I wrote a couple weeks ago about South Carolina’s new Formal Ethics Opinion 11-05 regarding an attorney’s use of services, such as Groupon, to offer discounts and deals on their legal services.  North Carolina also has a proposed ethics opinion, 2011 Formal Ethics Opinion 10 entitled “Lawyer Advertising on Deal of the Day or Group Coupon Website.” The [...]

Check out the slides from a webinar I gave yesterday for AVVO which provides the basics of unbundling legal services with ethics issues and best practices. Unbundling Legal Services As the owner of a virtual law office for going on six years now I’ve heard multiple times from other attorneys that because I 1) use [...]

Gary Munneke, Chair of the Law Practice Management Committee, at the New York State Bar Association has written a thought-provoking article entitled “Dueling Sanctions . . .  And More” in a recent NYSBA publication.  He refers to an incident reported by the ABA Journal  about a law firm that came under heat from another firm for [...]

Entitled “Ethical Obligations on Maintaining a Virtual Office for the Practice of Law in Pennsylvania”, the PA Bar Association Committee on Legal Ethics and Professional Responsibility published its FEO 2010-200 this month.  The opinion is in stark contrast to the out-dated thinking in the ethics opinion discussing virtual law offices published this past spring by its neighboring state of [...]

The September issue of the Technology eReport from the ABA GP, Solo and Small Firm Division has a feature article on elawyering written by virtual lawyering pioneer, Richard Granat.  The article is entitled “Doing Law on the Web: eLawyering for Competitive Advantage” and provides an introduction to elawyering or virtual lawyering, but also goes into [...]

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 [...]

If you are providing unbundled legal services online — whether you are providing pro bono unbundled assistance or charging a fee for your services, you might want to read through this opinion (Thigpen v. Banas) that was issued in the Northern District of Illinios in February. The case is related to ghostwriting/unbundling of legal services.  [...]

Exhibitor Hall at this year’s ABA Techshow has a number of different web-based technologies that allow  for attorneys to take all or portions of their practice online.  Most of them seem to be practice management applications, and not so much geared towards working online securely with clients. However, there are a few new developments that assist virtual [...]

I’m happy to announce that I will be a contributor to the Lawyerist.com blog. Here’s my intro post. An article on unbundling legal services with a virtual law practice should post sometime next week. If anyone has requests for topics related to virtual law practice that they would like for me to cover on this blog or [...]

Richard Susskind, author of The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services, has written a guest post for the Legal Rebels blog entitled “Disaster Ahead for Lawyers Unwilling to Change.” Susskind looks at changes in the profession as well as the impact that the economic recession has had on our clients.  He mentions [...]