Virtual Law Practice

Category: Cloud Computing

  • Practicing Law Online Ebook

    Practicing Law Online Ebook

    Here is the revised version of the Practicing Law Online ebook, which I first released in 2008 and updated in 2010.

    This revised edition of the ebook examines different business models for virtual law firms and goes beyond solos and small firms to apply the concept of virtual practice to larger firms and in-house legal departments. The ebook walks the reader through the process of choosing a virtual law firm business model and examines methods of online delivery that work best with the firm’s practice area and client base. I also incorporated some of the design methodology and design thinking process I have learned here at Stanford.

    The updated 2nd edition of the full book has a lot more detail, including checklists and policies and procedures, and goes into topics such as online marketing, developing a virtual law firm business plan, ethics issues and best practices. The second edition of the book is with the publisher right now and should be out by the spring of 2015. I hope my readers enjoy this new edition of the ebook. Please consider checking out the full book in the spring. It’s full of case studies from law firms of all sizes as well as an appendix of sample documents, checklists, and ethics resources.

    The first publication of this ebook was created as a way for me to address all of the questions I was receiving from lawyers when I would give presentations about virtual law practice. Questions about ethics issues and cloud computing came up back then. Lawyers wanted to have a virtual law office, but they were hesitant because they did not understand how the technology would work and how that would comply with their jurisdictions rules. This first ebook was intended as a basic guide for setting up a virtual law office and geared towards solos and small firms. ebookcover

    Back in 2008 there was still a lot of controversy around the use of cloud computing in law practice – yes, basic cloud computing for practice management. There was even more controversy around delivering legal services to clients online. Only a handful of states had issued ethics opinions on the topic at that time and lawyers had a ton of questions, most of which related to ethics and malpractice concerns. A lot of misinformation was flying around. Jack Newton, founder of Clio, Larry Port, founder of Rocket Matter, Richard Granat, President of DirectLaw, and myself got together by phone for the first Legal Cloud Computing Association call to discuss how we could set industry standards, reassure state bars and lawyers, and counteract some of the false statements that were going around about cloud computing. A couple of us even sat in on state bar ethics committees and spent a considerable amount of our unpaid time advising and evangelizing to make sure restrictive rules and opinions that did not make sense from a technology perspective did not make it to print. So that first ebook, which has had hundreds of downloads since I released it, spent a lot of text looking at how SaaS and cloud computing work, what the benefits and risks of virtual law practice are, and how to apply best practices to avoid ethics issues.

    This time around revising the ebook I did not feel the need to focus on the same content. Many state bars have either published formal or advisory opinions approving of virtual law practice or third-party hosting of law office data. There is less skepticism about the consumer demand for online legal services and our profession’s ability to deliver it while complying with the rules of professional conduct. There are more hybrid virtual firms – traditional law practice incorporating some form of online delivery. More law firms are finding ways to unbundle their legal services which also facilitates online delivery. I receive fewer questions about ethics concerns and more about the successful online marketing of online services. I’m glad that I have my strong tech and ethics background for these questions, but I’ve had to learn a lot about business planning and management, online marketing and design to keep up.

    Thank you to those who have worked with me over the past ten years to develop and support the concept of virtual law practice. Future innovations on the model are no doubt on their way in the New Year.

     

     

  • Commission on Future of Legal Services Seeks Feedback

    Commission on Future of Legal Services Seeks Feedback

    I was honored to be asked to participate in the ABA President’s Commission on the Future of Legal Services this year and next. This Commission is calling for Issues Paper feedback now through December 10th. For my legal tech friends and colleagues, if you have something to say, now is a good time to get it on the table. Details below.

    I like the ABA President this time around. I’ve heard President William Hubbard speak several times by now. I’ve heard him address some difficult criticisms of the ABA with grace at a conference on disruptive innovation in the market for legal services at Harvard Law School. Most importantly, I think he is making an effort to listen and take seriously the fact that technology can be used to increase access to justice in a variety of ways. Whether or not he or any future leader has the ability to actually sway the more traditional (and often tech-averse) mindsets of the lawyers who actually hold up the HOD and prevent progress…..well, I’ll retain my healthy skepticism. That said, President Hubbard is making solid headway with this Commission. The initiative seems like a good follow-up to the initial research and rule changes that the Commission on Ethics 20/20 underwent.

