An exciting new resource for lawyers and legal educators has been published online for free thanks to the sponsorship of Harvard’s Berkman Center LawLab. The book project called Educating the Digital Lawyer is now available for download as an epub file here.

The ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services has written a letter to the Commission on Ethics 20/20 providing its recommendations regarding lawyer advertising rules. In an interesting move, the Committee has recommended the deletion of Model Rule 7.2(b). For those of us in virtual practices who depend on online advertising methods perhaps moreso than traditional law firms, this would be a potentially revolutionary change to the rules.

The State Bar of California has released a draft formal ethics opinion (No. 10-0003) regarding the use of a “virtual law office practice” by an attorney. This seven page ethics opinion was tentatively approved by the State Bar Standing Committee on Professional Responsibility and Conduct on November 5th and has been published for a 90-day public comment period.

  The NC Bar has published the revised version of it proposed ethics opinion entitled “Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property”, 2011 FEO 6 on the website. It will also be published in the next issue of the NC State Bar Journal.  You can [...]

  Last week I was honored to give a keynote at the annual Canadian Discipline Administrators Conference in Toronto hosted by the Law Society of Upper Canada. The attendees were the discipline authorities of the different Canadian Bar jurisdictions. After speaking with several of them and based on the Q & A session, I can report that [...]

  This Saturday I’m giving a live lecture focused on virtual law practice marketing strategy for my students in Concord Law School’s Small Business LLM program. I’m having the students slowly add in components of a business plan with each assignment so that by the end of the semester they have a complete and ready-to-implement business plan for [...]

After five years, I finally got around to updating my virtual law office website. I’m still kicking the tires and making a few tweaks, but I’m pretty pleased with it as it is. I’ve got grand plans to update my whitepapers and to send out monthly emails to my online clients.  I’d also like to add realtime [...]

One of the more recent initial resolutions published by the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 clarifies Model Rule 5.5 as it relates to systematic and continous presence and shows the Commission’s acceptance of the growth of alternative law practice structures, such as virtual law practice. Comment [4] of Rule 5.5 covers when systematic and continues presence is [...]

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post for the NC Law Blog entitled “What Contact Information Must a Non-Traditional Law Firm Provide?“. The post discussed how more non-traditional law offices are opening up, many of them delivering legal services online, and how this is raising the question of how to comply with residency requirements, [...]

The ABA Standing Committee on Ethics and Prof. Responsibility has published a new ethics opinion, Formal Opinion 11-459 “Duty to Protect the Confidentiality  of E-mail Communications with One’s Client”. I didn’t see this one coming, but I think it’s a move in the right direction. The situation described in the opinion relates to when an attorney has [...]