Virtual Law Practice

Month: March 2013

List of Must-Reads Related to Law and Tech

Here is some spring reading. Every six months for the past couple of years, I publish a post that lists the top updates in virtual law practice and links out to the news, events and articles over that time period. Well, virtual law practice has gone more mainstream and curating all of that content is way more time consuming and difficult to narrow down.

So instead, here are the top articles that have come out in the past six months that I think any virtual practitioner should read. Most deal with the future of law practice, but others are practical advice on security and tech issues. I use Twitter as my reader these days so I know I’ve missed a few. They are in no particular order. I’m purposefully not putting the great law school reform/legal jobs debate in here.

– Jordan Furlong, The Evolution of the Legal Services Market, five part series on Law21.

– V. Mary Abraham, What Technologists Can Teach Lawyers on Legal Technology Today.

– David R. Johnson, Serving Justice with Conversational Law, for the World Future Society

– Ron Friedmann, A New Model Law Firm: A Closer Look at Clearspire, two part post on Prism Legal.

– Ron Friedmann, The Current State and Future of Big Law Online Legal Services , on Prism Legal.

– Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future, Oxford Press (2013).

– Dan Katz recaps the coverage of the ReInvent Law Conference in Silicon Valley on his Computational Legal Studies blog. Hopefully videos of the talks will be posted soon.

– Dan Katz, Quantitative Legal Prediction – or – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry, Emory Law Journal, Vol. 62, 2013 on SSRN.

-Law Society of British Columbia’s Cloud Computing Checklist

– Sharon Nelson and John Simek, Through a Glass, Darkly: The Future of Court Technology, on Slaw.

– John Gregory, Crowdsourced Online Dispute Resolution on Slaw.

– Dave Einstein, Big Data in Law: Cloud Challenge, Analytics Opportunity, on Forbes.

– Pam Woldow, What Law Firms Can Learn from Hotels: Perspectives on Service

– V. Mary Abraham, Improve Your Legal Practice Through Gamification, in Law Technology Today

– Donna Seyle, eLawyering in an Age of Accelerating Technology, ABA GP/Solo Report (January 2013)

– Using Technology to Enhance Access to Justice, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Volume 26, Number 1 Fall 2012

– Dennis Kennedy, Thirteen Mobile Collaboration Tips for 2013, Law Practice Today (January 2013)

March 29, 2013
Updates on Events

Below are a couple of the events I’m scheduled to attend this month. I have not had time to blog because I’ve been finishing up the edits to my book about online marketing tools and branded networks. It is now slated to come out the first of June.

I have a couple other articles or chapters that should be published between now and the summer as well. I’ll share what I can here. In addition to the firm practice and consulting work, I’ve also been online teaching the second six week session on Social Media and Online Marketing for the Digital Lawyering Program at the University of Dayton School of Law. And I’ve put a few more irons in the fire with a couple other legal tech/legal services related startups that I’m keeping under wraps for now. Too many ideas, too little time.

ABA Techshow in Chicago April 4-5. I’ll be at a Meet the Author session on Friday at 1:45pm. This is more of a casual event where I will focus on addressing questions from the audience. I’m also hosting a Taste of Techshow dinner with Chad Burton, another Techshow speaker. We will be discussing virtual law practice at that dinner if anyone attending the show wants to sign up and join us for that.

Lawyernomics Conference in Vegas April 26-27th at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. I’ll be speaking on the topic of the Consumer Law Revolution book. Basically, I’ll be giving practical tips for lawyers who want to work with branded networks and discussing the best practices to do so.

March 28, 2013
Using Technology to Unbundle in the Legal Services Community

My article for the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology has been published online. It looks at the building blocks that are already in place and proposes methods of unbundling legal services and delivering them to the public throught the use of technology. This articles comes from a white paper I wrote for the LSC Tech Summit.

March 13, 2013
Slides from ReInventLaw Conference

This past Friday, I gave a presentation at the ReInvent Law conference in Silicon Valley. Rachel Zahorsky of the ABA Journal wrote about the event here and the American Lawyer wrote about it here. There were 500+ attendees registered and some really interesting speakers. The focus of my talk was about the subject of my new book: lawyers, especially solos and small firms, should learn to collaborate with branded networks and where we are at this stage in that process. I believe a video of my presentation will be made available at some point online which will probably make way more sense than these slides do alone.

Overall, there was a lot of energy at this conference and more than a few calls to action, perhaps directed at some of the many legal tech companies and startups in the room.

ReInventLaw Slides – Consumer Law Revolution from Stephanie Kimbro

March 11, 2013
Unbundling Low Cost Legal Services with Contract Lawyers

I wanted to give a shout-out to Gabriel Cheong, owner of Infinity Law Group, for creating a new business model that unbundles legal services for reduced fees. Cheong has founded Cambridge Divorce Group which brings together contract lawyers who are willing to unbundle family law services for reduced rates. I’ve mentioned Cheong on here before because his law firm website features a web calculator to assist prospective clients in estimating their legal costs.

Cheong writes about his new venture on the Solo Practice University blog. It’s a great example of using unbundling to meet an underserved market of pro se litigants seeking limited legal assistance for family law matters. I can’t tell from the website, but I would expect that some of these unbundled services will be handled online between the lawyers and clients in order to make the unbundled services more efficient and the process of unbundling more cost-effective for the venture.

Wouldn’t it be great if these types of collaborative, unbundling lawyer ventures were available to the public in every state? With the ABA’s recent adoption of the Unbundling Resolution, maybe this is exactly what we will see more of in the near future.

March 7, 2013
Ethics and the Virtual Law Office – Article in St. Louis Lawyer

Michael Downey, a lawyer with Armstrong Teasdale LLP and legal ethics teacher at Washington University School of Law and St. Louis University School of Law, has written an article for the St. Louis Lawyer seeking to balance the messages lawyers might take from two recent events in virtual practice news: 1) Rachel Rodger’s article in Forbes focusing on the benefits of increased work/life balance from virtual law offices and 2) the Virginia disciplinary matter of lawyer Atchuthan Sriskandarah who operated a virtual practice and engaged in misleading lawyer advertising.

Michael’s article focuses on the ethics issues that lawyers engaging in virtual practice should be aware of. He concludes

Advancing technology, changing lifestyles, and the current economic climate will inevitably lead to an increase in virtual law offices. As long as a lawyer takes care to comply with applicable ethics rules, including the eight facets discussed in this article, he or she should be able to have – as the Forbes article discusses – a rewarding virtual practice.

March 4, 2013

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