Virtual Law Practice

Month: November 2011

  • New Version of NC SaaS Ethics Opinion

     

    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 read some of the history of this opinion in this post.  After a year or more of subcommittee review and revision, this latest version will hopefully be the final one that the Ethics Committee recommends for adoption by the Council at their January meeting.

    The subcommittee removed the list of minimum requirements for the selection of a technology vendor. Many of the items on the list had raised concern as detailed here by myself and others. The new version of the opinion sticks with the “reasonable care” standard requiring the attorney to do his or her due diligence in researching the technology and any third-party provider. The proposed opinion states:

    …a law firm may use SaaS if reasonable care is taken to minimize the risks of inadvertent disclosure of confidential information and to protect the security of client information and client files. A lawyer must fulfill the duties to protect confidential client information and to safeguard client files by applying the same diligence and competency to manage the risks of SaaS that the lawyer is required to apply when representing clients.

    (more…)

  • Private Cloud for Lawyers? Slides from Presentation on Future of Legal Service Delivery

     

    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 our neighbors to the north are grappling with some of the same issues as our State Bar ethics regulators regarding the use of SaaS in law practice management.

    An interesting idea was raised by a member of the group that the Canadian Bar might create a private cloud just for Canadian lawyers. I believe there was some mention of this as well in the cloud computing report published by the Law Society of British Columbia this summer.

    Would this address some of the concerns surrounding lawyers placing their data into the hands of third-party providers and hosting it in a public cloud?  It’s certainly something to think about. My initial reaction was that it would limit competition and because of the expense of creating and maintaining a private cloud, might take away many of the cost-savings associated with a public cloud as well as cause problems when a law firm wants to use another SaaS product that does not collaborate with the Canadian Bar to host a copy of the data on the private cloud. But there would be benefits, especially for Canadian lawyers who are subject to a more rigorous auditing process that requires immediate access by regulators to a law firm’s data.

    I still think the best approach to take would be to create guidelines for lawyers rather than restricting use of web-based technology to a private cloud or restricting technology use to a specific list of approved vendors, especially if that list of vendors might not be updated regularly.

    What do you think about the creation of a private cloud? What if your state bar proposed to create a private cloud just for its members? What about cross-border and multijurisdictional practices?

    The slides from the presentation are below. I’ve integrated several ethics slides that are specific to the Canadian Bar. For those of you familiar with my presentations, the first few slides may be familiar background information on cloud computing and virtual practice, so skip ahead to the interesting case studies and resources.

    Keynote on Future of Legal Services Delivery

MENU