Virtual Law Practice

Category: Educational

  • Video: Teaching a Virtual Law Firm Simulation

    This is a video I recorded for a technology exposition that is being held at Wake Forest University. It explains how I am using the virtual law firm simulation to teach a course for Wake Forest Law School entitled Technology in Law Practice. Thanks to Total Attorneys for the continued use of their platform for this purpose. I also provide the students in my course with access to a number of legal SaaS products from practice management systems to document automation and assembly tools so that they will have a wide variety of hands-on experience. The video explains the rest.

    I have had a couple years of teaching online courses for different law schools and providing guest lectures on various legal tech related subjects. I am working on a post about distance education in law school from my unique perspective as an adjunct.

  • Final Slides from Law Practice Management Class

    These are the slides from my final session for a Wake Forest Law School course on law practice management this fall. I taught the course online and used a virtual law firm simulation to teach ethics and other best practices for unbundling legal services and online delivery.

    As the slide content makes obvious, the students were asked to read Susskind’s End of Lawyers? and my book on virtual law practice as well as many other articles, videos, and ethics opinions related to both traditional firm management and the integration of technology in practice management. This is just the last slide deck from the series of 14.

    In our final class, we looked at how the legal industry is changing and how the students may adapt to these changes as new associates in law firms or as solo practitioners. We had some interesting discussions in this course because the students came from such diverse backgrounds and with many different plans for their legal careers. Several were even a tad argumentative or resistant at first even to the idea that these changes might affect the way they had thought they would practice law upon passing the bar.

    I hope by the end of this course rather than depressing the students, I gave them some new ideas about how to direct their legal careers within a law firm or how to create their own unique business models.

     

  • Slides from Digital Lawyering Program

    I posted a sample of slides on Slideshare from the Tech in Law Practice session for the Digital Lawyering Program that I’m teaching online for the University of Dayton School of Law this fall. Note that this is just a sample from one of the classes, we have an entire syllabus full of different topics involving law practice technology, including all the ethics issues and best practices.

    We are using Marc Lauritsen’s book The Lawyer’s Guide to Working Smarter with Knowledge Tools as the framework for discussion and Richard Susskind’s End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. We are also reading some of the chapters from my books and using podcasts and videos from other experts. The students have access to a virtual law firm simulation as well as several other legal tech applications for them to get hands-on, practical experience based on their future career paths and what interests them.

    Next up in the program is a session on Social Media for Lawyers.

  • Technology to Unbundle Legal Services

    Next week I will join Forrest “Woody” Mosten, Sue Talia, and Richard Granat for an ABA CLE webinar entitled “Unbundling in the 21st Century: Growing Your Practice with Limited Scope Representation.” I am most excited about the conclusion to this webinar where Mr. Mosten, the “grandfather” of unbundling, will discuss where he sees this delivery method going in the future.

    Please join us if you are interested in this topic. Most virtual law practices implement some form of unbundled service delivery so it’s important to understand the ethics issues and best practices that go along with it. For example, below is an excerpt from my book, Limited Scope Legal Services: Unbundling and the Self-Help Client, that discusses some of the technology that may be used in unbundling.

    Excerpt from Beginning of Chapter Seven: Using Technology to Unbundle Legal Services

    NEW DEVELOPMENTS IN INTERNET technology have made it even more efficient for a law firm to offer unbundled legal services. A law firm can employ different forms of Web-based applications that can be delivered over the Internet, depending on how much it wants to automate the unbundling process for greater efficiency in delivery. These tools may be used to generate legal work product or to provide decision-making tools to guide and assist a lawyer working with a client’s case. (more…)

  • Webinar: How You Can Deliver Legal Services Online, ALI-CLE

    I’ll be teaching a CLE about how to deliver legal services online this Thursday, August 16th from 1-2:30pm EST for ALI-CLE and co-sponsored by the ABA Law Practice Management Section. A copy of my Virtual Law Practice book in ebook format comes with the program. We’ll cover the following topics: Introduction to virtual law practice; Options for setting up your virtual law office including: case studies, document assembly and automation, and multijurisdictional law firms; technology and understanding security issues of virtual law practice; and Ethical concerns and best practices in online legal services.

