As I’ve started talking about the game I’m developing, I hear people throw out the phrase “gamification of legal services” to describe my project. That’s not what I’m doing and the terminology does make a difference. There is gamification, serious games and simulations and then there are games. The difference really has to do with the design goal.

This is a running debate that gets pretty heated in the game industry. The best known example is the “Gamification is Bullshit” position statement given by scholar Dr. Ian Bogost at the Wharton Gamification Symposium. He has since been featured in several pieces explaining his position that have been published in Wired, The Atlantic, and Kotaku. If you want a good book on gamification, one written by a couple of lawyers even, check out For the Win: How Game Thinking Can Revolutionize your Business, by Dan Hunter and Kevin Werbach. And if you are into that, just re-read Drive by Daniel Pink and you’ll notice how ridiculously connected those books are to each other. (There are also some wonderfully brilliant presentations by designer Sebastian Deterding which help explain what is going wrong currently with gamification efforts in the business world.)

Again, that’s not what I’m doing with my game. Although concepts of internal and external motivation discussed in Drive hang around when we think about the game design and what will motivate better and recurring game play, but those concepts were around in game design long before Pink’s book. In fact, he references the same American psychologist and creator of the concept of “flow”, Mihaly Csikszentmialyi, that Jane McGonigal (of the “games” camp) writes about in her book, Reality is Broken.  Here is Csikszentmialyi’s TED Talk on flow. Really worth your time. There is overlap here.

When games cross over into the area of “games for social good” they get classified as “serious games” and that throws them into this semantics debate. If you are trying to do good with your game, such as educate people about their rights, then is it a game if there is an agenda built into it? It seems to come down to the design goal and the game mechanics.

If you are taking existing process, such as the business of delivering legal services, law firm operations, the judicial process, rules of civil procedure, the process for a criminal or tort case, and adding game elements to those processes to help people learn about them or to encourage them to be handled in a different way, then that is gamification.

Most of the existing “games” around the law or legal services fall into this camp. They tend to be card games, simulations, text-based walkthroughs or quizzes. Most of them have the goal of teaching civics, legal procedures and basic law practice skills to citizens and law students. Here are a few of the better known ones: More »

Today I gave a presentation which was live but also webcast for the Chicago Bar Association. Here are the slides from that talk. I’ve started just using graphics on slides so I’m not sure how useful these will be to anyone without the context, but here they are anyway!

One of my law students recently raised this question to me:  Could a lawyer allow payment for legal services in Bitcoin? It’s not a question I’ve ever heard before, and it’s a good one.

Bitcoin is digital currency and it’s not managed by any central authority but the transactions occur through Bitcoin miners which is basically a server that communicates and confirms the transaction and records it on a ledger. They can be transferred by mobile devices. Recent articles have suggested that eBay and Paypal may open up their sites to the use of Bitcoin.

There is criticism around Bitcoin that the exchange rate is too volatile. A Twitter follower in response to my posing of this question replied: “Would you accept bearer bonds?” There are also potential security issues. The best article I’ve read on that subject was in Wired by an author who had tried to break Bitcoin and failed. And then there are the questions about IOLTA and trust accounting rules and compliance. There is a Bitcoin Foundation which supports the standardization of Bitcoin and claims to support the software design and cryptography behind it.

I could find only one other instance where anyone in the legal profession was offering payment by Bitcoin. A law firm in Albuquerque called Law 4 Small Business published a press release announcing their offering of payments via digital currency.

For a virtual law practice, adding Bitcoin to possible online payment methods might make sense. I’m still thinking through this one. Anyone else have any reactions?

The NY State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics has published a new ethics Opinion 964 on April 4, 2013 that affects virtual law offices. (HT to Niki Black for bringing it to my attention.)

The opinion is more related to lawyer advertising than virtual law offices, but it affects advertising for virtual, traditional and hybrid delivery models. The opinion was prompted by an inquiry from a lawyer who delivers immigration law services primarily online. Like many lawyers with virtual law offices, the lawyer rarely meets with clients in person and communicates using video conferencing and other digital methods of communication. Working from home, the opinion explains that the lawyer did not want to have clients coming to her home office. Accordingly, she preferred to use a PO Box or other mailbox service than providing her home address.

