Virtual Law Practice

Category: Cloud Computing

  • Click and Mortar Legal Services for the Public Open in CA

    LegalForce1A new hybrid of legal service delivery has launched this week with the opening of the LegalForce storefront in Palo Alto. The delivery model combines online services with the customer service of a traditional store front operation complete with a network of lawyers who charge a flat rate of $45 for 15 minutes of legal advice.

    Raj Abyhanker, the lawyer who created the Trademarkia Enterprise, is responsible for this new innovation in legal service delivery. The LegalForce website provides personal online legal services in a self-help manner. The store front offers access to go online and purchase these services and also sells mobile devices, such as tablets, and legal self-help books. Employees of the store, called concierges, are there to assist customers as needed but do not provide legal advice. Customers may book appointments with lawyers online prior to meeting them in the store.

    The company plans to cultivate relationships with law firms and lawyers so that the store front may be used as a meeting place for lawyers and prospective clients. The store may also be used as a way for community legal education sessions to be offered. This type of collaboration between practitioners, the community, and companies providing legal services online (and now in hybrid form) is only the beginning as I’ve suggested in past posts.

    Richard Granat, who was present for the store’s launch this week, has written his first impressions on his blog and explains the value of this “click and mortar” strategy both for the public and the legal profession. [Many thanks to Richard for sharing the pictures with me as well as the overview of this model. I was unable to make it to the launch of the storefront, but plan to make it out there for a quick tour in March.]

    LegalForce2This concept will appeal to the DIY client. It combines elements of unbundling and virtual law practice with more traditional face-time with a lawyer and the in-person customer services of a small business venue. I see two potential benefits to this model: 1) it could increase access to legal services and basic legal education for the public in a local community; and 2) it could provide lawyers with another way to offer services which could be used for client development and as part of their online and offline marketing strategies.

    The company hopes to expand its branded network of lawyers outside of CA and into other states in the future. I am looking forward to seeing how their network grows and plan on including a case study of their business model in my upcoming book providing guidance on ethics issues and best practices for lawyers who want to join up with branded networks such as LegalForce as part of their online marketing strategy.

  • Florida Publishes Proposed Cloud Computing Ethics Opinion

    FloridaOn January 25, 2013, the Professional Ethics Committee of the Florida State Bar published Proposed Advisory Opinion 12-3 2 related to the use of cloud computing in law practice.

    The proposed opinion refers to the ethics opinions already published in Alabama, Arizona, Iowa, Nevada, New York and Pennsylvania. Here is a link to my post that lists state bar ethics opinions related to virtual law practice and cloud computing.

    This short proposed opinion in Florida also comes to a similar conclusion as most of the other states that have addressed the topic: Yes. It is o.k. to use cloud computing in law practice. However, there are precautions that the lawyer should take. And then the proposed opinion provides the usual caveats which essentially come down to using “reasonable care” in the selection and use of the technology in law practice to ensure compliance with the Rules of Professional Conduct (in particular Model Rule 1.6(a) regarding confidentiality).

    The conclusion of the opinion states:

    In summary, lawyers may use cloud computing if they take reasonable precautions to ensure that confidentiality of client information is maintained. The lawyer should research the service provider to be used, should ensure that the service provider maintains adequate security, should ensure that the lawyer has adequate access to the information stored remotely, and should consider backing up the data elsewhere as a precaution.

  • NJ Supreme Court Adopts Amendments to Bona Fide Office Rule 1:21-1

    New JerseyAdopted Amendments to NJ Supreme Court Rule 1:21-1 will be effective February 1 of this year. This is the “bona fide office” rule that I’ve written about on here before. Thanks to Ekaterina Schoenefeld for sharing a copy of the Notice and Amendments.

    Here is a quick rundown of the amendments. The bona fide office rule now states that a lawyer does not need a physical location, but does have to make sure the practice is conducted in a way to ensure “prompt and reliable communication with and accessibility by clients, other counsel, and judicial and administrative tribunals”.

