I will be speaking at the District of Oregon Conference entitled, Innovations in the Law: Science and Technology, on Friday of this week at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry in Portland. Speakers for the event will have 6-12 minutes to present on a number of topics including “improving the delivery of legal services, innovations in the courts, gaps in the law, and how the public’s use of technology impacts law enforcement.” Many of the speakers on the roster were involved in the ReInvent Law event in Silicon Valley last spring. I will be giving my 6 minute Ignite style talk on the consumer law revolution and how lawyers can collaborate with branded networks to increase access and delivery. If you are in Portland on Friday, consider registering for the event.
Category: Cloud Computing
-
Chapter from New International Report on Online Legal Services
This summer I wrote a report for Managing Partner, a UK-based publishing company focused on law firm management. The report is for lawyers who are interested in learning about and possibly adding online legal services to their law firms. Here is the Executive Summary and Chapter One.This is not intended to be an academic report so there are few citations and more checklists and recommendations for analysis and implementation. It is written for lawyers who want to focus on client-development and customer service for existing clients by adding online services in their firms. The case studies I reviewed are law firms that are successfully doing this. For example, Brilliant Law in the UK and Slater & Gordon in Australia. I’m not focusing on branded networks or companies in this report.
The chapter I wish they would have given me to share is the final one where I take a look at why online legal service delivery by firms have not been as quickly adopted or as successful as many had hoped and what I think needs to be done to see it evolve and really increase access to legal services for the public. I will try to make this the subject of a blog post soon because I think there are definitely some lessons to be learned from this research that need to be shared. You can purchase a copy of the full report here.
This report was international in scope, but I had difficulty finding firms in some areas that were marketing and delivering their services online. Some areas I neglected to write about simply because I couldn’t find anything there (Africa, South America, China, Japan, Russia, and others). I’m sure there must be some innovation in online delivery happening there, but to what extent? Already, since turning in the proofs last month, I’ve learned about a new company in Germany that is focused on online delivery. That’s the nature of this topic and why I should only write easily editable ebooks!
As always, feedback, comments, and connections to others innovating in this space, are gratefully encouraged.
-
Infographic: Technology in Legal Education
This was my first attempt at creating an infographic using Piktochart. Any feedback is welcome! It’s challenging for a writer to think in terms of graphic design, but I’m trying!
-
Less Law School + More Practical Training
I have been enjoying the debates that have ensued after President Obama’s recommendation to cut law school down to two years. I agree with it personally, but only with the requirement of some form of mentorship or residency program added on. Actually, this practical skills requirement should be in place even with a three year schedule.My concern is that if the law school length were cut down to only two years, more of the practical courses that do exist in the curriculum would have to be cut. If the bar exam isn’t changing any time soon, then students would still be hard pressed to take all the substantive bar courses and the practice areas they are interested in only in two years. That might push the practical skills, legal writing, law practice management courses, incubators, clinics, mock trial, law review and many other extras further to the side.
However, law schools could start looking at outside solutions to provide their students with this form of practical education. This is emerging in the form of certificate courses and supplemental programs for law students and young lawyers.
I announced a couple weeks ago that Richard Granat and I are now co-directors of the Center for Law Practice Technology. This is our intention: to provide law students and, at some point, private practitioners with the practical business and technology knowledge that they need to practice law in the 21st Century. It is essentially a certificate program. The students will graduate with proof for themselves and prospective employers that they have real-world business and technology skills to practice law or work in any other capacity in our profession.
Obviously, I believe this type of program is a good solution for law schools to consider – regardless of whether they ever go down to a two-year degree. It will help our law students and those currently practicing to get up to speed. I am excited to see what kind of innovation we can come up with in the way that this learning experience is delivered. We are currently working on course design for our project and thinking about user design and experience in how each course is laid out and taught both in lectures, prerecordings, podcasts, videos and other materials.
When I read the discussions around President Obama’s statement, I got very excited that maybe this time the proponents of this two-year concept would be taken more seriously.
