This is the video of my “ignite-style” presentation at the ReInvent Law Conference in Silicon Valley a couple months ago. I’m speaking at a super fast pace about branded networks, lawyer advertising, and online delivery of legal services.
Stephanie Kimbro – Consumer Law Revolution from ReInvent Law Channel on Vimeo.
A few articles to note and a request for leads:
I like to write.
My new book about the online legal marketplace, Consumer Law Revolution, was released today from the publisher and pre-orders should be shipping this week.
I’m excited to share this book with the legal profession. It dives into an area that is growing in practice and where we don’t have clear, established best practices to guide us. The online legal marketplace naturally involves technology and the unbundling of legal services, but also new forms of online lawyer advertising and collaboration with non-lawyer legal service companies that provide online marketing tools and platforms for lawyers to connect with consumers.
As with most of the work I do, part of my motivation for writing this book was because growth of the online legal marketplace increases access to justice by providing the public with alternative methods of receiving assistance and of matching them up with the lawyer or self-help service that will be best for them. By alternatives, I mean that more individuals will be able to find a legal service that they can afford to pay and which are delivered in a manner that they are able to receive it without financial or physical hardship.
The book covers a lot of online marketing basics but also provides case studies of many of the legal technology startups that are coming on the scene to disrupt the delivery of legal services. Lawyers need to be a part of this disruption. For most of these case studies, I joined up as a lawyer and as a prospective client to see how the process worked from both sides. I hope the readers will find this review and my analysis useful in making selections about which branded networks to join. There are checklists and suggested best practices as well as evaluation of the potential ethics issues that may arise.
I look forward to the conversations and debates this book will generate. I did not mince words in criticizing the outdated lawyer advertising rules and questioned the lack of data behind many of the assumptions that are behind those rules. If there are answers to my questions or reasons my proposals would not be feasible, that’s great. If there are none, then I hope this book sparks some reform or clarification or something useful to further the progress of our profession’s ability to stay relevant and adapt effectively to the changes in the legal marketplace. Thanks to everyone who supported my research and writing for this book.
Here’s the official marketing copy for the book from the ABA LPM: (more…)
The Virginia State Bar has published Legal Ethics Opinion 1872 on virtual law offices and the use of temporary office space on March 29, 2013.
The ethics opinion acknowledges that virtual law offices and temporary or leased office spaces do not always go together, but it addresses both from the standpoint of ethics issues, such as providing contact information in marketing, supervision of lawyers and nonlawyers in the firm, confidentiality of the tech and competency using it to work with clients online. The opinion also acknowledges that these ethics issues are the same that come up with traditional firms just in a different context and should be treated as such – a message I’ve been preaching for years.
Perhaps because of the Virginia Disciplinary Matter that came up last year regarding the lawyer who was disciplined for violating lawyer advertising rules in marketing his virtual law firm, this new opinion mentions that the lawyer can’t list temporary office space in advertising a virtual law office to make the firm look like it is larger or has more resources than it actually does. It seems the easiest thing to comply with this would be to put “by appointment only” next to any contact address where you have temporary office space and want items mailed there but don’t actually work from that location on a regular basis. The opinion doesn’t say this, but that’s my take and also what the NC Bar put it its opinion on that topic last year.
As usual, the big key to complying with lawyer advertising rules comes down to being transparent in your business practices. This is something lawyers should be doing anyway as business owners even if the RPC weren’t there. Being false or misleading to clients about your ability to provide services to them isn’t going to win you loyal clients and referrals in the long run anyway. There’s another reason we should teach marketing and practical business skills to law students. We wouldn’t end up with practitioners who think acting like unscrupulous, hit ’em over the head, insincere sales people is going to help with long-term client development. That’s a rant for another day.
The new Virginia State Bar Ethics Opinion touches very generally on the basics to watch out for when operating a virtual law office. This is a good thing because I suspect in the next five to ten years all law firms will have some form of online delivery component even for their full-service, in-person clients and more will want to cut costs by using temporary office space. [HT to Niki Black for bringing this opinion to my attention.]
Today I gave a presentation which was live but also webcast for the Chicago Bar Association. Here are the slides from that talk. I’ve started just using graphics on slides so I’m not sure how useful these will be to anyone without the context, but here they are anyway!
One of my law students recently raised this question to me: Could a lawyer allow payment for legal services in Bitcoin? It’s not a question I’ve ever heard before, and it’s a good one.
Bitcoin is digital currency and it’s not managed by any central authority but the transactions occur through Bitcoin miners which is basically a server that communicates and confirms the transaction and records it on a ledger. They can be transferred by mobile devices. Recent articles have suggested that eBay and Paypal may open up their sites to the use of Bitcoin.
There is criticism around Bitcoin that the exchange rate is too volatile. A Twitter follower in response to my posing of this question replied: “Would you accept bearer bonds?” There are also potential security issues. The best article I’ve read on that subject was in Wired by an author who had tried to break Bitcoin and failed. And then there are the questions about IOLTA and trust accounting rules and compliance. There is a Bitcoin Foundation which supports the standardization of Bitcoin and claims to support the software design and cryptography behind it.
