In a survey released today by the American Bar Association, judges indicated that a lack of representation in civil matters is hurting those individuals’ cases, and is negatively impacting courtrooms.

Approximately 1,000 state trial judges responded to the survey, which posed questions about their dockets, self-representation and the impact on the courts.  More than half of the judges stated that their dockets increased in 2009, with the most common areas of increase involving foreclosures, domestic relations, consumer issues such as debt, and non-foreclosure housing issues such as rental disputes. 

Sixty percent of judges said that fewer parties are being represented by lawyers, with 62 percent saying that parties are negatively impacted by not being represented.  The impact is exemplified, through a failure to present necessary evidence (94 percent), procedural errors (89 percent), ineffective witness examination (85 percent), failure to properly object to evidence (81 percent) and ineffective argument (77 percent).

The ABA has a resource page on its website that can help individuals find legal assistance — www.findlegalhelp.org.  

During a time when state budgets are constrained, agencies as well as courts are being asked to become more efficient.  However, the increase in non-represented parties makes this more difficult for courts.  The lack of representation has a negative impact on the court, said 78 percent of the judges, and 90 percent of judges stated that court procedures are slowed when parties are not represented.

Nearly half of the judges responding believe that there is a middle-class gap with respect to access to justice, stating that the number of people who are not represented and who do not qualify for aid has increased.

Lamm announced the findings during a news conference earlier today at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. 

The survey of judges on the impact of the economic downturn on representation in the courts was conducted for the ABA Coalition for Justice.  Respondents came from around the country.

Two conservative-driven decisions with potentially broad consequences will likely define the just-completed Supreme Court term: freeing corporations and unions to spend as much as they like in campaigns for Congress and president, and ruling that Americans have a right to a gun for self-defense wherever they live.

A key member of the five-justice majorities in both cases, and the author of the guns opinion, was Justice Samuel Alito. Though he has been on the court less than five years, Alito has had an outsize influence in firming up the court's conservative bloc.

His appointment to replace the more moderate Sandra Day O'Connor, more than any other choice in the last decade shows the importance of Supreme Court nominations. It also points up that Elena Kagan's nomination to take the place of the like-minded John Paul Stevens almost certainly will not have the same short-term impact as Alito has had.

"Of all the changes in personnel during this time of rapid change at the court, the Alito-for-O'Connor switch has clearly been the most consequential," said Paul Clement, who was top Supreme Court lawyer for then-President George W. Bush.

Indeed, nothing is likely to alter the court's current path in either direction unless President Barack Obama has the chance to replace a right-leaning justice, or a future Republican president gets to add another solid conservative vote.

The conservative trend on the court might be even stronger as long as Democrats hold Congress and the White House, said Paul Smith of the Jenner and Block law firm in Washington. "The conservative majority is going to continue to feel a need to push back in a lot of areas," Smith said.

The credit, or criticism, for many of the court's high-profile decisions goes variously to Chief Justice John Roberts, the putative leader of the court's conservatives, or Justice Anthony Kennedy, who dislikes the label "swing justice," but is always in the majority when the other eight justices split along liberal and conservative lines.

Their influence certainly was in evidence this term. Roberts was in the majority more than any other justice — 92 percent of the time — and Kennedy wrote the campaign finance decision as well as one in which the liberal justices prevailed, ruling out life prison terms with no prospect of parole for juvenile offenders in other than murder cases.

When clients call Washington attorney Sue Wang, the clock doesn't start ticking.

Phone calls aren't billed in six-minute intervals and each hour of work won't cost several hundred dollars.

Wang and the four other lawyers in Clarity Law Group aim to reconfigure the billable-hour business model at law firms that she said tends to shut out small and start-up companies with shallow pockets.

"People have been speaking about the death of the billable hour, but people had been saying that for years and they weren't really acting on it," said Wang, formerly of Latham & Watkins.

Clarity Law Group is designed like a timeshare, where clients pay a set fee for access to the entire firm, Wang said. The firm also reduces costs by forgoing the standard luxuries at big-name firms like secretaries, wall art and swanky office space.

The firm opened its Illinois office last October and secured its Washington license in April.

"The relationship between attorneys and clients is not a friendly one," said Kim Le, who works at Clarity. "They're worried all the time about getting billed for every little thing, and that doesn't build a good, trust[ing] relationship."

While other firms around the country are also trying to lower the barrier of entry to legal services, Wang said the idea for Clarity came to her and her former University of Michigan law school roommate, Leah Goodman, while on a recent vacation in Greece.

At Clarity, each client is assigned two attorneys who act as the primary counsel, but any of the lawyers may be called on depending on the legal needs. It's a hybrid model between big-firm contractors and in-house counsel, Wang said.

A prosecutor says most of the crimes occurred while 26-year-old Brewer was taking her sons, now 6 and 7, to or from school. Authorities say she sometimes used her younger son as a lookout and at least once put him inside a house through a window to unlock the door.

Brewer was pregnant at the time of the April and May burglaries in Harrison. She says she gave birth to a girl on June 4 while in jail.

She blamed the burglaries on an addiction to pain medication.

The Supreme Court has rejected an appeal from a Canadian engineer who was caught up in the U.S. government's secret transfer of terror suspects to other countries.

The court did not comment Monday in ending Syrian-born Maher Arar's quest to sue top U.S. officials, including former Attorney General John Ashcroft. Arar says he was mistaken for a terrorist when he was changing planes in New York on his way home to Canada, a year after the 2001 terrorist attacks. He was instead sent to Syria, where he claims he was tortured.

Lower courts dismissed Arar's lawsuit, which asserts the U.S. purposely sent him to Syria to be tortured. Syria has denied he was tortured.

The Canadian government agreed to pay Arar $10 million and apologized to him for its role in the case.

A Canadian investigation found that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wrongly labeled Arar an Islamic fundamentalist and passed misleading and inaccurate information to U.S. authorities.

The inquiry determined that Arar was tortured, and it cleared him of any terrorist links or suspicions.