September’s issue of the Michigan Bar Journal features an article that I wrote entitled “Best Practice Tips for the Virtual Law Office.” The article summarizes some of the potential malpractice risks of using technology to deliver legal services online and then discuss ways to mitigate those risks.
This past week’s ILTA conference was full of great insight about disruptive technologies, virtual law practice and the changes that are expected in practice management as a result. I wasn’t able to attend the conference in person, but I managed to collect materials and information presented at key sessions. Here’s what I picked up without the travel expenses and jet lag.
The Legal Current blog posted about an ILTA session entitled “A New View of the Automated Law Firm.” The session explained how the commoditization of legal services is leading to the need for automation of the workflow in law practices. Document assembly and automation will help to streamline the delivery of legal services to meet the consumer demand for legal services based on a fixed fee model. Here are the slides from that presentation.
Darryl Mountain, expert on disruptive technologies and document automation, and Marc Lauritsen, co-chair of the ABA elawyering task force and author of The Lawyer’s Guide to Working Smarter With Knowledge Tools, presented a session entitled “Harnessing Disruptive Technologies”. The slides for that presentation are here. They covered the nature of disruptive technologies and look at technologies that can be used to create “substantive legal work.” The presentation slides cover document assembly, web-based document automation and virtual law practice. Lauritsen covered choiceboxing, an interactive decision support system which has multiple potential forms of application in elawyering and choice management. The slides also list two stumbling blocks to the use of disruptive technologies in law practice: “1. the knowledge acquisition bottleneck and 2. ethical rules of the legal profession.” More »
Lee Rosen set off a series of blog posts written by other attorneys related to virtual law practice last Friday. I’ve posted some comments on the different posts, starting with Lee’s. So rather than re-hash the debate, I’m going to link to the different posts below in the order they were written.
There different ways to approach the analysis of whether of not virtual law practice is a good fit for your solo practice or law firm or a good fit for your clients or practice area. These posts highlight a couple of those positions, but they are far from complete in analyzing all of the various forms or structures of elawyering to deliver legal services to clients online.
Lee Rosen, “What the Virtual Law Office Advocates Aren’t Telling You.”
Carolyn Elefant, “The Virtual Law Office Debate: Virtually Impossible To Succeed or Not?”
Susan Cartier Liebel, “The Virtual Law Office Debate…Really?”
Richard Granat, “Framing the Discussion about Virtual Law Firm Practice.”
Below are two videos taken at ABA Annual a couple weeks ago that were just published on the Legal Currents blog. I’m talking about virtual law practice, where I see it going in the future and about some of the key ethics issues for attorneys to be aware of before adding a virtual law office to their practice management.
I was notified this past week that the NC Bar Ethics Committee met at the end of July and decided to send the proposed ethics opinion, 2010 FEO 7 “Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property” to a subcommittee for further study. They will be providing an update on the status of the opinion again after the Ethics Committee’s meeting in October.
Is anyone aware of other state bar committees that are reviewing this topic? I believe that the ABA Center for Professionalism is currently reviewing cloud computing and considering the need to create some form of guidance or regulation related to the use of it in practice management. The elawyering task force is also working on drafting guidelines for the use of cloud computing. It would be great to know if there are other state bar initiatives related to SaaS, cloud computing or virtual law practice.
The final guest post in my three-part series for the Massachusett’s Law Office Management Assistance Program (LOMAP) has posted on the blog. This final post covers ethics considerations in virtual law practice including both the attorney’s responsibility to thoroughly research their software provider as well as best practices for the ethical management of a virtual law office.
Below is the introduction to the post. Many thanks to Jared Correia for the opportunity to share my research and writing with the readers of the LOMAP blog.
From the guest post:
The delivery of legal services online carries with it a number of ethical concerns; however, these ethical concerns are not all that unlike those that have traditionally been addressed by offline law firms. The online lawyer is able to mitigate risks associated with virtual law practice just as a traditionally-practicing attorney would with an offline practice when, for example, installing and using software for law practice management. There are two separate categories of ethics matters to address in connection with the virtual practice of law. The first pertains to the attorney’s duty in selecting the service provider that will be setting up, hosting and maintaining the virtual law practice. With any cloud computing service, there are precautions that must be observed in researching and choosing a software provider. The second category of potential ethics concerns relates to the attorney’s daily operation of the virtual law office; and, the focus there is on ways to mitigate potential malpractice risks when working with clients online. Further issues related to each category are discussed in greater detail below; and, in addition, suggestions are made and additional resources are pointed to, for further guidance.
You can read the rest of the guest post on the LOMAP blog.
There was a lot of coverage related to virtual law practice and the delivery of online legal services at this year’s ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco. Compared with even a year ago, this topic is fully on the radar of attorneys and bar officials concerned with virtual law practice for both solo and small firms. However, this time there was also interest as it relates to larger firms, the outsourcing of legal services and the globalization of law firms.
I sat on a panel discussion entited “20/20 Vision: The Impact of Technology and Globalization on Ethics for the 21st Century Lawyer” and was pleased to see a packed audience as well as have the majority of audience questions pertain to virtual law practice. Here is a link to a video interview of our panel’s moderator, Judith Miler.
