Virtual Law Practice

Category: Educational

  • Avvo Webinar Posted: How to Operate a Virtual Law Office

    Here is the recording from the webinar I presented on November 9th for the Avvo blog.  It provides an introduction to virtual law practice, looks at some case studies of how attorneys are setting up virtual law offices and then dives into researching the technology, ethics issues and ends with marketing a virtual law office.  This webinar had great interaction from the attendees who broke up the presentation with thoughtful questions. 

    [As a side note, I finally claimed my Avvo profile this month.  I was hesitant because I wasn’t sure how their rating system would handle a virtual law office.  Most referral databases are limited by geographic location and just don’t work well with a virtual law office that draws clients from across the attorney’s jurisdiction rather than their place of business or residence if they work from home.  I was pleased to find out that I could post my PO Box address rather than my home address in the profile.  The fact that I operate a virtual law practice did not seem to hurt my ratings at all. ]

  • Free Webinars on Virtual Law Practice

    Please join me this week for two different webinars related to virtual law practice.   Both are free sessions that you can register for, but each will take a different approach in covering the topic.

    How to Operate a Virtual Law Office and Deliver Legal Services Online – Tuesday, November 9, 10:00am PT, AVVO Blog: Register Here

    In this webinar, I will provide a basic introduction to virtual lawyering that will cover the practical aspects of operating a virtual law practice and delivering legal services to clients over the Internet. The session will also include a discussion about unbundling legal services and the ability to use document assembly and automation to streamline the delivery to clients online while maintaining a high standard of quality legal services. Ethics concerns will also be addressed as they relate to the daily operation and best practices for a virtual law office.

    The Virtual Law Office: What It Is & How to Use It, Thursday November 11 at noon EST, Law Practice Strategy with Donna Seyle, Register Here.  

    During this webinar, Donna Seyle and I will discuss how a virtual law office can be integrating into a traditional law practice or run as a completely web-based practice delivering unbundled legal services online.   This webinar will be more of an interactive, interview-style session, and I’m looking forward to having a good conversation with Donna and the webinar attendees about virtual law practice, the technology, security, ethics, and practical implementation issues.

  • Lawyerist Guest Post: Receiving a Digital Education

    The following is an excerpt from my recent guest post for the Lawyerist blog discussing a mini-conference on educating the digital lawyer that I attended last week at Harvard Law sponsored by the Berkman Law Lab. 

    Below are a few examples of courses or programs that are successfully working to provide a digital education.  Some of them have links to resources for the course or to online publications by the educator.  …

    I’m happy to say that the following examples are just skimming the surface of what seems to be a long overdue evolution in legal education. Thankfully several of the advancements are multidisciplinary with a strong emphasis on innovation in delivery of legal services through entrepreneurship.  No matter how far removed you may be from your law school days, the quality of digital education available for current students impacts our entire profession and is worth our support.

    – The Berkman Center’s Law Lab – Check out the Digital LLC project and Cloud Law.

    – Prof. Clark Cunningham, Georgia State University – Uses Clio to introduce students to cloud-based practice management.

    – International Forum on Teaching Legal Ethics and Professionalism – open to explore or register and post content, teaching materials, etc. (in beta)

    – Prof. Paul Maharg,University of Northumbria Law School – Check out the slideshare presentations.   In this open source learning and teaching environment, law students enter a virtual world to conduct simulated legal transactions.

    – Prof. Brian Donnelly, Columbia University – Lawyering in the Digital Age Clinic

    – Prof. Ronald Staudt, University of Chicago-Kent School of Law – Justice and Technology Practicum

    – Prof. Oliver Goodenough, Vermont Law School – Digital Drafting course. Video or audio of the Berkman Center’s session with John Clippinger and Oliver Goodenough on Cloud Law, Finance 3.0, and Digital Institutions.

  • ELawyering and the Future of Legal Work CLE

    The ABA eLawyering Task Force will be presenting a CLE at American University Washington College of Law on October 21, 2010 from noon – 1:20pm, entitled “ELawyering and the Future of Legal Work“.  I will be joining co-panelists Blair Janis, Marc Lauritsen and Ronald Staudt in a discussion of elawyering and its impact on the future of law practice.  The program is free and open to law students and practicing attorneys (it costs a little if you need the CLE credit).  If you are in the D.C. area, please join us.  The question and answer sessions at the end of these presentations are always fun and a great opportunity to hear from local attorneys about how they may be using virtual law practice and other elawyering methods to deliver legal services.

