Remember how I wrote that virtual practitioners may need to collaborate with “branded network concepts” when updating their marketing strategies?  I also argue that this is necessary in the conclusion of my new book on unbundling because it’s a major component in increasing overall access to justice. Apparently I’m not the only one who sees the potential benefits to the public and the profession from the availability of newer online lawyer advertising methods.

The ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services has written a letter to the Commission on Ethics 20/20 providing its recommendations regarding lawyer advertising rules. In an interesting move, the Committee has recommended the deletion of Model Rule 7.2(b).

For those of us in virtual practices who depend on online advertising methods perhaps moreso than traditional law firms, this would be a potentially revolutionary change to the rules. Model Rule 7.2(b) is the rule that prohibits a lawyer from giving anything of value for recommendation for his or her services with four exceptions. It is these exceptions and the speed at which online advertising methods have developed that has caused confusion and controversy over the past few years.

The Committee’s letter provides a background on how changes in online advertising methods have impacted the options available to the public seeking legal services. Because one of the primary goals of the Committee is to increase access to justice for individuals of moderate income levels, they are quick to point out that these new online methods actually allow for individuals of all income levels to find both the lawyers that they could work with as well as other resources that empower them to make educated decisions about the legal services they might need. More »

The ABA eLawyering Task Force is accepting nomination forms for the annual James I. Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering.

The award is given to a lawyer who has developed innovative legal service delivery over the Internet. The focus of the award is on the delivery of personal legal services, especially those that serve individuals of moderate to middle class means. Nominees may be individual lawyers, a law firm, or any other organization that delivers legal services to individuals.

Last year’s Keane Award recipient was Orange County California Legal Aid Society for their development of Legal Genie. The year before that, Lee Rosen, owner of Rosen Law Firm, was the recipient. The award is presented at a special ceremony at the ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago on March 30, 2012 and comes with other perks such as publication about the award recipient in Law Practice magazine and other LPM Publications.

Do you know of a lawyer, law firm or other organization that deserves nomination? Self-nomination is accepted as well. The deadline is February 15. The criteria for nomination and the form for submission may be found on the elawyering task force website.

This week I was honored to provide a plenary presentation at this year’s Legal Services Corporation’s Technology Initiative Grants (TIG) conference in Albuquerque. The title of my talk was “Going Virtual to Expand Access” and my purpose was to provide the attendees with an overview of how private practice lawyers and law firms are using technology to delivery legal services online.

I discussed the current state of the legal marketplace, where it is heading, and the changing expectations of clients in a more Internet-driven world. At the end, I posed a few questions for the audience that we then took into a break-out session.  Marc Lauritsen  joined us virtually to brainstorm these issues. The questions I posed for legal services organizations were:

How will you:

- Identify candidates for online delivery?

- Match lawyer volunteers with prospective online limited scope matters?

- Integrate online delivery methods?

- Address technology and security concerns in serving clients online?

- Use tech to collaborate with private practitioners, law schools, and legal SaaS providers to increase access to justice? More »

The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) is holding its annual conference in D.C. this week. I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion entitled “Technological Innovation in Practice and Education.”

The conference has an entire workshop devoted to the future of the profession and legal ed. I see that as an acknowledgement that the legal education system is in need of innovation and reform and fast.  If the legal profession is going to be rescued from its downward spiral, it’s got to start with the law schools.

A few of the questions the workshop will address:

1) What new or different kinds of training will law schools of the future need to provide?

2) How can law schools better serve students seeking to develop critical skills in the areas demanded by changes in legal practice?

3) What innovations are currently underway in law schools?

4) How will projected changes in the economics of the legal profession affect law students’ priorities and law schools’ budgets?

For my session, I will be giving a presentation about virtual law practice and showing a demonstration of how myself and other lawyers work with clients and each other using cloud-based technology. But I will also be sharing some of the emerging trends in the future of legal service delivery that will impact future young lawyers. I’m hoping for a challenging Q&A session. If I get it with any audience, it aught to be this one.

There is a book to be published soon entitled “Educating the Digital Lawyer“, co-edited by Oliver Goodenough and Marc Lauritsen. This book will showcase chapters written to address many of the issues that this workshop will raise.  I wrote a chapter for it that laid out some of the topics that I thought should be in a law school curriculum and I probably won’t have time to share with the attendees here what I would like to see happen in law schools, but that’s what blogging is for.  So here goes.  More »

The State Bar of California has released a draft formal ethics opinion (No. 10-0003) regarding the use of a “virtual law office practice” by an attorney. This seven page ethics opinion was tentatively approved by the State Bar Standing Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct on November 5th and has been published for a 90-day public comment period.

The question posed in the opinion:

May an attorney maintain a virtual law office practice (“VLO”) and still comply with her ethical obligations, if the communications with the client, and storage of and access to all information about the client’s matter, are all conducted solely through the Internet using the secure computer servers of a third-party vendor (i.e., “cloud computing”)?

The opinion acknowledges the impact that the Internet and technology have had on the legal profession and that “the provision of legal services via a VLO has started to emerge as an increasingly viable vehicle in which to deliver accessible and affordable legal services to the general public.” More »

The December issue of Law Practice Today is focused on elawyering with articles from myself and fellow ABA elawyering Task Force members discussing different forms of elawyering.

