Panel Endorses Legal Service by Non-Lawyers

A panel of specialists from six of nation’s largest think tanks is recommending to President Reagan that bankers, real estate agents and other professionals be allowed to compete with lawyers to provide cheaper divorces, land sales, wills and other contracts.

That proposal is among a series of ideas designed to reduce “the burden of law, lawyers, litigation and legal fees on our society” by the 14-member Committee on the Next Agenda. A copy of the panel’s report on legal reform, due to be released here next week, was obtained by the Associated Press on Thursday.

The report said that if real estate settlements and contracts, divorces, wills and other contracts could be handled by paralegals or relevant professionals other than lawyers, the competition would drive costs down.

Among the other recommendations were:

Greater use of mediation and conciliation instead of trials.

Restrictions on the ability of state convicts to get federal courts to review their convictions.

Charging private parties the full court costs of their lawsuits.

Narrower drafting of federal legislation.

Periodic reconfirmation of federal judges.

The committee was sponsored by the conservative Hudson Institute and its president, Thomas Bell, who drew additional members from five other major research centers: the Hoover Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Brookings Institution, the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Research on the Economics of Taxation.

The committee included such Reagan first-term officials as former White House domestic policy adviser Martin Anderson and former Treasury Under Secretary Norman B. Ture.

It also included Heritage President Edwin J. Feulner, a close friend of presidential counselor Edwin Meese III, whom Reagan has nominated to be attorney general. In that post, Meese would be in a position to promote or act on the legal recommendations.

For instance, the panel said federal court dockets could be reduced and costs cut if more disputes were settled by arbitration or conciliation rather than by trials.

The panel particularly praised the Justice Department’s Community Relations Service for encouraging such alternatives, but for a number of years the service has had to rely on appeals by attorneys general to keep the Office of Management and Budget from gutting or eliminating its budget. Justice sources say that battle was renewed this year.

The section on legal reform said the United States “has become excessively litigious and (has) a legal system that is now grossly overblown.”

It noted that this year, 15 million new civil suits will be filed and more than 30,000 new lawyers will graduate although this country already has one lawyer for every 600 citizens, the highest ratio in the world.