    From the Commission’s site:

    …technology, globalization, and other forces are transforming the ways legal services are accessed and delivered. Familiar practice structures are giving way in a marketplace that continues to evolve. New providers are emerging, online and offline, to offer a range of services in dramatically different ways.

    I joined up with the BlueSky Working Group that formed out of the Commission. The working groups are interesting because they are made up of such a diverse group of people from across the legal profession. I can tell already that a large part of the work process for the group is just going to be educating each other about our different perspectives whether its from practicing in BigLaw, working in legal services, in legal academia, or with legal tech startups.

    The goal of the Commission is to propose new approaches that are not constrained by traditional models for delivering legal services and that are rooted in the essential values of protecting the public.

    To focus these working groups and the entire Commission, the Chair has issued a call for comments on an Issues Paper. I’ve posted the Issues Paper below. The issues are related to the delivery and access of legal services by the public.

     

     IssuesPaperFeedback

     

     

     

     

  • Teaching eProfessionalism to Law Students with Social Media

    SMflowersToday I posted an article on the Legal Technology Blog, part of the Law Professor Blog Network, about the challenges of teaching eprofessionalism to law students in my Social Media and the Law course.  You can read the full post here.

    The trick with teaching social media to law students is that it is a personal choice the students have to make about finding the right balance between their personal lives, their friends and family and hobbies, and their soon-to-be professional lives. I give them my own choices in the use of social media as an example and teach them how to use the settings in each application to build up walls between their two worlds.

    Some students dive straight into the idea of sharing their thoughts on the law and their work with the world. Other students flat out refuse to join Facebook for the course, but will have a professional online presence on LinkedIn. For personal reasons, including sometimes domestic violence concerns or for religious reasons, students will not want to join these public applications and want to try to remain anonymous online and protect their privacy. Those students still have to complete an assignment to show me they understand the use of privacy settings on the social media applications. Whether they use it or not, their clients may. And many of them do not realize that some branded networks, such as Avvo, may create online profiles for them after they pass the bar whether they want them or not. I think they need to understand how these applications work regardless with hands-on experience – to protect themselves and their clients. When we cover the material related to the use of social media as evidence, it also makes a lot more sense if they’ve explored the applications first.

  • Podcast: How to Provide Client Hand-holding in Virtual Law Practice

    micLast month I joined in on a podcast for the ABA Journal with reporter Stephanie Francis Ward; Michelle Crosby, founder of Wevorce; and Fred Rooney, Director of Touro Law Center’s International Justice Center for Post-Graduate Development.
    The topic was “How do you provide client hand-holding if you run a virtual firm?”

    You can listen to the podcast on the ABA Journal site or read the transcript.

    Ward asked the three of us this question towards the end of the podcast:

    [C]an the three of you give me one tip on making that personal connection and doing it online? So combining the personal connection of perhaps, like, automation and things like that, that can make it more affordable for the client and make you, help you be more efficient as a lawyer.

    My response:

    I think that finding a way…that engages the online client. Gets them interested, builds an initial amount of trust. That goes a long way.

    Right now, I’m researching games and gamification as ways that lawyers can effectively engage that prospective client in whatever the practice area is that the client is looking for help. But sort of an initial, warm-up education, empowerment that happens online before that prospective client registers for access or asks a question of the online lawyer.

    I think that really helps prepare them when you start working with the client, then you move from there to web conferencing, have the Google hangout or Skype or real-time chat or whatever their virtual law firm uses to communicate. But I think that initial online engagement is really critical.

  • Online Legal Services Gets a Boost from ABA & Rocket Lawyer Partnership

    connectedI was thrilled to hear the news today from the Wall Street Journal Law Blog that the ABA announced its partnership with Rocket Lawyer on a pilot project to help match up ABA members with online clients.

