Virtual Law Practice

Month: July 2012

  • Review of SubTech2012 at New York Law School in Tweets

    Yesterday was a productive day of brainstorming at New York Law School which is hosting the 2012 Twelfth International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice (SubTech). Topics discussed at the roundtable included Automation of Legal Work,
    The Nature of the Current and Future Legal Profession, Technology and the Law School Predicament and Re-Invention. You can see a list of the attendees on the site. The discussion was heated at times because of the mix of technologists, academics and practitioners.

    I’m posting my notes which were tweeted below. For the record, these are not all my thoughts. The moderators asked that we not attribute anything that was said in the discussion to any one particular individual. They are also posted backwards below so read from the top up. I’m sure there is a better way to scrape tweets off of Twitter. If you don’t care about the law school dilemma and only want to read about the legal technology, jump straight to the bottom. The ideas are there. Enjoy, comment.

    Heading back to SubTech this morning to listen to individual presentations that address some of the topics we discussed yesterday.

    ______________

    Wonderful wrap-up from Liz Chambliss at #SubTech2012. Looking forward to more productive discussion at dinner.

    UDSL has two online programs starting this fall. RT @rgranat: How about a Certificate in Digital Lawyering? idea surfaced at #subtech2012

    Collaboration among law schools on certificate programs with an assessment component that employers can verify. #SubTech2012

    Could we add more gamificaton to legal education and add multidisciplinary collaboration to that online system? #SubTech2012

    Not having to teach to the bar would also help deliver a product to students that would be more applicable in real practice. #SubTech2012

    Should law schools take a new role in training legal engineers, new firm roles, not just lawyers? #SubTech2012

    Reinvention of legal ed may have to figure out what happens to legal scholarship and research. What is value, who pays for that?#SubTech2012 (more…)

  • ABA Annual: Delivering “Unbundled Legal Services” Over the Internet

    If you are attending ABA Annual in Chicago in a few weeks, please join myself, Richard Granat and Will Hornsby, for our CLE panel discussion about delivering unbundled legal services online. The program is sponsored by the ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services and will be held on Friday, August 3rd from 3-4:30pm. Additional educational materials will be provided to attendees. Here is the program description:

    The concept of delivering “unbundled” or “limited legal services” is not a new idea, but the idea becomes much more powerful when these legal services are delivered over the Internet as an online legal service. This program will help all law firms, but especially solos and small law firms, learn how to design an “online limited legal service”. Issues discussed include: designing and pricing the legal service; Internet applications that support online delivery; marketing “unbundled legal services online” ; ethical issues that need to be considered, including the creation and termination of the attorney/client relationship, the limited legal service retainer agreement, and confidentiality of client data. Existing models for delivering “unbundled legal services” online will also be discussed as well as the economics of this approach to online legal service delivery.

  • Regulators Concerns with Virtual Law Practice – Review from ILEC

    I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the International Legal Ethics Conference (ILEC) in Banff, Alberta last week. I took part in a panel discussion with John Browning, Darrel Pink and Victoria Rees, entitled “The Challenges of Virtual Law Practice and Social Media.” As with any good panel, we collaborated ahead of time and in the process, learned a lot from each other.

    I wanted to share some of the wonderful insights I gained from listening to Darrel Pink during his portion of our Virtual Law Practice panel presentation. He entitled his thoughts “The Regulator’s Dilemma,” and I think it provides a unique perspective on the concerns that states and other regulatory entities have as more of their members begin delivering legal services online.

    Many of the ethics concerns are similar to what every lawyer has to think about whether delivering services online or off. But when the practice
    is online, it raises interesting questions for the regulator as to how he or she can effectively monitor the practice, the client data, trust accounting
    practices, etc. How does the regulator provide oversight of the lawyers’ practice if it is online? How does he or she handle enforcement of regulations or auditing practices if required?

    Here are some ethics issues that Darrel brought up in his presentation with regards to the limitations on the regulator:

    •How does the regulator address limited jurisdictional reach? For example, how can he or she access data that is located in another jurisdiction
    or if it is in the cloud and the location is unknown?

    •What are costs of access to that data? How would a regulator obtain it?

    •He noted a concern with the ease of information being hidden online by an unscrupulous lawyer or deleted entirely before it could be accessed.

    •If the practice must be taken over in custodianship or receivership by a regulator entity, how is this accomplished if it is an online practice?

    •If the online law office data is requested by law enforcement agencies, such as by a search warrant or production order, how does the
    regulator protect the clients’ privileges when the scope of the seizure is indeterminate? How would the regulator have notice of such a request for
    data?What about the risk that the law office data is entangled with other data being sought?

    •And finally, how does a regulator set standards and enforce rules that are relevant and continue to reflect and adapt to the changes that are occurring with virtual practice? (more…)

  • Speaking at the International Legal Ethics Conference

    This week I will be attending the International Legal Ethics Conference (ILEC) in Banff, Alberta. I am taking part in a panel discussion with John Browning, Darrel Pink and Victoria Rees, entitled “The Challenges of Virtual Law Practice and Social Media.”

    Several tracks run throughout the two-day conference: Culture, Ethics & Society; Empirical Approaches to Legal Ethics; Regulation of the Profession/Ethics and Education; and Philosophy and Legal Ethics. My session falls under the Regulation of the Profession track. This will include discussion about changing regulatory models, regulation of lawyers and other legal service providers, and ethics education for lawyers and in law schools. I’ve submitted my paper on regulatory barriers to multijurisdictional virtual law practice for this session and will talk about some of the newer ethics opinions that have come out which are related to virtual law practice.

    I am most excited about meeting some of the individuals I have worked online with over the past year on different projects. Several individuals from the Law Without Walls team will be attending as well as more than a few of the speakers who participated in this month’s successful LawTechCamp London. I’m a huge fan of some of the legal technologists and educators who will be speaking in Banff so I will have to restrain myself from acting like a giddy teenager at a Justin Bieber sighting.

    I expect to return home with a new perspective on how other countries are addressing ethics and regulatory issues in the legal profession and hopefully will come away inspired to continue my own education on these issues as they pertain to unbundling and the online delivery of legal services. I will make an effort to tweet while at the event or at least follow up with a blog post in the near future.

     

  • Massachusetts Bar Association Publishes Cloud Computing Ethics Opinion

    The Massachusetts Bar Association published Ethics Opinion 12-03 regarding the use of cloud computing in law practice, specifically referring to lawyers’ use of Google docs. The scenario posed in the opinion is this: “A lawyer wishes to store and synchronize the electronic work files that he creates in the course of his law practice across multiple computers and devices (e.g., smartphones, iPads, etc.) so that he can access them remotely.”

    The question posed is “whether it [the use of cloud computing] would violate Lawyer’s obligations under the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct to store confidential client information using Google docs or some other Internet based storage solution, and to synchronize his computers and other devices that contain or access such information over the Internet.”

    This opinion mirrors several that we have seen in the past year that focus on compliance with Rule 1.6 and protection of the client’s confidentiality. (more…)

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