    To comply, the lawyer may designate “one or more fixed physical locations where the client files and attorney’s business and financial records may be inspected on short notice…where mail or hand-deliveries may be made and promptly received, and where process may be served…including disciplinary actions….” [I still wonder: What could be more accessible and done “on short notice” than giving access to your cloud-based practice?] (more…)

  • LTN Innovative Use of Tech Award

    InnovationI’m pleased to share the news that the virtual law firm I joined last spring, Burton Law LLC, has won a Legal Technology News 2012 Innovation Award in the category of Most Innovative Use of Technology in a Small Law Firm. Here is the ALM press release.

    I’ve described our firm’s tech structure on this blog before when I announced my move from solo virtual lawyering to this different structure of virtual practice. The LTN article announcing the award briefly explains the tech we use in the firm. However, we have also now added DirectLaw to the list of software that we use to deliver services to clients. As someone who has unbundled online services for the past seven years, getting the document automation and assembly piece of the puzzle into our firm’s structure was an important addition to the usual cloud-based delivery of legal work.

    You can read the LTN article’s brief description of our firm’s technology here. Chad Burton, the founder of our firm, will be attending LegalTechNY to receive the award for the firm. Chad is always one step ahead of the curve when it comes to exploring new technologies and processes that might be integrated into our firm’s model. Almost once a week he is sharing with us some new iPad app to increase personal productivity. I’m sure he’ll return from LegalTechNY with a few more new tools and ideas to share with the firm on Yammer.

    I was also very happy to see that John Mayer received an award as Champion of Technology for his work at CALI, eLangdell, and the A2J Author software. The article should have also mentioned the MOOC he developed last year on Digital Topics in Law Practice which is an awesome free online educational resource that all lawyers interested in virtual law practice should go through. Congrats on the well-deserved recognition, John!

  • Ch-ch-ch-changes: Rocket Lawyer Acquires LawPivot; TR Joins the Club (finally)

    snakeeatsfrogJanuary is the usual month for companies to launch new products or make announcements. Most launches come before the tradeshow at LegalTechNY. Two announcements this month are of interest to the virtual lawyer. First, Rocket Lawyer acquired LawPivot.

    Will this make a huge difference in terms of competition in the online delivery of legal services space? Probably not. I wrote about LawPivot as one of the case studies in my new book. Here was my run-down of what they offer:

    LawPivot provides both the free question and answer service and the paid. However, it uses a crowdsourcing model that allows the individual or company asking a legal question to receive multiple responses from attorneys rather than being limited to just one response. The system analyzes user data and trends on its site to create an algorithm that matches the most qualified lawyers to respond to the user’s legal question. The company received $600,000 in venture capital funding from Google Ventures and other investors in January of 2011.

    Unlike other question and answer sites, the lawyer network at LawPivot is more selective and focuses on “over 2,000 lawyers from some of the most prestigious private practices and law firms.” [This may change since Rocket Lawyer’s network is not selective.] The focus of the company is to provide legal services related to startup entrepreneurs and business law. Consumers who post a question from the network online may receive responses from several lawyers in their jurisdiction. Unlike some services, the user is able to ask additional follow-up questions from the list of respondents before determining if there is one that he or she would like to retain. [This may be integrated into Rocket Lawyer’s referral system to their lawyer network?]

    For lawyers who wish to join the LawPivot network, the company has added a gamification component to motivate lawyers to respond to questions. There is a point system and lawyers may receive points for questions answered. This point system is based on an algorithm that determines how well and how quickly the lawyer answers the question. The acquired points move the lawyer up through different “levels” on their profile. This ranking is visible to the public as well as information about the number of public questions asked, private questions asked, thanks received from users, and profile views. Along with the point system, there is a “Confidential Q&A Percentile Ranking” which displays the lawyer’s percentages regarding “well-received answers”, “questions seldom go unanswered”, “answers promptly” and “contributes to the LawPivot community.” [I’m guessing this will stay in because that’s what makes it such an effective marketing tool for the lawyers as a Q&A feature.]

    But really, the only thing Rocket Lawyer was missing from it’s online menu of offerings to the consumer was a robust Q&A platform. Almost every other legal tech company that I studied for my book had a Q&A component and most started out with that basic piece of the SEO puzzle. I think this means that Rocket Lawyer will have an even broader reach of its services to the public. It will also mean the lawyers joining its network will have another engagement option to consider.

    And for the second announcement of interest, Thompson Reuters has (finally) hopped on the cloud-based practice management bandwagon. Lisa Solomon does not give it a great review. But at this point, lawyers wanting a practice management system in the cloud have plenty of options to find the one that has the right mix of features that their firm needs.