    I’ve been researching and writing about lawyer collaboration with branded networks like Rocket Lawyer for the past couple of years with a focus on ethics issues and best practices. I wrote a book about the best practices for lawyers who wanted to work with these companies and make connections with clients through them. I think this partnership integrates wonderfully with virtual law practice and unbundling of legal services. However, I didn’t see this announcement coming because of the resistance I’ve heard from state bars for the past several years to any form of online delivery, even completely lawyer-owned and controlled, that might threaten the traditional lawyer business model. This announcement is huge because it steps back from the usual protectionist stance of the ABA and looks at what the public is asking for from the profession and at what lawyers need in order to connect with them. It is an acknowledgement from the ABA that consumers are going online looking for legal services and that not having licensed lawyers on board with the public’s need for online legal services puts both the lawyer and the public at a disadvantage.

    One of the key themes that came out of the Legal Services Corporation’s Tech Summit Report was the need for mobile access. Rocket Lawyer has developed a mobile app as a part of its online services offerings. Getting lawyers used to using mobile apps and online tools is going to increase the profession’s ability to provide greater access to legal services, especially in rural areas. It’s also going to lead to greater acceptance and use of unbundling as a legal service delivery model. It will be interesting to see how these pilot projects role out. Here is a link to my free ebook with best practices for collaboration by lawyers and companies like Rocket Lawyer.

  • ILTA Article – Teaching Tomorrow’s Lawyers Legal Tech Skills

    apple2An article I co-authored with Ron Dolin entitled Course Correction: Teaching Tomorrow’s Lawyers Legal Tech Skills, was published in the newest edition of the ILTA Peer to Peer Magazine.

    Ron developed the syllabus for and taught the first course on legal informatics at Stanford Law School. Several of his students from that course have gone on to find innovative paths in the legal industry, including Margaret Hagan, his co-founder in the Program for Legal Tech and Design. Ron writes about the changes he believes are critical in the law school curriculum to prepare future lawyers for the realities of practicing law with technology. I write about my experience teaching courses in legal tech at various law schools for the past three years and developing the Center for Law Practice Technology with Richard Granat.

    It’s a short article that summarizes what Ron and I believe are the key issues that law schools need to address when designing a curriculum that prepares new lawyers to enter a changed legal marketplace. We link out to other useful resources for further research.

  • LegalTech Startup Weekend – San Francisco

    If you are in the San Francisco area, consider checking out the LegalTech Startup Weekend. I’ll be one of the mentors for the event along with several other founders of legal tech companies, including LawPal, Ravel, One400, Judicata, LawGives, Casetext, and more.

    Teams form Friday evening, August 15th and final presentations with be on Sunday, August 17th. The teams will tackle four challenges listed on the event site and compete for prizes.

    The intersection of law and technology presents unique challenges and exciting opportunities for growth and creativity. Recent years have seen a surge of answers to law’s need for innovation, such as e-discovery tools, contract generation apps, law practice management SaaS, virtual firms, and websites changing the way lawyers research. Myriad possibilities remain to integrate tech into solutions for consumers, attorneys, businesses, and the government. SF LegalTech Startup Weekend will bring together legal professionals, policy geeks, programmers, designers and students to innovate the legal services market and bring it into the 21st Century – one solution at a time. SFLegalTechStartupWeekend

  • Second Edition of Virtual Law Practice Book

    book pic2I am updating the second edition to the Virtual Law Practice book that I wrote back in 2010. The book needs to be almost completely re-written based on the way that technology has changed since I wrote about the set up of online delivery in law firms only four years ago.

    I am expanding the book to include my newer experiences working with law firms and lawyers to integrate online delivery of legal services into different law firm business models. Over the past four years, I’ve taught law school courses on the subject of virtual practice and related topics, such as unbundling of legal services and law practice management. Some of the content and material from my courses will end up in the text of the updated edition of the book.

    At the time of writing the first edition, I was very focused on the idea of completely virtual law offices, mostly operated by solos or small firms. However, since then, I’ve worked with so many varieties of business models that use technology to deliver online services that I realized I need to expand the book to include these different models. In many cases, in terms of economic success, these other methods of delivering online services seem to be more successful than the purely virtual law office model.