I could find only one other instance where anyone in the legal profession was offering payment by Bitcoin. A law firm in Albuquerque called Law 4 Small Business published a press release announcing their offering of payments via digital currency.
For a virtual law practice, adding Bitcoin to possible online payment methods might make sense. I’m still thinking through this one. Anyone else have any reactions?
The NY State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics has published a new ethics Opinion 964 on April 4, 2013 that affects virtual law offices. (HT to Niki Black for bringing it to my attention.)
The opinion is more related to lawyer advertising than virtual law offices, but it affects advertising for virtual, traditional and hybrid delivery models. The opinion was prompted by an inquiry from a lawyer who delivers immigration law services primarily online. Like many lawyers with virtual law offices, the lawyer rarely meets with clients in person and communicates using video conferencing and other digital methods of communication. Working from home, the opinion explains that the lawyer did not want to have clients coming to her home office. Accordingly, she preferred to use a PO Box or other mailbox service than providing her home address.
We have seen this question in other states. NC’s proposed ethics opinion on the use of leased time-shared office addresses ran through a similar scenario and inquiry. Virginia’s recent disciplinary case with a lawyer who claimed to have a state-wide virtual law firm in his misleading advertising also raised the issue. So how did NY decide to respond? Hint: I think they had a BYOB pow-wow with the NJ ethics folks.
This weekend I gave a presentation for Avvo’s Lawyernomics Conference in Las Vegas. I was talking about the subject of my new book and giving examples of the online marketing tools that branded networks provide for lawyers in their network to use to connect and work with clients online. There were several great questions from the audience throughout, but one question in particular struck me: Couldn’t we use the same techniques the branded networks are using on our own law firm sites?
Yes. Lawyers can use very similar techniques on their websites to draw prospective clients. Lawyers can create web calculators, provide free legal forms and resource libraries, use real-time chat and video to hold initial free consultations, and provide a way for prospective clients to register to request legal assistance directly on their website. These are all things that many virtual law offices include in their website design. These lawyers add various “calls to action”, create landing pages, and connect the resources provided on their site with the sharing components of their different social media account activities. They share and put their valuable content out there for the public. It builds and expands their firm’s online brand and reputation. Lawyers may use different tools to run analytics on their site and their different marketing campaigns and refine them as needed. However, it is still difficult to use all of these same techniques as branded networks and compete effectively. It’s just not enough was the message I had for them.
Why is it not enough? Because the companies marketing direct to consumer are not restricted by any lawyer rules of professional conduct, whether it’s advertising rules or the lovely Rule 5.4 that restricts fee sharing and protects the “independence of the lawyer.” Branded networks are not small business owners, but companies who typically have sizable marketing budgets devoted solely to the purpose of D2C marketing. They can pour a lot of that money into building their brand and spreading it to particular target markets for online, personal legal services. In terms of competing with these companies for purchasing Google AdWords or keywords in any search engine, it is going to be very difficult for any solo, small or medium sized firm to do for a long enough period of time for it to have an impact on client development.
I was honest with this audience. I told them that seven years ago it had been easier to be a solo virtual lawyer, such as myself, to market my online unbundled services using online marketing and social media engagement. However, as the years went by and the options for online offerings increased, especially in personal legal services such as estate planning and family law, it became increasingly difficult to compete in the search engine rankings without investing a significant amount of marketing dollars on online campaigns. What could have been done before 2007 on almost zero cost other than my time and energy and consistency, now takes a significant monetary investment.
That was the reality I shared with these attendees and asked them to look at the future development of this trend in the online delivery of personal legal services as an opportunity for collaboration rather than as a threat to their law firm model. Clearly, virtual law offices that are completely web-based without a traditional law office are going to be the most threatened. But it’s also even more important that these practices learn how to ethically use online marketing tools provided by branded networks and engage in their lawyer networks in a way that helps them build and expand their brand and push traffic and prospective clients back to their firm’s site rather than just exert all their energy providing free content and value to the branded network.
Developing best practices and a law firm policy for using the online marketing platforms provided by branded networks is going to be a key component in the future of lawyer advertising – whether you have a virtual law practice or a traditional one.
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.
This past Friday, I gave a presentation at the ReInvent Law conference in Silicon Valley. Rachel Zahorsky of the ABA Journal wrote about the event here and the American Lawyer wrote about it here. There were 500+ attendees registered and some really interesting speakers. The focus of my talk was about the subject of my new book: lawyers, especially solos and small firms, should learn to collaborate with branded networks and where we are at this stage in that process. I believe a video of my presentation will be made available at some point online which will probably make way more sense than these slides do alone.
Overall, there was a lot of energy at this conference and more than a few calls to action, perhaps directed at some of the many legal tech companies and startups in the room.