Virtual Law Practice

Month: March 2011

  • Video from Presentation at UNC Chapel Hill Law School

    Thank you to NC Jolt for inviting me to speak to law students at UNC School of Law in Chapel Hill last week. Special thanks to 3L John Kivus (@kivus) for making the connections. I appreciated the opportunity to share this topic with the next generation of legal professionals.

    Awesome questions from the attendees as well. I especially liked this one (perhaps for a future blog post?):

    What happens if you are representing a party that is suing Google or Amazon and all your law office data, including their client file, is hosted in the cloud on that company’s servers? Conflicts issues? Security issues?

    The question was more eloquently delivered, but you get the idea. Fun and necessary questions to ponder as we move more of our practices to the cloud.

  • Online Bidding for Clients

    Today’s Wall Street Journal published an article on Shpoonkle, an online auction site similar to eBay where lawyers can bid on clients.  Both Susan Cartier Liebel and Scott Greenfield had blogged about this site in the past month.  Robert Ambrogi even chimed in that the concept is old news and will hopefully fall to its demise sooner rather than later.

    Should we really consider this a new method of online delivery of legal services or is it just another form of online lawyer marketing?  

    My interest here as a virtual lawyer is in the potential online delivery of legal services to clients.  It doesn’t seem that Shpoonkle provides the registering attorneys with client portals or any other way of actually working with the clients online.  Once an attorney “wins” a bid, the parties move back to a more traditional attorney/client relationship.  However, I can see this form of bidding taking the next step where the attorney whose bid is chosen uses some form of secure workspace provided through the site to unbundle legal services online to the client.  Think about how Elance.com operates.  (more…)

  • Evolution of the VLO 1.0

    When my husband and I sold VLOTech, our legal software as a service solution that created virtual law offices, to Total Attorneys in the fall of 2009 we were anxious to see some of the items on our development list taken to the next level.   Almost a year and a half later, I’m excited to announce that they are releasing VLO 2.0, the next generation of the VLO concept. 

    I’ve been involved at different stages in the process of rebuilding and adding to the software.  A strong focus on the security of the system and attention to the ethics concerns unique to lawyers have been maintained by the developers at Total Attorneys.  It will be exciting to see the reaction from attorneys to the more user-friendly design and workflow. 

    From April to June anyone interested in test driving the beta version of the VLO can sign up with Total Attorneys for a free trial.  After June when the trial period ends those beta users will be offered a discount price if they wish to continue to use the software. 

    More web-based practice management solutions are entering the legal marketplace and more of them are developing client portals and features to facilitate virtual lawyering.  I’m clearly going to be biased in favoring the VLO 2.0 because it is what I’ve used to build my own practice for going on six years, and it is something that I’ve been able to work on closely with others to grow into what I believe is a solid platform for the online delivery of legal services.  I would encourage anyone interested in the development of technology for virtual law practice to take a close look at the VLO 2.0 beta from Total Attorneys and find out about some of the innovative developments that are coming down the pipeline for that software in the near future.

  • Choice of Law in Cross-Border Practice

    Below is the comment I submitted this morning to the ABA Ethics 20/20 Commission Working Group on Uniformity, Choice of Law, and Conflicts of Interest in response to their request for feedback on the issues paper on Choice of Law in Cross-Border Practice.  One of the fact patterns in the issues paper specifically referrred to a virtual law office and several of the other fact patterns might also apply to a multijurisdictional virtual law firm.

    Virtual Law Practice and Choice of Law in Cross-Border Practice

  • Unbundling Legal Services Webinar Slides

    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 technology to delivery legal services to my clients, and 2) that I unbundle my legal services, that I am essentially nothing more than a solo mimicking LegalZoom.  

    I feel the need to put this assumption to rest yet again and not just for my own pride in my practice (as an aside I just received the Wilmington Parent Family Favorite Attorney Award for the 5th year in a row for my virtual law office), but because it’s critical that others in the legal profession get this distinction about what unbundling legal services means and how it can benefit our profession and the public. 

    Unbundling legal services is not limited to using document automation and assembly programs to deliver legal forms to consumers online.  Unbundling is a complementary form of legal service delivery that may be used by traditional brick and mortar law practices, even those that focus on litigation, as well as truly web-based law practices and hybrid structures that combine the traditional law firm with a virtual delivery or communication component.  (more…)

  • Call for eLawyering Solos to Innovate

    Jordan Furlong over at Law21 has published a post describing the 21st-century solo practitioner and announced a competition to drive innovation.

    Furlong lists what he sees are four characteristics of the new solo lawyer.  One of these characteristics is the ability to innovate.  Solos may have more flexibility to take the risks necessary to come up with truly unique methods of delivering legal services and operating a law practice.  Just as the rest of the legal marketplace is having to adapt to changes in the use of technology to practice law, solos are in an ideal situation to take advantage of these trends to give themselves a competitive advantage.

    Furlong calls to solos to come up with new ways to deliver legal services and ends his post with the announcement that he is giving away five scholarships to Solo Practice University to “five current or soon-to-be solos or small-firm lawyers who are now engaging, or are ready to engage, in 21st-century sole practice.”

    Those of you who are solos engaged in elawyering, virtual law practice or are coming up with ways to use cloud computing in your practice, get in the running for one of these scholarships.  I’ve been on the faculty at SPU teaching a course in virtual law practice since it launched a couple years ago.  It’s a wonderful community of entrepreneurial solos with awesome online access to great mentors and teachers.  I’m looking forward to reading about the innovations that come out of this competition and hope at least a few of them involve the online delivery of legal services.

  • Virginia & the Ethics of Cloud Computing in Law Practice

    James M. McCauley, ethics counsel for the Virginia State Bar, has written an article for the February issue of the Virginia Lawyer Magazine, entitled “Cloud Computing — A Silver Lining or Ethical Thunderstorm for Lawyers?”

    Even if you aren’t licensed to practice in Virginia, I would recommend reading this well-balanced article on cloud computing.  

    McCauley summarizes the benefits of the technology for practice management, but spends the majority of the article answering the questions I’m sure he and other ethics counsel hear all the time from attorneys trying to figure out how to implement cloud computing in their practices.  He starts out by stating that “there is no basis in the Virginia Rules of Professional Conduct for an unqualified prohibition of lawyers managing their office software applications and client data using cloud computing.”   And then explains how Rule 1.6(a) gives attorneys an ethical duty to protect our clients’ confidential information.  From there the discussion moves to concerns about security and reliability of cloud computing.  (more…)

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