There is a record of concern about the quality of legal services. And there is a record of the attempt to ensure quality through restricting the admission of persons to the practice of law. But beyond this, there is no “system” for, nor for that matter, any theory about, assuring the quality of legal services. This paper proposes such a system, and at the same time offers a theoretical framework for its development. And this is done despite the fact that it is highly unlikely that any such system will be utilized in the near future.

The paper develops its theoretical base, and its concrete proposals, from an extended examination of the systems of quality assurance which have been developed for medical care services. Given a sufficient degree of similarity between the medical care and legal service systems, analogical analysis is used.

The paper concludes that a quality assurance system can be fashioned for the provision of legal services, even though such a system is likely to remain a theoretical construct for the foreseeable future.

The comment by the Cohens on my article, “An Instance of Effective Legal Regulation” (1976), consists mainly of speculation about the fatality distributions and questions regarding the adequacy of the statistical models that I used to test for deviation from random fluctuation. Such speculation is unwarranted, and particularly so when the issue is public policy affecting human life. A point by point examination of the Cohens' comments indicates that they are without merit.