    I remember back at the start of 2009 when I was pitching the concept of online practice management, client portals, and other features for a virtual law office. It is extremely amusing to me years later to see how this has all developed out – which companies listened, what advice they choose to take, which features they choose to develop over others that I told them the legal market would demand.

    What do I see with these two new year announcements? I see a lot more merging to come and maybe a few drop-offs. First adopters of innovative systems and business concepts who ignored the legal industry naysayers and pushed forward are the companies that are staying ahead. Legal tech startup business models that cannot effectively monetize or provide a truly unique online service in the legal marketplace will merge in with larger companies and become feature sets.

    Here’s an open challenge to the legal tech industry for 2013: SURPRISE ME. I’m getting bored and unimpressed.

    Really, this is pretty much business as usual and that’s never at the speed I would like. But hopefully, the consumers will benefit as the most effective technologies and business models are tightened down and push forward to deliver better legal services online. Maybe we can even have some fun getting there.

  • Increasing Access with Tech: Report from LSC Tech Summit

    This week I attended the second of two Legal Services Corporation (LSC) Technology Summits. The overall mission presented in these Summits was:

    Use technology to provide some form of effective assistance to 100% of persons otherwise unable to afford an attorney for dealing with essential civil legal needs.

    I want to share some of the progress of this Summit towards this goal because I believe virtual lawyers and elawyering from the private bar are key components in using technology to increase access. Keeping all the troops updated seems like a smart idea to me.

    [Typical lawyer disclaimer: This is my own personal report from the meeting so it’s only my take-aways and not that of the collective.]

    This second summit was a smaller gathering of individuals including state-based and national legal aid organizations, the private bar, technologists, administrators in the court, judges, law librarians, programmers, entrepreneurs, academics, and ethics experts. While the first summit was focused on Blue Sky thinking, this second one was for implementation of those ideas into a more concrete plan to move forward.

    Prior to attending the Summit, we were all invited to use Marc Lauritsen’s choiceboxing tool to prioritize the issues we had identified during the first summit. This was a great way to narrow down the collective’s priorities so that we could break out into smaller groups to address these issues.

    The five technologies chosen as the focus included 1) document assembly for self-represented litigants, 2) better triage, 3) mobile technologies, 4) expert systems and checklists, and 5) remote service delivery.

    On the final day of the summit, John Gracean pulled together each of the break-out group’s reports into a single plan and we focused on strategy. My take-aways from this summit are listed below, most of which come from my Twitter stream:

    1. Collaboration is going to be necessary between legal services, private practitioners, courts, and for-profit companies that provide online legal services to the public.
    2. Unbundled legal services are going to be a key component because trying to achieve 100% full service access is not realistic.
    3. Any solution should not focus solely on providing access to justice to the poor but be expanded to include all of those who cannot afford legal services. Opening up a system that would allow for practitioners to volunteer with the potential to make some money doing low-bono work would increase the incentive to volunteer.
    4. A secure access portal for remote delivery is necessary. The expert systems for triage, the document assembly and automation tools, access to mobile resources, and other tools, such as web advisors for self-help representatives (A2J, for example) may be accessible from that secure space. Referrals to the appropriate legal assistance for the individual’s need would be made from that portal to legal aid, self-help resources, private bar members willing to do pro bono and/or reduced fee unbundling or full-service, and maybe even for-profit companies with networks of lawyers willing to deliver services online.
    5. One idea we had in a break-out group was to have an X Prize. Lay out the mission statement and make it an open contest rather than limit the R&D to LSC or legal services resources. Put competition in the marketplace to work for the benefit of access. A legal hackathon as was mentioned in the first summit might also be a fun exercise and provide some different sets of eyes reviewing the issues at hand. A few people were squeamish with the work “hackathon” for lack of understanding so that may be something for someone else to organize for fun.
    6. Here are my tweets and a few RTs from the event in order of last to first: (more…)

  • Slides: Final Social Media in Law Practice for Digital Lawyering Program

    This is the slide deck from our final online session in Social Media in Law Practice, part of the Univ. of Dayton School of Law Digital Lawyering Program. It covers time management, the future of social media, its application to the legal profession, and our deliverable for the session.