  • Social Media for the Legal Professional

    This past weekend I presented a CLE session for the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys (NCAWA) annual meeting on the topic of social media for legal professionals. Anyone involved in virtual law practice needs to understand social media and how it can be used to market a virtual law office, but also about how online clients might attempt to contact the virtual lawyer using these methods and how to tactfully handle that.

    I’ve had online clients attempt to “friend” me on Facebook or chat on Twitter, but I’ve created a policy for my solo virtual law practice not to “friend” or “follow” clients and to let them know up-front that I won’t use unencyrpted or non-secure methods of communicating with them. Most of the relationships I have within the legal professional are for the most part created and conducted completely online using whatever social media app is trending at the time. It’s an invaluable part of my professional networking so I enjoyed the opportunity to share some of my methods and recommendations at the NCAWA Annual Meeting.

    This presentation covered the basics of social media how-tos with a healthy dose of “watch out for x” and “monitor y”. I also provided suggestions for creating consistent online reputations for law firms using social media and discussed how attorneys might implement social media policies for their firm and educate firm members and even clients about procedures the firm has adopted for the use of social media.

    Here are the slides from the presentation. The final slide has a list of recommended resources for further reading up on the topic.

    Social Media and the Legal Profe

  • Michigan Bar Journal Article: Best Practice Tips for the Virtual Law Office

    September’s issue of the Michigan Bar Journal features an article that I wrote entitled “Best Practice Tips for the Virtual Law Office.”  The article summarizes some of the potential malpractice risks of using technology to deliver legal services online and then discuss ways to mitigate those risks. 

  • Ethics Considerations: Guest Post on Mass. LOMAP Blog

    The final guest post in my three-part series for the Massachusett’s Law Office Management Assistance Program (LOMAP) has posted on the blog.  This final post covers ethics considerations in virtual law practice including both the attorney’s responsibility to thoroughly research their software provider as well as best practices for the ethical management of a virtual law office.  

    Below is the introduction to the post.  Many thanks to Jared Correia for the opportunity to share my research and writing with the readers of the LOMAP blog.

    From the guest post:

    The delivery of legal services online carries with it a number of ethical concerns; however, these ethical concerns are not all that unlike those that have traditionally been addressed by offline law firms. The online lawyer is able to mitigate risks associated with virtual law practice just as a traditionally-practicing attorney would with an offline practice when, for example, installing and using software for law practice management. There are two separate categories of ethics matters to address in connection with the virtual practice of law. The first pertains to the attorney’s duty in selecting the service provider that will be setting up, hosting and maintaining the virtual law practice. With any cloud computing service, there are precautions that must be observed in researching and choosing a software provider. The second category of potential ethics concerns relates to the attorney’s daily operation of the virtual law office; and, the focus there is on ways to mitigate potential malpractice risks when working with clients online. Further issues related to each category are discussed in greater detail below; and, in addition, suggestions are made and additional resources are pointed to, for further guidance.

    You can read the rest of the guest post on the LOMAP blog.

  • Virtual Lawyering Promoted at ABA Annual

    There was a lot of coverage related to virtual law practice and the delivery of online legal services at this year’s ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco.  Compared with even a year ago, this topic is fully on the radar of attorneys and bar officials concerned with virtual law practice for both solo and small firms.  However, this time there was also interest as it relates to larger firms, the outsourcing of legal services and the globalization of law firms.  

    I sat on a panel discussion entited “20/20 Vision: The Impact of Technology and Globalization on Ethics for the 21st Century Lawyer” and was pleased to see a packed audience as well as have the majority of audience questions pertain to virtual law practice.  Here is a link to a video interview of our panel’s moderator, Judith Miler. 

