Americans are mostly likely to get involved—housing court and family court—well over 80 percent of individual litigants are unrepresented by counsel. Moreover, this is just the tip of the iceberg, for the inability of everyday individuals to afford legal counsel means that many cannot go to court at all, or even obtain legal advice for everyday matters like drafting a will, incorporating a small business, or obtaining a pension.

As members of the Federal Bar Council, some of you may not be fully cognizant of this problem, since your clients tend to be well-heeled (at least I hope they are!). It is true, of course, that many of you here have done laudable pro bono work for indigent defendants; but you still may not be fully aware that most working class Americans, who would never qualify for indigent status, still cannot find a lawyer who will take on their legal problems at prices they can afford.

Yet I need hardly tell you that the involvement of a lawyer makes a huge difference. For example, those defendants facing mortgage foreclosure who do manage to retain counsel avoid foreclosure more than 50 percent of the time, while those without counsel avoid foreclosure less than 10 percent of the time. If you have ever witnessed an eviction, it is heart-breaking. You see an entire family sitting on the sidewalk, numbly watching as court officers pile their belongings on the curb, desperately wondering where they will be sleeping tonight. When you see this, you understand just how much real suffering can result when one lacks legal representation.

Although you and I practice in the rarefied atmosphere of the federal courts, we cannot blind ourselves to the failure of our profession to provide affordable legal services to what is probably a majority of our fellow Americans.

Now, it needs to be noted that New York State and New York City have done more than many localities to help people obtain legal help, culminating last August when New York City enacted legislation to guarantee free legal counsel to all low-income Housing Court defendants facing eviction. Such marvelous efforts are greatly to be applauded. But it must be noted that they are only available in New York City Housing Court and only to persons who qualify as low-income, and so they don't really get at the problem of the everyday citizen with everyday legal problems, who simply can't afford what lawyers charge today.

What is needed, then, is a more global solution. But before turning to what that solution might be, one might well ask: why hasn't the operation of the free market created a cadre of lawyers who cater to the needs of working class Americans? After all, if there are millions of Americans with real legal needs that are going unmet, why hasn't the supply of lawyers expanded to meet those needs and why haven't lawyers reduced their prices to corner that market? The answer, I'm afraid, is that our profession is also a bit of a cartel, with significant barriers to entry, parallel pricing with acknowledged price leaders, sharp restrictions on the unauthorized practice of law, and numerous other impediments to unfettered competition. Plus, in the last few decades, there has been a great rise in court-related costs and delays, such as expansive electronic discovery, that even the profession cannot control.

The result is that the cost of lawyers and lawsuits continues to rise dramatically. Over just the past two decades, the average billing rate of a law firm partner in the United States has risen from about $120 per hour to almost $600 per hour, and the average associate billing rate has risen during the same period from about $80 per hour to over $400 per hour.

Put another way, average fees for legal services have increased during the past two decades about three times faster than the overall rate of inflation during the same period. The sad fact of the matter is that legal services in the United States are increasingly available only to the relatively rich and, to a much lesser extent, the very poor, with almost nothing available in between.

So what is the solution? Three possibilities suggest themselves:

The first is legal insurance. This has been tried, mostly in California, but so far it has not caught on. The two main reasons are, first, that given the high and increasing cost of legal services, even when you spread out those costs through insurance, the annual premium is still too high for most Americans.

Second, while most Americans foresee that they will have health problems sooner or later, and thus recognize the need for health insurance, they are less likely to foresee substantial legal problems, and hence legal insurance seems to them unnecessary—until it is too late.

A second possible global solution is online legal services, which, because of decreased overhead and boilerplate responses, can be offered at rates much lower than insurance premiums. And, in fact, websites offering legal services are growing. But so far they have largely been limited to such rudimentary tasks as preparation of basic legal documents. Partly this is because offering much beyond these simple tasks might raise concerns about the unauthorized practice of law, and partly because any detailed interaction between an actual website lawyer and the would-be client would greatly increase the costs involved, as well as the risks of malpractice. Moreover, of course, a website lawyer cannot represent a client in court.