We have seen this question in other states. NC’s proposed ethics opinion on the use of leased time-shared office addresses ran through a similar scenario and inquiry. Virginia’s recent disciplinary case with a lawyer who claimed to have a state-wide virtual law firm in his misleading advertising also raised the issue. So how did NY decide to respond? Hint: I think they had a BYOB pow-wow with the NJ ethics folks.

More »

For what it’s worth, here are some thoughts on my quote that was published in an article on Attorney at Work today by Ruth Carter entitled, Is Work-Life Balance a Fraud?

I’ve been asked about work-life balance since I launched my virtual law office in 2006. (Yes. I am a mom to two young children and sure, that adds a layer of challenge to life, but I get things done and the kids don’t seem to be deprived or permanently scarred for life, yet.) Many assume that trying to achieve work-life balance is a motivating factor for anyone to set up a virtual law practice. It is certainly one of the reasons why I chose this form of practice, but not the only one. I’ve got a long-term side mission running to increase access to justice and online delivery and tech in law practice is a part of that.

Many of the lawyers that I help to set up virtual law firms, from web-based unbundled delivery to hybrid firms with both traditional and online delivery, want the flexibility that virtual practice provides. It’s great that the technology is available to allow us all to make choices that provide more flexibility, but it’s got to be a choice based on what’s right for us and our clients, and that may not be what works for another lawyer and their practice, their clients or their personal lives.

Anyway, here’s my thought on the exhausting work-life balance debate that Laura Bellow, current Pres. of the ABA re-raised earlier this year, as quoted in the article:

Balance is possible, but it’s BALANCE based on choices that we have made in our personal and professional lives. It doesn’t guarantee happiness. I think it’s a way of coping with the phases we all go through in life. Even with the best of examples and role models, I don’t believe a 20-something man or woman in law school has any idea what his or her 30- or 40-something self is going to want or need. So we make decisions because we have to, without fully understanding the consequences or what will have to be sacrificed personally and professionally later on down the line. That’s just a fact of life. Work-life balance is an attempt to adjust to those decisions based on where we are currently in our lives. And that means different things get sacrificed at different times—in both personal and professional spheres—to make the most people and ourselves happy. That’s the balance.

Please take a minute to read Richard Granat’s post entitled “10 Top Law Schools Teaching Law Practice Technology.”

The eLawyering Task Force is working on a project to identify law schools that are adequately preparing their students to enter practice with practical skills related to the use of technology. The Task Force is currently reviewing the programs and courses offered at different law school and has identified ten that meet the criteria discussed in the post.

What is your law school doing on this front? Is it enough?

I’m making a game and it involves legal services.

For the past six months, I’ve researched the idea of creating a game that would engage and empower the public to learn legal issues surrounding personal legal services.

Why am I doing this? When I was ten years old, I didn’t dream of being a lawyer, I dreamed of being this woman, a well-known computer game designer. When I went to college, computer science as a major was in its infancy and a class in game design was unheard of. Life happens. About six months ago, a friend pulled me back into gaming as a hobby – something I had sacrificed to give attention to my children when they were babies. Now back into gaming full force, I remembered how powerful it is as a tool of engagement. That made me start thinking about how cool it would be if we could use games to engage the public to learn about their rights and the law in a way that would help them prevent legal needs before they occur.

I starting researching the use of games for social good. Yes. There is a small segment of the game industry that develops games that will have an impact on society. It’s not all about first person shooters and role playing games. There is even a Games for Change Festival that showcases these games and those who work to create them. I read Jane McGonigal’s book Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better nad How They Can Change the World. Watch her impressive TED talk video if you don’t have time to read the book.

I also have immersed myself in game design and theory, exploring a ”playcentric” approach to design which emphasizes playtesting and user experience before hard core development even begins. I also started exploring the tutorials on different game engines, including Unity, LiveCode (big thanks to the brilliant David Johnson for this one and for the brainstorming sessions), and MIT’s Scratch and using Code.org to start learning JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. I also started researching and understanding the marketplace for games (the legal services marketplace I think I know pretty well by now) and the different platforms for publication.

What has been done so far surrounding legal services is focused more on educating school children on the legal process or it is geared towards law students. There are a few others that are focused on educating the public, but they tend to be heavily text-based, and frankly, I got pretty bored playing them.