My article is a basic “get started with elawyering” introduction.  Here is an excerpt:

It is not necessary to convert to a completely paperless law office in the clouds in order to benefit from different methods of elawyering. Most lawyers would prefer to get their feet wet first and then gradually find ways to take portions of their practice digital – whether that means moving to cloud-based applications for certain tasks or something smaller in scope, such as the use of a virtual paralegal or virtual assistant. There are a few simple first steps that a lawyer might take to getting started with elawyering…..read more

Other articles in this issue include:

Expand Your Solo or Small Firm Practice Using Client Portals, by Donna Seyle

Document Assembly Over the Internet, by Richard S. Granat

Dancing in the Cloud, by Marc Lauritsen

An Update on Governing Cloud Computing, by Will Hornsby and Joseph Duffy

The Potentials and Perils of a Virtual Law Practice, by Ed Poll

Imagine shopping for your groceries and remembering that you needed to check in with your attorney regarding the status of your divorce case. You find a private legal services booth and step inside. You touch a few buttons on the computer tablet attached to the kiosk and a video of a receptionist who works for your law firm comes online to take your request. A few minutes later you chat with your attorney face to face via web conferencing and log off. Your attorney has informed you that she needs another item for the next hearing in your case. You add a note to your grocery list. When you get home, you will upload the document to your attorney online and schedule another video conference through your secure client portal – after putting the groceries away.

Such access to legal services is now available in the UK by a company called Instant Law UK.  The LegalFutures blog announced last week that the company was placing video conferencing kiosks in shopping centers this month and by the end of 2012 it hopes to have 120 kiosks across the country. The video conferencing service is also available to clients via the Internet. Areas of law that the company provides include Family, Employment, Personal Injury, Immigration, Landlord & Tenant, Medical Negligence, Contract Disputes, Wills, and Probate. More »

I was pleased to find out last week that this blog has made the list of the ABA Journal’s top 100 law blogs for this year. Thank you for reading!

You can vote for your favorite blogs in different categories on the ABA Journal website, but they do require registration. This blog is listed under the LPM category, but they also have Technology, Opinion, Trial Practice, News, IP Law, and several other categories of blogs. It’s a great resource for finding or rediscovering new law blogs.

I’m honored to have been nominated to the list along with some of my fellow bloggers that I read regularly. I just finished writing a new book for the ABA LPM section about limited scope representation, the future of legal services and how law firms can adjust to the changing legal marketplace by incorporating unbundling into their law practices. Now that the book is finished, I’ll have more time to devote to keeping this blog updated with current information on virtual law practice and elawyering. Again, thank you for reading!

The NC Bar has published the revised version of it proposed ethics opinion entitled “Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property”, 2011 FEO 6 on the website. It will also be published in the next issue of the NC State Bar Journal. 

You can read some of the history of this opinion in this post.  After a year or more of subcommittee review and revision, this latest version will hopefully be the final one that the Ethics Committee recommends for adoption by the Council at their January meeting.

The subcommittee removed the list of minimum requirements for the selection of a technology vendor. Many of the items on the list had raised concern as detailed here by myself and others. The new version of the opinion sticks with the “reasonable care” standard requiring the attorney to do his or her due diligence in researching the technology and any third-party provider. The proposed opinion states:

…a law firm may use SaaS if reasonable care is taken to minimize the risks of inadvertent disclosure of confidential information and to protect the security of client information and client files. A lawyer must fulfill the duties to protect confidential client information and to safeguard client files by applying the same diligence and competency to manage the risks of SaaS that the lawyer is required to apply when representing clients.

More »

Last week I was honored to give a keynote at the annual Canadian Discipline Administrators Conference in Toronto hosted by the Law Society of Upper Canada. The attendees were the discipline authorities of the different Canadian Bar jurisdictions. After speaking with several of them and based on the Q & A session, I can report that our neighbors to the north are grappling with some of the same issues as our State Bar ethics regulators regarding the use of SaaS in law practice management.

An interesting idea was raised by a member of the group that the Canadian Bar might create a private cloud just for Canadian lawyers. I believe there was some mention of this as well in the cloud computing report published by the Law Society of British Columbia this summer.

Would this address some of the concerns surrounding lawyers placing their data into the hands of third-party providers and hosting it in a public cloud?  It’s certainly something to think about. My initial reaction was that it would limit competition and because of the expense of creating and maintaining a private cloud, might take away many of the cost-savings associated with a public cloud as well as cause problems when a law firm wants to use another SaaS product that does not collaborate with the Canadian Bar to host a copy of the data on the private cloud. But there would be benefits, especially for Canadian lawyers who are subject to a more rigorous auditing process that requires immediate access by regulators to a law firm’s data.

I still think the best approach to take would be to create guidelines for lawyers rather than restricting use of web-based technology to a private cloud or restricting technology use to a specific list of approved vendors, especially if that list of vendors might not be updated regularly.

What do you think about the creation of a private cloud? What if your state bar proposed to create a private cloud just for its members? What about cross-border and multijurisdictional practices?

The slides from the presentation are below. I’ve integrated several ethics slides that are specific to the Canadian Bar. For those of you familiar with my presentations, the first few slides may be familiar background information on cloud computing and virtual practice, so skip ahead to the interesting case studies and resources.