Virtual Law Practice

Category: Educational

  • Workshop on the Future of the Legal Profession and Legal Education

     

    The Association of American Law Schools (AALS) is holding its annual conference in D.C. this week. I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion entitled “Technological Innovation in Practice and Education.”

    The conference has an entire workshop devoted to the future of the profession and legal ed. I see that as an acknowledgement that the legal education system is in need of innovation and reform and fast.  If the legal profession is going to be rescued from its downward spiral, it’s got to start with the law schools.

    A few of the questions the workshop will address:

    1) What new or different kinds of training will law schools of the future need to provide?

    2) How can law schools better serve students seeking to develop critical skills in the areas demanded by changes in legal practice?

    3) What innovations are currently underway in law schools?

    4) How will projected changes in the economics of the legal profession affect law students’ priorities and law schools’ budgets?

    For my session, I will be giving a presentation about virtual law practice and showing a demonstration of how myself and other lawyers work with clients and each other using cloud-based technology. But I will also be sharing some of the emerging trends in the future of legal service delivery that will impact future young lawyers. I’m hoping for a challenging Q&A session. If I get it with any audience, it aught to be this one.

    There is a book to be published soon entitled “Educating the Digital Lawyer“, co-edited by Oliver Goodenough and Marc Lauritsen. This book will showcase chapters written to address many of the issues that this workshop will raise.  I wrote a chapter for it that laid out some of the topics that I thought should be in a law school curriculum and I probably won’t have time to share with the attendees here what I would like to see happen in law schools, but that’s what blogging is for.  So here goes.  (more…)

  • Speaking about Virtual Lawyering at SC Solo & Small Firm CLE

    If you will happen to be in or near Columbia, South Carolina on September 23rd, please consider joining me for the SC Bar’s 2011 Solo & Small Firm CLE and Annual Meeting entitled “Exploring the Business Side of Law Firms.”

    There will simultaneous tracks on law office technology and practice management, with sessions ranging from cloud computing and paperless law offices to handling court appointments. Two plenary sessions will bookend the day: “How Not to Commit Malpractice with Your Computer” and “60 Tips for Small Firm Lawyers in 60 Minutes.”

    There will be six ABA TECHSHOW speakers on the faculty, including three from South Carolina. Other faculty include lawyers from across South Carolina. Just like TECHSHOW, there will be social events and exhibits. 15 vendors in law office technology and related products will fill the exhibit space.

    I will be speaking at two sessions entitled “Take to the Cloud: Virtual Law Offices and Cloud Computing” and “Marketing Tips: From Analog to Digital.” If you are interested in joining us, you can register and get the full schedule here.

  • International Standards for Legal Technology

    This morning the International Legal Technology Standards Organization (ILTSO) published its standards for the use of technology in law practice.

    This resource has been a long time in coming.  The standards will be open for public comment and feedback after it has been out there for awhile.  It will be a continual work in progress as something like this should be.

    My hope is that the state bars and other regulatory entities will use these standards as a resource for their attorneys.  Rather than each state bar creating these vastly different ethics opinions that are rarely updated in a timely fashion that attempt to dictate how we use technology in our law practices, these entities could instead remind attorneys of the rules of professional responsibility that they must comply with and then point them to regularly updated technology standards such as these and other resources for education.   Especially with the rise in multijurisdictional and virtual law practice, the need for standardization of technology and security is becoming even more critical.  Plus the standards take into consideration the needs of different types of practices that have different resources available to them, from the solo to a BigLaw firm with a full-time IT consultant. The suggestions are ranked accordingly and also written with very technical descriptions next to “easier to implement for the not so tech-savvy” explanations.

    The goal of the ILTSO standards is to meet this need in the legal profession and to keep those standards updated as the technology and security changes.  The board of the non-profit is made up of legal professors, international consultants, malpractice insurance carriers, IP attorneys, IT consultants and programmers, legal SaaS vendors, and attorneys from solo to BigLaw firms.  I became involved in this non-profit about two months ago when called upon to review the draft manuscript of the standards.  I specifically worked with them on the drafting of the ethics portion of the manual, but also advised as a solo practitioner with limited resources to implement really complex in-house tech solutions.

