Incentive Mechanisms And Obstacles For Lawyers To Participate In Legal Aid

In order to ensure that citizens with financial difficulties obtain the necessary legal services,the government has gradually established a legal aid system of "government responsibility,lawyers’ obligations and social participation" through a series of laws,regulations and related policies.In this system,lawyers have become the main force in implementing legal aid.However,problems such as "low quality of legal aid" and "inactive participation of lawyers" in the practice of legal aid constantly appear.In order to solve this dilemma,on the one hand,the government responded by formulating relevant laws and implementing policies such as “public employed lawyers” and “government purchasing legal aid services”;On the other hand,scholars also put forward countermeasures and theoretical concerns from the aspects of system design and lawyer professional ethics.However,can these countermeasures effectively promote lawyers to participate in legal aid better? And for now,what problems do lawyers face when they participate in legal aid? These problems still lack the support of concrete empirical research.Based on this,this article takes the specific practice of lawyers’ participation in legal aid as a starting point,through field research and observation to show the current status of lawyers’ participation in legal aid in Q law firm in the Southwest China,and presents the incentives mechanisms and obstacles for lawyers who participate in legal aid in the process of specific legal aid.After observing the practice of lawyers ’participation in legal aid,it is found that in addition to the impact of aid subsidies,the motivation of lawyers to enhance their competitiveness in the process of legal service marketization,the ethical choice of non-moral professional dilemma in the process of lawyer professionalization,the government’s standardizes and institutionalizes for lawyers to participation in legal aid and the interactive logic of "symbiotic exchange" between the judicial administrative agency,law firms,and lawyers all have an important impact on the active participation of lawyers in legal aid.These factors together motivate lawyers to participate in legal aid cases.However,the study also found that the lawyers involved in legal aid also faced many obstacles,such as the contradiction between the commercialism of lawyers and the public welfare of legal aid,the relatively weak position of lawyers in the legal professional group,lawyers screen a case according to its difficulty and the attitude of the parties,the insufficient and the not in place financial support for lawyers in the legal services market,etc.Through in-depth analysis of the incentive mechanisms and obstacles for lawyers to participate in legal aid services,the article reveals that the practice of lawyers participating in legal aid is a process of effective interaction between the country,the market and society.Similarly,this also answers an important proposition across sociology,political science,law and many other fields —— the relationship between the state and society.The state and society are not binary oppositions,but are interactive and cooperative processes.Therefore,through the perspective of the interaction among state,market and social,there are some aspects: assumption of government responsibility in legal aid,introduce the open competition mechanism of legal aid public service and strengthen the construction of professional ethics of lawyers based on public welfare legal services,etc,which can help establish and improve the incentive mechanism for participating in legal aid,overcome the obstacles for lawyers to participate in legal aid and accelerate the construction of China’s public legal service system.