Here is an example of a game for social good. In March, a game called Half the Sky Movement was launched as a Facebook game to help end world hunger. The game play is a compelling story about empowering women, and allows the user to donate to a variety of causes as he or she plays through. The game allows the user to unlock free rewards. For example, one of these might be that a real world book would be mailed to a girl in India from a foundation which donated to the nonprofit, Room to Read Foundation. While learning about a social situation, the player is rewarded by connecting with real-world individuals. There is a sharing component and multiple layers of engagement throughout the game.

This, and games like it, inspired me to think that what we really need for legal services is increased ENGAGEMENT – before a legal need arises. That is exactly what games provide when they are done right. The game we are creating isn’t going to be an iCivics or any courtroom-based legal education game. It isn’t going to be preachy or overly full of text. It is going to be a game you would want to play and it will have an unique connection between the legal services marketplace and the players. That’s teasing. I’ll reveal more as I go along. More »

This weekend I gave a presentation for Avvo’s Lawyernomics Conference in Las Vegas. I was talking about the subject of my new book and giving examples of the online marketing tools that branded networks provide for lawyers in their network to use to connect and work with clients online. There were several great questions from the audience throughout, but one question in particular struck me: Couldn’t we use the same techniques the branded networks are using on our own law firm sites?

Yes. Lawyers can use very similar techniques on their websites to draw prospective clients. Lawyers can create web calculators, provide free legal forms and resource libraries, use real-time chat and video to hold initial free consultations, and provide a way for prospective clients to register to request legal assistance directly on their website. These are all things that many virtual law offices include in their website design. These lawyers add various “calls to action”, create landing pages, and connect the resources provided on their site with the sharing components of their different social media account activities. They share and put their valuable content out there for the public. It builds and expands their firm’s online brand and reputation. Lawyers may use different tools to run analytics on their site and their different marketing campaigns and refine them as needed. However, it is still difficult to use all of these same techniques as branded networks and compete effectively. It’s just not enough was the message I had for them.

Why is it not enough? Because the companies marketing direct to consumer are not restricted by any lawyer rules of professional conduct, whether it’s advertising rules or the lovely Rule 5.4 that restricts fee sharing and protects the “independence of the lawyer.” Branded networks are not small business owners, but companies who typically have sizable marketing budgets devoted solely to the purpose of D2C marketing. They can pour a lot of that money into building their brand and spreading it to particular target markets for online, personal legal services. In terms of competing with these companies for purchasing Google AdWords or keywords in any search engine, it is going to be very difficult for any solo, small or medium sized firm to do for a long enough period of time for it to have an impact on client development.

I was honest with this audience. I told them that seven years ago it had been easier to be a solo virtual lawyer, such as myself, to market my online unbundled services using online marketing and social media engagement. However, as the years went by and the options for online offerings increased, especially in personal legal services such as estate planning and family law, it became increasingly difficult to compete in the search engine rankings without investing a significant amount of marketing dollars on online campaigns. What could have been done before 2007 on almost zero cost other than my time and energy and consistency, now takes a significant monetary investment.

That was the reality I shared with these attendees and asked them to look at the future development of this trend in the online delivery of personal legal services as an opportunity for collaboration rather than as a threat to their law firm model. Clearly, virtual law offices that are completely web-based without a traditional law office are going to be the most threatened. But it’s also even more important that these practices learn how to ethically use online marketing tools provided by branded networks and engage in their lawyer networks in a way that helps them build and expand their brand and push traffic and prospective clients back to their firm’s site rather than just exert all their energy providing free content and value to the branded network.

Developing best practices and a law firm policy for using the online marketing platforms provided by branded networks is going to be a key component in the future of lawyer advertising – whether you have a virtual law practice or a traditional one.

This is the video of my brief interview with Colin O’Keefe about the topic of my presentation for Avvo’s Lawyernomics Conference next week in Las Vegas.

This is a video I recorded for a technology exposition that is being held at Wake Forest University. It explains how I am using the virtual law firm simulation to teach a course for Wake Forest Law School entitled Technology in Law Practice. Thanks to Total Attorneys for the continued use of their platform for this purpose. I also provide the students in my course with access to a number of legal SaaS products from practice management systems to document automation and assembly tools so that they will have a wide variety of hands-on experience. The video explains the rest.

I have had a couple years of teaching online courses for different law schools and providing guest lectures on various legal tech related subjects. I am working on a post about distance education in law school from my unique perspective as an adjunct.