New Task Force Cracks Down on the Unauthorized Practice of Law
The Mississippi Business Journal reported on January 4, 2010, that the Mississippi Bar Association had created a task force to deal with the unauthorized practice of law in Mississippi. The unauthorized practice of law in Mississippi is a misdemeanor, allowing the Bar to pursue criminal charges against non-attorneys who give legal advice or prepare legal documents.
The article notes that the task force is needed due to the harm created by wannabe attorneys who prepare documents and give legal advice about issues that they do not understand. Part of the task force’s goal is to shut down document preparation services for wills and divorces. People use these services, thinking that they will save money. As the article notes, in the long run, people “ultimately wind up having to shell out even more money when they discover an attorney is needed.”
Adam Kilgore, the Mississippi bar’s general counsel, is quoted extensively in the article, noting that many problems have arisen due to the “do-it-yourself culture” and the recent recession. As Kilgore notes, judges see a lot of the problems that unauthorized practice of law creates when the problems surface courtrooms across Mississippi. Attorneys are often needed to clean up the mess, costing the client more in legal fees than if they had simply hired an attorney to do it right the first time.
We see the beefing up of oversight in this area as a welcome development. In the probate and estate planning area, we often run across problems that were created by incompetent “estate planners,” many of which are hucksters that sell a prepackaged set of boilerplate documents to anyone they can convince to buy them. These forms often do not take into account the full intricacies of Mississippi law or federal tax law. The clients are promised big probate savings in exchange for a smaller up-front expense of setting up the plan. But because the estate plan is not properly designed or carried out, the clients often get hit with a double-whammy: they pay for an expensive “estate plan” and their heirs end up paying for probate anyway.
Sadly, the client often never learns of problems with defective estate plans since most of them arise after the client’s death. It is the heirs who are left with a mess to sort out, including issues such as dealing with spousal rights, family disputes, and probate issues caused by improperly funded revocable trusts. Because our firm is often called on to sort out this mess, we have witnessed first-hand the havoc that unauthorized practice of law can create. This task force is needed to help protect the general public against unscrupulous and incompetent document preparation services.