    The questions from the audience after the panel discussion were the same ones I hear at a lot of presentations.  The primary concern is still related to the basic security of entrusting law office data to cloud computing.  The second greatest concern is about the verification or authentication of client identity online.  “Can you really form a relationship online without seeing the whites of their eyes?”  Sometimes it’s just a matter of being comfortable with the technology and getting used to using it to communicate that helps answer these questions.  Overall, the response was positive and hopefully, the details and resources I provided in the manuscript for the attendees will go a long way in answering their questions about the security and cloud computing concerns in virtual law practice.

    Will Hornsby joined Marc Lauritsen, Richard Granat and myself for a lively panel discussion on virtual lawyering on Friday.  Richard informed me that he also provided a presentation on virtual law practice to a room of state bar presidents and other bar officials who were very receptive to these concepts in practice management. 

    ABA President Carolyn Lamm during her presentation on Sunday night on a panel entitled “Lawyers Surviving in a Darwinian World” mentioned online legal service companies and emphasized the legal profession’s reponsibility to step up to meet the needs of the public who are going online to seek out legal assistance.   The ABA Journal has a write-up of her comments during the presentation. 

    Social media was also a hot topic at several CLE sessions at the annual meeting.  At one of the vendor booths I picked up a copy of Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontierby Michael Fertik and David Thompson.  I’ll try to post a review of the book on this blog when I get a chance to read through it.  Even the Twitter hashtag for the event was active this year indicating a growing comfort by my fellow attorneys to embrace technology to communicate.  And to top it off, I got to meet Heather Armstrong, mommy-blogger and famous Dooce.comwriter, at the WestlawNext CLE about social media in the workplace. 

    There were also some vendors that I spoke with who are making an effort to facilitate virtual law practice for attorneys.  This might be in response to the ethics and UPL complaints raised by some state bars to the documents produced by legal service companies.  Both Legal Zoom and Rocket Lawyer are combining their document assembly and automation technologies with the ability to connect an attorney with the consumer going online to fill out and purchase basic legal forms.  I’m reaching out to both vendors to find out more about how their systems will allow for this type of delivery to be controlled by the attorney as a practice management tool for delivering online legal services. 

    The overall tone I left with at the end of the annual meeting was that technology to deliver legal services online and to communicate with our clients and other legal professionals is embraced as the future. Rather than the over-emphasis on the security and risks that I’ve seen the past few years at other conferences, the tone seems to be an acceptance of virtual law practice and a move towards finding ways to responsibly integrate it into our practice management toolboxes.  I much prefer this optimistic, but realistic, mood.

  • Revising Ethics Rules to Facilitate Virtual Law Practice

    I’m on a panel discussion this morning at the ABA Annual Meeting about the impact of technology and globalization on ethics for the 21st century lawyer.  One of the questions that I expect will come up will be about the need for ethics rules to be revised to reflect the changes in practice management that involve virtual law practice and cloud computing.  Which rules do I think need to be revised?

    Based on my research, not many state bar ethics rules or advisory opinions actually address the use of cloud computing or the delivery of legal services online.  The North Carolina State Bar’s proposed opinion related to SaaS in law practice managment that was published this summer is one of the first to my knowledge.  There are opinions out there that are related to the hosting of law office data by third-party providers, but none that really discuss the actual delivery of legal services online to clients. 

    My main concern with the development of any future ethics opinions is that they should not attempt to define the technology too narrowly.  This is a problem that attorneys have now in trying to interpret the existing rules and regulations based on way that they were drafted years ago.  Try figuring out how to apply rules related to email, fax and cell phone usage to the cloud computing apps you currently use in practice management.  There is a lot of uncertainty in trying to comply with the rules when the rules weren’t really written to take the rapid growth of technology into consideration.  (more…)

  • Virtual Law Practice at Legal Rebels Kickoff

    The ABA Journal’s Legal Rebels is kicking off the 2010 tour with a presentation during the upcoming American Bar Association Annual Meeting in San Francisco.  I’ll be presenting 20 slides in 6 minutes related to innovation in the delivery of legal services online and how it can be used to grow your law practice. The presentation starts at 12:30 p.m. Thursday, August 5 at the expo floor at George Moscone Center West. They will be posting the video of my speech at legalrebels.com later in September and I’ll post the slides up on slideshare afterwards.  If you are in town for the Annual Meeting, please join us.

MENU