So, while legal insurance and automated legal services may yet come to serve some of the needs of ordinary Americans with legal problems, for now something more is needed. The third, and in my view the most promising, solution is the creation of a corps of certified legal practitioners—roughly analogous to nurse practitioners in the medical field—who could provide a great many ordinary legal services at a fraction of the price a full-fledged lawyer would charge.

Many of you in this audience may have already had a nurse practitioner give you a basic physical examination, write you a prescription, or even perform simple operations like removing stitches, all at a fraction of what a doctor would charge for the same services. Based on this model, Washington State introduced in 2012 the concept of what they called Licensed Legal Technicians, who were authorized to provide a multitude of simple legal services that previously only lawyers could lawfully perform. The program, however, has developed slowly, partly, I'm told, because of opposition from certain segments of the bar. As a result, it has, in practice, been largely limited thus far to family law matters. However, it has been enough of a success that Washington State is now considering expanding it to other areas.

Also, at least two other states, Massachusetts and Utah, are considering adopting similar programs.

Right here in New York, moreover, there was created in 2014 a specially trained group of non-lawyers called Court Navigators, who are permitted to provide specified legal assistance to unrepresented individuals involved in matters like consumer debt disputes. These Court Navigators are authorized, not only to help pro se litigants respond to claims against them, but also to accompany them to court and advise them how to argue their cases there.

Building on these experiments, one can well imagine a cadre of certified legal practitioners—probably drawn initially from the ranks of paralegals—who could undertake a host of lawyer-like services at much cheaper rates than lawyers would charge. In my thought-experiment, I imagine applicants for these positions taking some specially designed courses at accredited law schools, followed by six months to a year of apprentice work, after which they would take a certification exam. If they passed, they would be licensed to draft simple wills and basic contracts, offer legal advice on everyday housing law, family law, and consumer law disputes, and appear in housing court, family court, and state and city administrative agencies. Just as paralegals now perform tasks that were once done by lawyers but that paralegals can do nearly as well at a fraction of the cost, these licensed legal practitioners could provide basic legal services at a price much less than now charged by lawyers.

Over time, many of these practitioners would doubtless also develop specialized expertise. But even then, you might ask, would the quality of their services be as good as those provided by full-fledged lawyers? Probably not. But for millions of Americans, these practitioners would provide adequate legal services that otherwise would not be provided at all. So, I am very much of the view that the development of a corps of licensed legal practitioners would be of substantial benefit to our fellow citizens. It would also complement the other two solutions previously mentioned, because, by use of such practitioners, insurance carriers could reduce their premiums and on-line legal services could offer more personalized assistance.

To make this happen in a place like New York would require a lot of work. Groups like the wonderful New York City, New York County, and New York State Bar Associations would need to study the matter and draft model rules prescribing exactly what these licensed legal practitioners could, and could not, do. Law schools, of which this city has so many great ones, would have to design training programs that would give these practitioners some basic and practical legal education, while law firms would have to devise parallel programs for the apprenticeship period. And, finally, groups like the Federal Bar Council would need to convince judges and lawmakers that the organized bar does not fear or denigrate these adjuncts, but rather welcomes them.

This is a tall order, and perhaps I am naive in even thinking it could get off the ground. Lawyers being lawyers, many issues will be raised, and objections noted. But issues and objections should not be an excuse for passivity when so many of our fellow citizens are being effectively denied any meaningful legal services. And I like to think that in those rare quiet moments when each of us reflects on why we became lawyers, we realize it is because each of us had a passion for justice and we knew that real justice could not be achieved if people did not have professional help. So, I ask for your help now and submit that, in assisting the creation of a corps of licensed legal practitioners, you will be furthering your own ideals of what the legal profession is all about.