    In terms of statistics and specific data about the operation and success of any form of virtual practice, we still have very little concrete information to share. Companies like Clio and MyCase may gather useful information on the use of their systems to help with their marketing campaigns to lawyers. However, no one else seems to be able to gather data on how many lawyers deliver legal services online, what tools they use,  how it integrates with traditional delivery models, who their customers are, and any success they may or may not be having. I have my personal experience and that of my colleagues in elawyering working with many law firms and lawyers to create virtual law practices. Perhaps in the future as more lawyers add unbundled, online legal services to their offerings, the state bars will assist in collecting this data.  For the second edition, I will try to locate more statistics that might be useful in helping practitioners determine what the risks and benefits are of the different models of delivery.

    I’m going to spend the next two months finishing up this second edition and then turn my focus back to the work on my fellowship at Stanford Law School with the Center on the Legal Profession. I am attending the GSummit event in San Francisco next week to learn more about gamification and games and to think of ways to apply this form of increased online engagement to the legal profession and to serving the public.

    If anyone who read the original book would like to make suggestions about anything that you would like to see me cover in this updated edition, please let me know. Thanks and I look forward to having new content to share on this blog and elsewhere in the very near future!

  • ABA Journal Article on Virtual Practice

    cloudThe ABA Journal published an article entitled “Lawyers’ definitions of virtual practice vary, but not when it comes to finding success“.  The article runs through the different definitions of virtual law practice and the wide variety of ways that lawyers are choosing to deliver legal services online. The debate over the definition of the term (which the online legal community hashed out in multiple debates over the past eight years) does not matter as much as the use of the technology to serve clients, increase access to legal services, and provide lawyers with flexibility in their business models.

    The most valuable content in this lengthy article is the second half that goes into the ethics issues and the value of a virtual practice and how that might differ from a traditional law firm. The article references the ABA eLawyering Task Force’s the Best Practice Guidelines for Legal Information Web Site Providers and recommendations for working with cloud-based providers.

    The ABA LPD has asked me to write a second edition of my Virtual Law Practice book which was published in 2010. I’ll be working on that over the next couple of months. I’m expecting to need to re-write the majority of the book. So much has changed in only a few years in the area of online legal service delivery.

  • Video – Disruptive Innovation in Legal Services at Harvard

    Last week I attended a conference hosted by Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession, entitled “Disruptive Innovation in the Market for Legal Services.”

    My primary reason for attending was to hear Clayton Christensen, a Professor at Harvard’s Business School and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, speak about disruption in the legal profession. Unfortunately, he admitted to not really having analyzed our profession from the perspective of disruptive innovation so his talk was a bit of a rehash of both Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovative University. It was still really worth it to hear from the man himself, and following his presentation, the Senior VP of IBM Watson, Mike Rhodin, the CEO of Legal Zoom, John Suh, and GC of Charles River Ventures, Sarah Reed, weighed in on what they think disruptive innovation of legal services looks like.

    Chris Kenny, Chief Exec of the UK Legal Services Board, also spoke via video conferencing about how alternative business structures (ABS) are working out across the pond. According to Kenny, ABS is working great in the UK, increasing access to justice and creating healthy competition in the marketplace without risk to consumers or disciplinary issues in the profession. I found his presentation to be informative and encouraging in terms of looking forward towards real structural change in our profession. The ABA President-Elect, William Hubbard, weighed in after Kenny spoke to explain that the ABA was not on board with ABS, but he said he would like to see the gap bridged between main-street lawyers and the innovators and academics pushing for change in the profession. Of course the real reasons why we can’t move forward with ABS have to do with protectionism and the interests of the lawyers who sit at the helm of the Bar. Progress here will come slowly, and I still believe it will be consumers who push the change in the market forward, not the ABA House of Delegates.

    Bob Ambrogi wrote a good run-down of the morning’s presentations. (Note: it’s hidden behind a required registration wall.)

    After a very interesting morning session, the conference broke out into working groups. I attended one called “Lawyers and Technology.” There were also working groups on access, big data and analytics, and corporate pricing and matching. Several legal technology startups spoke briefly at each working group, but the discussions among the attendees was the most stimulating. Below is the video of the Working Group Report to the conference summarizing the key points from each breakout discussion.
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