  • Teaching Digital Lawyering with a Virtual Firm Simulation

    This summer I taught an online course for the University of Dayton School of Law entitled “Unbundling and the Future of Legal Services”. My 14 law students were required to read Richard Susskind’s End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services and chapters from my books on unbundling and virtual law practice, along with podcasts and other digital materials throughout the course.  The course was held completely online three nights a week. The students could see me on live video feed and I also shared my desktop with them to go in and out of different technology applications.

    Aside from discussing the materials we were reading, the most practical teaching experience came from the use of our virtual law firm simulation. I created a virtual firm for the class by importing pretend contacts into the Total Attorneys’ platform and creating existing case files for several of those contacts.

    Each student in the course was a member of the virtual firm. We assumed general competency in all practice areas and set our jurisdiction as only “licensed” in Ohio. As part of their grade, each student at some point in the course had to put themselves in the shoes of a prospective online client with a legal need. They had to register through the client portal and request legal services online from the firm. This gave them the opportunity to experience the process from the client’s perspective, but also gave us new material as a firm to discuss during class time. I also set up a few ethics or malpractice issues in the cases for the students to handle particular issues we were discussing in the course materials, such as jurisdiction and conflicts checks, UPL, choosing when to unbundle online and when to refer the matter out, etc.

    I was impressed with the creativity of many of the students on the virtual firm simulation. (more…)

  • Speaking at the International Legal Ethics Conference

    This week I will be attending the International Legal Ethics Conference (ILEC) in Banff, Alberta. I am taking part in a panel discussion with John Browning, Darrel Pink and Victoria Rees, entitled “The Challenges of Virtual Law Practice and Social Media.”

    Several tracks run throughout the two-day conference: Culture, Ethics & Society; Empirical Approaches to Legal Ethics; Regulation of the Profession/Ethics and Education; and Philosophy and Legal Ethics. My session falls under the Regulation of the Profession track. This will include discussion about changing regulatory models, regulation of lawyers and other legal service providers, and ethics education for lawyers and in law schools. I’ve submitted my paper on regulatory barriers to multijurisdictional virtual law practice for this session and will talk about some of the newer ethics opinions that have come out which are related to virtual law practice.

    I am most excited about meeting some of the individuals I have worked online with over the past year on different projects. Several individuals from the Law Without Walls team will be attending as well as more than a few of the speakers who participated in this month’s successful LawTechCamp London. I’m a huge fan of some of the legal technologists and educators who will be speaking in Banff so I will have to restrain myself from acting like a giddy teenager at a Justin Bieber sighting.

    I expect to return home with a new perspective on how other countries are addressing ethics and regulatory issues in the legal profession and hopefully will come away inspired to continue my own education on these issues as they pertain to unbundling and the online delivery of legal services. I will make an effort to tweet while at the event or at least follow up with a blog post in the near future.

     

  • Technology in Legal Mentorship

    Below is an article that I wrote on the changing face of mentorship in the legal profession. I was asked to write it for a legal publication last year, but for space reasons they were not able to publish it. I think it’s an important topic so I’ll share. In this article, I focus on alternative forms of mentorship that take advantage of technology and the Internet to assist a new generation of lawyers who may have difficulty finding mentors upon passing the bar. Comments are always welcome.

     

     

  • CodeX Speaker Series Discussion at Stanford Law

    I’ll be giving a presentation at Stanford Law School on May 2nd as a speaker sponored by CodeX: Stanford Center for Computers and the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, and the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession. The title of my presentation will be “Unbundling and the Future of Legal Service Delivery”. You can read more about it here. The event is free and open to the public. I’m looking forward to some challenging and productive discussion.

     

  • Law Student Survey Related to Online Legal Services

     

    Please take a minute to fill out this brief survey.  It will help out a team of law students who are researching how people use online services to fill their legal needs.

    This law student team is part of the Law Without Walls program. I’m serving as an Entrepreneur Advisor this year and have been encouraged by the participants and their eagerness to think outside of the box to come up with their “project of worth.”

    Law Without Walls is a great legal education initiative that pulls together academics, entrepreneurs, practitioners, and law students and takes an international and interdisciplinary approach to learning. I’ve met with the team online using Google Hangouts and the sessions for the entire project are held online through Adobe Connect. The program is a strong example of using technology to create new and exciting distance learning opportunities for law students.

    Please help my team out by taking a minute to complete this survey. Thanks!

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