The questions from the audience after the panel discussion were the same ones I hear at a lot of presentations. The primary concern is still related to the basic security of entrusting law office data to cloud computing. The second greatest concern is about the verification or authentication of client identity online. “Can you really form a relationship online without seeing the whites of their eyes?” Sometimes it’s just a matter of being comfortable with the technology and getting used to using it to communicate that helps answer these questions. Overall, the response was positive and hopefully, the details and resources I provided in the manuscript for the attendees will go a long way in answering their questions about the security and cloud computing concerns in virtual law practice.
Will Hornsby joined Marc Lauritsen, Richard Granat and myself for a lively panel discussion on virtual lawyering on Friday. Richard informed me that he also provided a presentation on virtual law practice to a room of state bar presidents and other bar officials who were very receptive to these concepts in practice management.
ABA President Carolyn Lamm during her presentation on Sunday night on a panel entitled “Lawyers Surviving in a Darwinian World” mentioned online legal service companies and emphasized the legal profession’s reponsibility to step up to meet the needs of the public who are going online to seek out legal assistance. The ABA Journal has a write-up of her comments during the presentation.
Social media was also a hot topic at several CLE sessions at the annual meeting. At one of the vendor booths I picked up a copy of Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontierby Michael Fertik and David Thompson. I’ll try to post a review of the book on this blog when I get a chance to read through it. Even the Twitter hashtag for the event was active this year indicating a growing comfort by my fellow attorneys to embrace technology to communicate. And to top it off, I got to meet Heather Armstrong, mommy-blogger and famous Dooce.comwriter, at the WestlawNext CLE about social media in the workplace.
There were also some vendors that I spoke with who are making an effort to facilitate virtual law practice for attorneys. This might be in response to the ethics and UPL complaints raised by some state bars to the documents produced by legal service companies. Both Legal Zoom and Rocket Lawyer are combining their document assembly and automation technologies with the ability to connect an attorney with the consumer going online to fill out and purchase basic legal forms. I’m reaching out to both vendors to find out more about how their systems will allow for this type of delivery to be controlled by the attorney as a practice management tool for delivering online legal services.
The overall tone I left with at the end of the annual meeting was that technology to deliver legal services online and to communicate with our clients and other legal professionals is embraced as the future. Rather than the over-emphasis on the security and risks that I’ve seen the past few years at other conferences, the tone seems to be an acceptance of virtual law practice and a move towards finding ways to responsibly integrate it into our practice management toolboxes. I much prefer this optimistic, but realistic, mood.
I’m on a panel discussion this morning at the ABA Annual Meeting about the impact of technology and globalization on ethics for the 21st century lawyer. One of the questions that I expect will come up will be about the need for ethics rules to be revised to reflect the changes in practice management that involve virtual law practice and cloud computing. Which rules do I think need to be revised?
Based on my research, not many state bar ethics rules or advisory opinions actually address the use of cloud computing or the delivery of legal services online. The North Carolina State Bar’s proposed opinion related to SaaS in law practice managment that was published this summer is one of the first to my knowledge. There are opinions out there that are related to the hosting of law office data by third-party providers, but none that really discuss the actual delivery of legal services online to clients.
My main concern with the development of any future ethics opinions is that they should not attempt to define the technology too narrowly. This is a problem that attorneys have now in trying to interpret the existing rules and regulations based on way that they were drafted years ago. Try figuring out how to apply rules related to email, fax and cell phone usage to the cloud computing apps you currently use in practice management. There is a lot of uncertainty in trying to comply with the rules when the rules weren’t really written to take the rapid growth of technology into consideration. More »
The ABA Journal’s Legal Rebels is kicking off the 2010 tour with a presentation during the upcoming American Bar Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco. I’ll be presenting 20 slides in 6 minutes related to innovation in the delivery of legal services online and how it can be used to grow your law practice. The presentation starts at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, August 5 at the expo floor at George Moscone Center West. They will be posting the video of my speech at legalrebels.com later in September and I’ll post the slides up on slideshare afterwards. If you are in town for the Annual Meeting, please join us.
Jim Calloway and Sharon Nelson have published a new podcast on The Digital Edge entitled “Virtual Lawyering Goes Mainstream.” Calloway and Nelson discuss ways that virtual lawyering is starting to take off within the legal profession.
Over at the Slaw.ca blog, Sharon Nelson and John Simek has a post entitled “The Virtual Lawyer Stampede.”
Jim Calloway also discusses virtual lawyering on his practice management blog under the post “Virtual Law Offices Are Becoming a Real-World Alternative.”
I will be participating in three events at the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco in a couple weeks that are related to virtual law practice.
Update (via elawyering blog):
eLawyering Task Force Meeting, Saturday, August 7, 2010, Hilton Hotel, Union Square, 9:00 – 11:00 A.M.Open Meeting
National Conference of State Bar Presidents, Joint Workshop 3A – Keeping Pace with the Evolving Practice of Law
