The NYC Bar Committee on Professinal Responsibility has issued a 34 page report recommending that trained non-lawyers be allowed to serve as advocated (or "aides") in some court and agency tribunals and also to advise on certain matters outside tribunals.
The report is at http://www2.nycbar.org/pdf/report/uploads/20072450-RolesforNonlawyerPractitioners.pdf.
As you know, Chief Judge Lippman of the New York Court of Appeals has convened a task force to study whether and how non-lawyers may be authorized to perform services now deemed within the exclusive province of lawyers.
Here is yet another event that foreshadows greater changes in the traditional law marketplace. Non-lawyer practitioners are meant to enable clients who are now unrepresented to get affordable advice. That's a worthy goal assuming the non-lawyers are competent to perform the permitted tasks. Testing and training requirements should be able to ensure that competence. On the other hand, of course, some of what they will do might otherwise have been done, for some of their clients at least, by practiciging laywers who will lose the business.
When the Washington Supreme Court recently adopted a rule to allow non-lawyers to perform certain services other than under the authority of a lawyer, it recognized that its rule would redirect some work that would otherwise go to lawyers. But it rejected that prospect as a legitimate consideration when balanced agaisnt the need unrepresented populations have for informed advice.