    The students were asked to create a social media policy for a law practice to prove competency in the subject matter. In the course, we covered blogging, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, and Twitter as the core platforms, reviewed management and analytic tools, privacy and security settings, ethics rules and opinions, use of social media in litigation, integration with a larger online marketing strategy, and more.

    In order to teach this session I was forced to go back through all of my own personal and professional uses of social media which was a daunting task at times. I gave the students walkthroughs of the different applications, privacy and account settings, and other features using my own accounts, excluding any confidential or private information. I refered to several practical books from the ABA LPM’s ____in One Hour for Lawyer’s Series for each social media method as well as Niki Black and Carolyn Elefant’s book, Social Media for Lawyers. We also looked across industries to see how other professions and businesses are using social media for client development and professional networking.

    Several interesting questions were raised by the students regarding their transition from student to licensed lawyer and how this should be handled in their existing social media use. For example, upon passing the bar, should they notify friends and family that going forward their use of these applications will be x, or should they post a one-time disclaimer reminding followers that now that they are licensed lawyers, friends should not post any confidential legal questions on public sites? These are real concerns for young lawyers. Hopefully this session provided them with the skills they need to navigate, keep up with, and regularly modify their use of social media in their careers.

     

  • Slides – Consumer Law Revolution: Online Marketing Tools for Lawyers

    These are the slides from my part of the panel presentation from the College of Law Practice Management (COLPM) Futures Conference last Friday at Georgetown Law Center in D.C. Some of this talk included research from my forthcoming book on the subject.

    I think Michael Mills, who was on the panel with myself, Marc Lauritsen and Tanina Rostain, made a wonderful point when he asked whether our profession’s reluctance to use available technologies that make legal knowledge available to a larger majority of the public is actually “immoral.” It is certainly malpractice to not use it, but I think he is right, if it’s available and can be implemented by law firms or at least made accessible through legal services organizations to increase access to justice, then yes, it borders on being immoral.

    I tried to argue that some of these companies creating new platforms to deliver legal services might collaborate with  private practitioners as well as legal aid services  to increase alternatives available but also help lawyers to build their online brand and market their full-service or unbundled legal service offerings. I’m not sure about what reception these ideas had because it was the end of the day and that always limits attendee questions.  Would love the feedback.

  • Consumer Law Revolution

    I will be speaking on a panel at the College of Law Practice Management (COLPM) Futures Conference this Friday at Georgetown Law Center in D.C.
    Our panel will be discussing the following topics:
    • How is technology changing delivery of legal services to consumer?
    • How is tech changing how lawyers who serve consumers practice?
    • Will the consumer law movement shape the broader market for legal services?  Do we see signs today that consumer law developments are already doing so?
    • Will constraints – for example, client or lawyer conservatism, immature technology, or ethical barriers – limit a more rapid evolution or a real  revolution?

    I am charged with speaking about lawyer marketing using Internet-based platforms. My co-panelists are Professor Tanina Rostain, Michael Mills, and Marc Lauritsen. I will post any slides from my part of the presentation at a later date.

  • Business Lessons for Lawyers:Unbundling in Other Industries

    This is an except including a checklist from my book Limited Scope Legal Services: Unbundling and the Self-Help Client, ABA LPM (2012):

    The economy does not exist in a bubble and neither should legal professionals. There are lessons to be learned from looking at ways that
    other industries have unbundled their services to create new or improved markets that adapted to changes in the global economy and the way
    consumers exercise their purchasing power.

    The Music Industry

    More than a few people in the music industry initially questioned the unbundling of music. Traditionally, a music producer would bundle a musician’s less popular recordings with the one or two singles that were commercially popular and charge a higher fee for the entire catalog of records on a CD. When iTunes presented the concept of allowing the consumer to pick and choose whichever songs he or she wanted from the hits and the not-so-popular songs, it revolutionized the way that music is purchased.

    Critics had to admit that it did not culminate in the downfall of the music industry or result in decreased sales. Instead, unbundling songs at a lower cost per purchase allowed the consumer to learn about the artists and their music offerings without making a large up-front investment in an entire album. If consumers liked the services, they would come back for the rest of the album, and the full album could always be downloaded from the iTunes store for the customers that wanted the entire recording.

    The Airlines (more…)

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