Regulation of Representatives in Agency Adjudicative Proceedings
Many federal agencies conduct adjudicative proceedings and permit claimants or parties to those proceedings to be represented by attorney or non-attorney practitioners. Almost fifty of these agencies have one or more rules specifically regulating the conduct of these representatives. The number of agencies with such rules has steadily increased from the time the first agencies adopted rules in the mid-twentieth century to the last two decades, in which more than a dozen agencies adopted new rules or modified existing ones. In a previously published paper, I engaged in the first broad comparison of these rules across agencies, but that paper offered only a preliminary and general analysis of these rules.
The purpose of this study is to undertake a detailed examination of how these rules work in practice in a sample of agencies, to make recommendations about how existing rules might be improved, and provide guidance to agencies lacking such rules about whether to adopt them and if so what form they should take.