Neil Sands
A largely untapped “middle market” exists for law firms, but accessing it means adapting the way legal services are delivered while ensuring professional standards are maintained, The Law Association (TLANZ) Chief Executive Clayton Kimpton says.
Clayton Kimpton
Kimpton outlined his vision over the weekend in an insights paper delivered to the Inter-Pacific Bar Association (IPBA) conference in New Delhi, India.
The paper says that New Zealand’s legal system “functions relatively well at the extremes” – those on very low incomes are eligible for legal aid, while corporates and high-net-worth individuals can afford specialist advice from lawyers.
Between the two extremes lies what Kimpton calls “the middle market”, a substantial portion of the population who do not meet the legal aid criteria but would also struggle to pay for full legal representation.
He says the legal needs of this group are largely unmet, citing official data showing that fewer than 40% of people with legal problems use a lawyer and up to 50% of adult New Zealanders do not have a will.
Some people turn to non-lawyer legal service providers, or increasingly Artificial Intelligence (AI), even though these solutions do not protect against risk, breach or lack of performance.
Others simply disengage from the legal process completely, potentially abandoning valid claims because the cost pressures are too high.
Kimpton believes law firms must find a way to offer another option, which provides the professional quality service not available via non-lawyers, while being sufficiently cost-efficient to appeal to the middle market.
“I guess I’m saying there is an alternative. You don’t just simply have to throw up your hands and say ‘the non-lawyers are coming, the non-lawyers are coming’. We as lawyers have the ability to be innovative and step into that space ourselves,” he said.
“The opportunity is to access a market that simply isn’t going to law firms. If lawyers don’t move into that space, someone else will, if they haven’t already.”
‘By lawyers, for lawyers’
It’s one thing to identify a potential market, another to find a way to access it. Kimpton believes one solution lies in TLANZ’s LegalForms platform, which offers standardised legal documents prepared and reviewed by lawyers.
The platform was launched last year, providing a hi-tech replacement for the WebForms service.
It currently offers more than 90 forms covering various transactions, including the industry standard Agreement for Sale & Purchase of Real Estate (ASPRE).
Kimpton said TLANZ (previously the Auckland District Law Society) had provided documents to the legal profession for more than 50 years.
“People in the New Zealand legal environment are used to downloading legal forms from us, paying for them, and passing then across to the client. There’s a confidence within the legal community about that,” he said.
“We create documents by lawyers, for lawyers, which substantially reduces the cost and risk, both for the lawyer and also for the client, and I think we can do more of that and help access the middle market.
“By packaging something up that we can give lawyers to sell, it’s not taking away their own business, it will actually be creating more business and making that market accessible.”
TLANZ has 18 committees covering the gamut of legal practice, ranging from trusts to technology, civil litigation to criminal law.
Each committee is comprised of specialised lawyers in their field, who Kimpton said will be consulted about the areas within their remit may be suitable for standardisation under the LegalForms model.
“What I could see is that in areas like employment, wills and estates, independent contractors, the sorts of documentation that small businesses need set up into practice, I could see those documents being packaged up so that law firms could offer them at a fixed price, just like they do conveyancing.”
Kimpton told LawNews the middle market concept and how to service it had generated considerable interest among international delegates at the conference in India.
However, he said TLANZ had an advantage over member organisations in other countries because it charged fees for its forms from the very beginning, ensuring it had funds to ensure the documents were regularly reviewed, as well as allowing it to develop technology enabling LegalForms.
“I think we’re ahead of the pack. The reason is this most other organisations have these forms decided to offer them free as part of their membership, so they haven’t focused on review and updating the forms,” he said.
Kimpton’s insights paper is available here.
The non-lawyers aren’t just coming: we’re already here, and we’ve been here for over a decade, serving the very “middle market” this article accurately identifies. We too provide a quality service – we just don’t give legal advice. In the era of generative technology, legal advice is now available at the tap of a client’s independent, well-crafted (and subsequently independently verified) LLM prompt. Think Lexis Nexis AI, Courtaid AI, Spellbooks, Clio, GPT 5 for Law, Relativity, Casetext, Fastcase, Westlaw Edge, Digital Waroom, or Alexi just to name a few of the Legal AI platforms available to Law firms or consumers. Read Richard Susskind: he pegged this development about 40 years ago.