Last week I gave a presentation at Stanford Law School entitled “Unbundling and the Future of Legal Service Delivery.” We had some great questions from the attendees at the end of the talk. Thanks again to Stanford CodeX and the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession for inviting me out there. I am introduced by Tony Lai, one of the founders of LawGives who I also had the pleasure of spending time with while in Palo Alto. Below is the video from my talk.

Today, the Apple Apps Store has released the Total Attorneys practice management platform’s iPad and iPhone app. This clean app allows a lawyer to operate a law practice from the iPad and/or iPhone with secure access to the virtual law office platform. Case and client management features are all integrated into the app, and it syncs with the full browser version of the software.

At its meeting on January 27, the NC State Bar Council adopted and published the last version of 2011 Formal Ethics 6 “Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property”. The last version of this opinion was sent to subcommittee in July 2011, but the discussion over the structure of the opinion has been almost a year and a half-long process.

  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 The Law Society of British Columbia’s Cloud Computing Working Group published online a report with recommendations regarding the use of cloud computing by legal professionals. Recommendations included in the report include: 1)      Guidelines to help lawyers conduct due diligence in researching a technology providers and cloud-based solution.  (The report refers to “third party [...]

The Ethics Committee at the North Carolina State Bar voted to send the proposed formal ethics opinion 6 (FEO 6), entitled ”Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property” back to the subcommittee to reconsider responses they received to inquiries #1 and #2. Both of these inquiries contained worrisome [...]

I love SaaS.  I depend on SaaS to operate my virtual law office.  I support an attorney’s right to choose their own practice management tools and make their own business decisions whether it’s in the cloud or in a filing cabinet.  But there are responsibilities that come along with choosing any practice management system and [...]

Below is the text from my letter to the NC Bar Ethics Committee regarding their proposed ethics opinion on the use of Software as a Service (SaaS) in law practice management.  The Committee has received only two comments so far.  This is an important issue that will have a big impact on attorneys in NC and potentially elsewhere [...]

Below is a short and to-the-point article that I drafted for the NC Bar Association’s Technical Advisory Committee after our last meeting discussing the proposed NC Ethics Opinion on SaaS.  I wasn’t critical of the opinion at first, until I spoke with a few SaaS vendors and others who explained their positions in greater detail [...]

UPDATE: CHECK OUT THIS POST by Erik Mazzone, Director of the Center of Practice Management at the NC Bar Association, on his Law Practice Matters blog.  Erik is concerned that the proposed opinion will limit the cloud-based vendors that attorneys in NC can use based on the location of their servers.  While most legal SaaS [...]