    As with everything it seems, some in the industry will feel threatened by the creation of standards and attempt to find something negative about the formation of this group.  I’m just glad that this resource is out there for the many attorneys that I speak to who are actively seeking this type of guidance.  I look forward to the feedback from others as they read through it.

  • Seminar: How to Deliver Legal Services Online

    This Wednesday, April 6th at 1:00pm Eastern, I’ll be co-presenting an online seminar about delivering legal services online hosted by ALI-ABA and the ABA Law Practice Management Section.  The hour-long session will be in a discussion/interview format and focus on the topics discussed in my book, Virtual Law Practice: How to Deliver Legal Services Online.   Mark Robertson, co-author of Winning Alternatives to the Billable Hour, Third Edition (ABA 2008), will be the moderator.  Attendees may email us questions during and after the session.  Here’s the link to register.

  • Video from Presentation at UNC Chapel Hill Law School

    Thank you to NC Jolt for inviting me to speak to law students at UNC School of Law in Chapel Hill last week. Special thanks to 3L John Kivus (@kivus) for making the connections. I appreciated the opportunity to share this topic with the next generation of legal professionals.

    Awesome questions from the attendees as well. I especially liked this one (perhaps for a future blog post?):

    What happens if you are representing a party that is suing Google or Amazon and all your law office data, including their client file, is hosted in the cloud on that company’s servers? Conflicts issues? Security issues?

    The question was more eloquently delivered, but you get the idea. Fun and necessary questions to ponder as we move more of our practices to the cloud.

  • Call for eLawyering Solos to Innovate

    Jordan Furlong over at Law21 has published a post describing the 21st-century solo practitioner and announced a competition to drive innovation.

    Furlong lists what he sees are four characteristics of the new solo lawyer.  One of these characteristics is the ability to innovate.  Solos may have more flexibility to take the risks necessary to come up with truly unique methods of delivering legal services and operating a law practice.  Just as the rest of the legal marketplace is having to adapt to changes in the use of technology to practice law, solos are in an ideal situation to take advantage of these trends to give themselves a competitive advantage.

    Furlong calls to solos to come up with new ways to deliver legal services and ends his post with the announcement that he is giving away five scholarships to Solo Practice University to “five current or soon-to-be solos or small-firm lawyers who are now engaging, or are ready to engage, in 21st-century sole practice.”

    Those of you who are solos engaged in elawyering, virtual law practice or are coming up with ways to use cloud computing in your practice, get in the running for one of these scholarships.  I’ve been on the faculty at SPU teaching a course in virtual law practice since it launched a couple years ago.  It’s a wonderful community of entrepreneurial solos with awesome online access to great mentors and teachers.  I’m looking forward to reading about the innovations that come out of this competition and hope at least a few of them involve the online delivery of legal services.

  • Animated Movie Intro for a Virtual Law Office

    An attorney operating a virtual law office relies more on online marketing and social media to develop their reputation and an online client base.  Some virtual law offices are creating YouTube tutorial videos that will walk prospective online clients through their virtual law office registration process and explain how legal services are delivered online.

    Below is my experiment using animated movies to introduce a virtual law office.   Check out this Wall Street Journal article from last week about the use of animated movies. A movie like this could be placed on an attorney’s website and then circulated on different social media networks.  It was simple to put together and took less than a half hour.  The dialogue for the avatar in the movie comes straight from the text you provide.  Many of us could cut and paste the text from existing law office marketing materials and just adjust it with the avatar’s facial expressions and motions to make it less stiff.  There are many different characters and backgrounds to choose from.

    As the ABA and other state bars analyze the use of the Internet as a tool for client development, here is yet another example of a technology that they will have to factor into their research on the topic. 

    This type of video could be used to market the online delivery of legal services of a virtual law office or used to educate the general public about basic legal issues, but in a fun format.  While you might think it would appeal only to a select target client base, most likely younger or tech-savvy clients, I think that to rule out a larger audience interested in watching an animated movie would be ignoring the value of novelty.  Much of the public gathers their information from the television screen or movie. Maybe those of us wanting to provide a basic legal education to the public are not using the correct form of media to reach them. 