To share some of our ideas about teaching this material, here is the online copy of the law review paper Richard and I co-authored. This provides a blueprint for a curriculum for such a program.
-
Center for Law Practice Technology
This week I signed on as Co-Director of a Center for Law Practice Technology which I will be leading with Richard Granat. Over the coming months, we will be working to design a core curriculum and body of courses that reflects our experience in legal tech and draws from the expertise of our colleagues internationally. We hope to bring guest lectures and experts to the Center that will not only provide practical background in law practice management and the use of legal technology, but who will also foster a spirit of entrepreneurship and innovative thinking.
I have been teaching courses related to the use of technology in law practice for several years as an adjunct professor at various law schools and have also provided many guest lectures for classes and programs. Working with law students provides a wonderful challenge and opportunity to share and learn what is needed for our next generation of legal professionals to thrive in a changed legal marketplace. This experience has also given me the chance to use various distance learning platforms, pull a few together on my own, and figure out what works and does not work from a design and teaching perspective. (more…)
-
Minimalism & Virtual Law Practice
This will be a personal post. Fellow virtual lawyers might find my recent experience with minimalism and moving interesting. It touches on the main reason many of us are attracted to online delivery and the use of technology in law practice – more freedom and efficiency.
When I first designed my virtual law office and launched it back in 2006, a large part of my motivation was my daughter who had just been born. I needed the flexibility to care for her and was not interested in racking up the traditional lawyer hours in an office. I also loved working with my clients and thought there was a more convenient way to deliver services to them. I could also use the efficiency to lower my fees to be more affordable. I have a transactions-based practice so unbundling and online delivery made sense.
BEFORE Over the last seven years, although I was almost completely paperless and virtual, I accumulated “stuff” in my home office and my house. The simplicity of being able to work online and not get lost in the office environment was replaced with recreating an office environment in my own home. Not good.
So I decided to research minimalism. This is a renewed trend that has emerged since the recession hit. It’s a more positive way to embrace being faced with unemployment, foreclosure, debt and other situations that threaten to remove us from our tangible possessions. If you can’t afford to purchase things or are forced to sell or give up your possessions, that involves loss, but if you willingly choose to give up those things there is a greater sense of control over your life and it can be empowering rather than depressing. I like this approach to life in general. I thought I would adopt some of these principles while also doing some reading on mindfulness (a post for another day and very applicable to legal professionals). (more…)
-
Online Legal Marketplace Book Release
My new book about the online legal marketplace, Consumer Law Revolution, was released today from the publisher and pre-orders should be shipping this week.I’m excited to share this book with the legal profession. It dives into an area that is growing in practice and where we don’t have clear, established best practices to guide us. The online legal marketplace naturally involves technology and the unbundling of legal services, but also new forms of online lawyer advertising and collaboration with non-lawyer legal service companies that provide online marketing tools and platforms for lawyers to connect with consumers.
As with most of the work I do, part of my motivation for writing this book was because growth of the online legal marketplace increases access to justice by providing the public with alternative methods of receiving assistance and of matching them up with the lawyer or self-help service that will be best for them. By alternatives, I mean that more individuals will be able to find a legal service that they can afford to pay and which are delivered in a manner that they are able to receive it without financial or physical hardship.
The book covers a lot of online marketing basics but also provides case studies of many of the legal technology startups that are coming on the scene to disrupt the delivery of legal services. Lawyers need to be a part of this disruption. For most of these case studies, I joined up as a lawyer and as a prospective client to see how the process worked from both sides. I hope the readers will find this review and my analysis useful in making selections about which branded networks to join. There are checklists and suggested best practices as well as evaluation of the potential ethics issues that may arise.
I look forward to the conversations and debates this book will generate. I did not mince words in criticizing the outdated lawyer advertising rules and questioned the lack of data behind many of the assumptions that are behind those rules. If there are answers to my questions or reasons my proposals would not be feasible, that’s great. If there are none, then I hope this book sparks some reform or clarification or something useful to further the progress of our profession’s ability to stay relevant and adapt effectively to the changes in the legal marketplace. Thanks to everyone who supported my research and writing for this book.
