Time to Move Past the Term ‘Nonlawyer’ as Legal Industry Evolves

Is it time to remove the term “nonlawyer” from the legal lexicon?

Last week, two lawyers—Olga Mack, a fellow at the Stanford Center for Legal Informatics, and Damien Riehl, a vice president at the legal-tech platform vLex—published an online petition for the American Bar Association “to cease using the term ‘nonlawyer.’”

Together with around 20 “early advocates,” Mack and Riehl call upon the ABA to “engage in the work and dialogue to determine a more appropriate term that more accurately respects and acknowledges the wide range of contributions and roles of all legal professionals.”

Mack and Riehl posted their petition on LinkedIn, where it has generated robust discussion—around 280 comments and 30 reposts. As for the ABA, a spokesperson told me the organization learned of the petition last week, “and ABA leadership will consider it.”

What’s the case against “nonlawyer”? According to the petition, “this term perpetuates negative stereotypes and hierarchical structures, undermining our profession’s fundamental principles of inclusivity and respect,” and “implies a binary division between lawyers and others, inadvertently (or purposefully) marginalizing the invaluable contributions of our legal support professionals, paralegals, and other professional colleagues (e.g., COOs, CFOs, CTOs).”

Earlier this week, I interviewed Olga Mack and Damien Riehl about their initiative. Mack told me it’s an issue she’s been thinking about her entire legal career.

In her first few legal jobs, she worked with numerous non-attorney professionals who were “more senior, experienced, and indispensable” to their organizations than many lawyers,” but were referred to as “nonlawyers”—based not on what they are, but what they are not. She started asking herself, “Why are we using this term?”

Defenders of the term, who posted on the LinkedIn thread, said “nonlawyer” is accurate and efficient. Lawyer and legal commentator Carolyn Elefant, addressing the issue back in 2017, cited the heightened ethical duties of lawyers and said that speaking of lawyers versus nonlawyers is “not an insult, it’s a reality.”

And not everyone sees the term as particularly negative—like Bryan Garner, editor of Black’s Law Dictionary and a leading authority on legal language.

“As a lexicographer, I’m wholly agnostic on this political point,” Garner said. “If, over time, ‘nonlawyer’ takes on pejorative connotations or becomes something of a taboo, my writings will reflect that fact. But in many circles today, the term seems to have the opposite of pejorative connotations!”

But Garner is a lawyer himself. Based on many of the comments on the petition, a fair number of nonlawyers have issues with this term. One client-support professional said it “creates an ‘us versus them’ divide that we have enough of already.”

According to a legal-operations executive, “Given the unprecedented, critical importance of roles from pricing to BizDev to technology,” abandoning the term “should be a no-brainer.”

My own views are nuanced. On the one hand, as a strong advocate of civility, I avoid using terms that might cause offense, regardless of my personal views on whether a certain word is offensive. And so, going forward, I will try my best to not use “nonlawyer.”

On the other hand, as a staunch supporter of free expression, I’m not a fan of policing people’s language. And I definitely don’t support punishing or shaming those who (often inadvertently) use language that powers that be view as verboten.

But here’s why I’m open to finding some new term or terms to replace “nonlawyer.” As both a lawyer and a writer, I’m a big believer in clear communication. And in our conversation, Damien Riehl persuaded me that “nonlawyer” is problematic—not so much because it’s offensive, but because it’s overbroad and imprecise.

“Our opposition to ‘nonlawyer’ is about being respectful, but it’s also about being accurate and precise,” Riehl said. “The ultimate goal of language is to get an idea from my brain into your brain, and ‘nonlawyer’ often obfuscates more than it elucidates.”

Think about all the people who play some role, large or small, in serving the clients of a law firm. The term “nonlawyer” includes everyone from chief operating officers with MBA degrees and patent agents with PhDs to messengers or janitors.

Given the many types of professionals other than lawyers who are involved in the delivery of legal services today, Riehl argued that lawyers “need a word to describe the contributions of our fellow professionals,” as opposed to those whose work, while still essential, “might not be valued in the same way.”

Noting that lawyers appreciate precedent, Riehl pointed out a linguistic shift in another field: medicine. The many health-care professionals who aren’t doctors, including nurse practitioners and physician’s assistants, are increasingly referred to as “allied medical professionals,” rather than “nonphysicians’ or “nondoctors.”

“As lawyers, we like to think we’re good at words,” Riehl said. “Why should we cede the linguistic high ground to doctors?”

Professor David Wilkins of Harvard Law School, a leading scholar of the legal profession, said it’s high time to stop using “nonlawyer.”

“I’ve been saying this for years,” he told me. “No one likes it; it sounds like ‘non-humans.’ And we need the expertise of people like data scientists, business development and marketing professionals—and, of course, our clients, regulators, and policymakers—more than ever, in the age of ESG and ChatGPT.”

Professor Bill Henderson of Indiana University Maurer School of Law, another well-known expert on the legal industry, similarly supports the petition.

“I applaud this effort,” Henderson said. “I am 100% certain that in the years to come, the term ‘legal professional’ will include many multidisciplinary roles, including data, process, technology, design, business operations, marketing, and much more. This issue is only going to get bigger.”

Indeed, the debate over “nonlawyer” parallels a larger debate over the extent that professionals other than attorneys should be involved in the legal industry. At least two states, Utah and California, are allowing investment into law firms by individuals who are not lawyers.

Mack and Riehl told me that some critics of their petition claim it’s a Trojan horse of sorts—part of an effort to elide the distinction between lawyers and nonlawyers, loosen the rules of legal ethics, and allow tech companies to overrun the profession.

But they denied this allegation to me, insisting they take no stance on issues like outside ownership of law firms or the unauthorized practice of law. They don’t want to change the substance of any of the ABA model rules; they simply want them reworded to remove reference to “nonlawyers.”

At the end of the day, the prevalence of the term “nonlawyer” is far from the most serious issue facing the legal profession. But it’s a problem that’s easily addressed—at both an individual level, through our own word choices, and a more systemic level, through organizations like the ABA.

So we might as well address it—not just to promote inclusivity and respect, but to provide a more accurate picture of the many different professionals who play critical roles in delivering legal services today. When it comes to providing top-notch legal work product, it takes a village.

David Lat, a lawyer turned writer, publishes Original Jurisdiction. He founded Above the Law and Underneath Their Robes, and is author of the novel “Supreme Ambitions.”

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