    What do you think?  Does this format have potential in elawyering?  Could we use this to market our virtual law offices?  Could we create educational movies using animated characters – one an attorney and one a client – to explain how unbundled legal services are delivered online or walk prospective clients through limited scope representation legal issues?

  • ABA Ethics 20/20 Addresses Choice of Law Issue in Virtual Law Practice

    Virtual lawyers and multijurisdictional virtual law firms take note: The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 has released yet another issues paper proposing changes to ethics rules that could affect the delivery of legal services online.  This newest paper comes from the Working Group on Uniformity, Choice of Law, and Conflicts of Interest and is entitled “Choice of Law in Cross-Border Practice.”  It even includes a sample scenario for the virtual law practice which I’ve posted below.

    With lawyers and clients more frequently not located in the same geographic location and many of them communicating and receiving legal services online, this raises the question of which jurisdiction’s ethics laws apply.  The Commission recognizes the need for guidance and greater clarity for a growing number of lawyer and law firms faced with questions about choice of ethics law. (more…)

  • Upcoming Events Related to ELawyering, Virtual Law Practice

    – University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s School of Law presentation on virtual law offices, next Thursday, February 10th at noon. 

    – Unbundling Legal Services: Ethics and Best Practices, ALI-ABA Teleconference, February 24, noon-1:30pm EST.

    – AVVO webinar on unbundling legal services which will also discuss the use of technology to unbundle and deliver legal services.   Thursday March 10th at 10:00 am PT.

    – ABA/LPM Meet the Author Series Podcast, 1pm

    – ABA TECHSHOW, Chicago

                     – April 11, 10:30-11:30am, “Expanding Your Practice with an Online Office”, co-presented with Catherine Sanders Reach

                      -April 12, 8:00- 9:00am, Meet the Author, “Virtual Law Practice: How to Deliver Legal Services Online”

                                      10:00 – 11:00am, “Popular Cloud Services for Lawyers”, co-presented with Tom Mighell

                                       7:00pm, Hosting Taste of Techshow Dinner with an “elawyering theme”

  • Legal Cloud Computing Association Forms, Responds to ABA 20/20 Ethics Commission

    I’m excited to announce the formation of the Legal Cloud Computing Association (LCCA).  See the formal press release below my comments. 

    About two years ago when I was owner of VLOTech, Larry Port of Rocket Matter reached out to me, Jack Newton (Clio) and Richard Granat (DirectLaw) about forming a group to address the concerns that legal professionals had surrounding cloud computing.  At the time, we were noticing the many questions about cloud computing and security that would pop up on different practice management listservs.  We were concerned with the fact that so many attorneys didn’t seem to know much about cloud computing basics or where to go to get the answers.  The group loosely communicated back and forth on a Google group and over the phone about the best ways to educate the legal profession about the risks and benefits, but did not take any action until this fall when the ABA 20/20 Ethics Commission published its issues paper related to cloud computing.  

    I think it’s remarkable that these competing companies were able to organize an association and collaborate to draft a comment to submit to the Ethics Commission in response to the issues papers.   Since VLOTech was acquired by Total Attorneys last fall, David Dahl, the CTO of Total Attorneys, has taken over my role in the LCCA.  However, I was able to join in where I could and offered suggestions as a practicing attorney who uses cloud computing on a daily basis.  I expect that other cloud computing providers will get involved in the group as well adding to its knowledge base and expanding its ability to provide educational content to the profession.   I look forward to the LCCA continuing to take a role in helping to provide balanced technology education to the profession. 

    Below is the formal press release which links to the comment they submitted to the ABA 20/20 Ethics Commission addressing the following points:  1)  Desired form of the Committee’s Recommendations, 2) Minimal Set of Technology Standards for Cloud Computing Providers, 3) Model Terms of Service for Cloud Computing Providers, 4) Is Cloud Computing Outsourcing?, and 5) Cloud Computing Security vis-à-vis E-mail Security. 

    Legal Cloud Computing Association Press Release

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