Here’s the official marketing copy for the book from the ABA LPM: (more…)
-
Virginia State Bar Publishes Virtual Law Office Ethics Opinion
The Virginia State Bar has published Legal Ethics Opinion 1872 on virtual law offices and the use of temporary office space on March 29, 2013.The ethics opinion acknowledges that virtual law offices and temporary or leased office spaces do not always go together, but it addresses both from the standpoint of ethics issues, such as providing contact information in marketing, supervision of lawyers and nonlawyers in the firm, confidentiality of the tech and competency using it to work with clients online. The opinion also acknowledges that these ethics issues are the same that come up with traditional firms just in a different context and should be treated as such – a message I’ve been preaching for years.
Perhaps because of the Virginia Disciplinary Matter that came up last year regarding the lawyer who was disciplined for violating lawyer advertising rules in marketing his virtual law firm, this new opinion mentions that the lawyer can’t list temporary office space in advertising a virtual law office to make the firm look like it is larger or has more resources than it actually does. It seems the easiest thing to comply with this would be to put “by appointment only” next to any contact address where you have temporary office space and want items mailed there but don’t actually work from that location on a regular basis. The opinion doesn’t say this, but that’s my take and also what the NC Bar put it its opinion on that topic last year.
As usual, the big key to complying with lawyer advertising rules comes down to being transparent in your business practices. This is something lawyers should be doing anyway as business owners even if the RPC weren’t there. Being false or misleading to clients about your ability to provide services to them isn’t going to win you loyal clients and referrals in the long run anyway. There’s another reason we should teach marketing and practical business skills to law students. We wouldn’t end up with practitioners who think acting like unscrupulous, hit ’em over the head, insincere sales people is going to help with long-term client development. That’s a rant for another day.
The new Virginia State Bar Ethics Opinion touches very generally on the basics to watch out for when operating a virtual law office. This is a good thing because I suspect in the next five to ten years all law firms will have some form of online delivery component even for their full-service, in-person clients and more will want to cut costs by using temporary office space. [HT to Niki Black for bringing this opinion to my attention.]
-
Client Portal Matrix
Last week I gave a presentation with Chad Burton at the ABA LPM Spring meeting about the eLawyering Task Force‘s newest project, the Client Portal Matrix, formally titled as the “Comparative Evaluation of Web-based Practice Management Software with Client Portal Applications for Solos and Small Law Firms.” Donna Seyle, who did most of the work gathering data for the matrix, was unable to make the meeting so I filled in to discuss some of the practical uses of a client portal in law practice and the best practices and ethics issues that might come up.
The matrix will be posted on the eLawyering website in the near future. It is a work in progress, but is already a useful tool and starting point for lawyers considering virtual practice. It was designed primarily for solo and small firm practitioners. The matrix focuses on cloud-based, SaaS solutions and specifically excludes the online client portals and tools provided by branded networks, such as Rocket Lawyer. The focus of this project was on client-facing technology so also excluded were systems that focused on other administrative tasks, such as time and billing, calendaring, or matter management among others. There are fourteen companies with client-facing features on the matrix so far.
It makes me think back to eight years ago when I opened my solo virtual law office and co-founded the system that is now Total Attorney’s platform with client-facing features. At the time, there weren’t any SaaS options out there for a practitioner. Now there are choices and more most likely in the works. Expect to hear more clients asking their lawyers and firms for online access to their legal accounts. If you don’t have a client portal or any client facing features in the technology you use for your firm, you need to consider in the near future how you will add it to the mix. This is going to be the case whether you are delivering legal services online with a virtual law office or operating a traditional law firm without online delivery options. It’s about client access and good customer service which should apply in any firm structure.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/surfstyle/ -
Gamification vs Games for Legal Services
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…)