The Legal Current blog posted about an ILTA session entitled “A New View of the Automated Law Firm.”  The session explained how the commoditization of legal services is leading to the need for automation of the workflow in law practices.  Document assembly and automation will help to streamline the delivery of legal services to meet the consumer demand for legal services based on a fixed fee model.  Here are the slides from that presentation.

Darryl Mountain, expert on disruptive technologies and document automation, and Marc Lauritsen, co-chair of the ABA elawyering task force and author of The Lawyer’s Guide to Working Smarter With Knowledge Tools, presented a session entitled “Harnessing Disruptive Technologies”.  The slides for that presentation are here.  They covered the nature of disruptive technologies and look at technologies that can be used to create “substantive legal work.”  The presentation slides cover document assembly, web-based document automation and virtual law practice.  Lauritsen covered choiceboxing, an interactive decision support system which has multiple potential forms of application in elawyering and choice management.  The slides also list two stumbling blocks to the use of disruptive technologies in law practice: “1. the knowledge acquisition bottleneck and 2. ethical rules of the legal profession.”

Sally Gonzalez, a director at Hildebrandt Baker Robbins gave a presentation entitled “Technologies to Support the Virtual Practice.”  The slides from the presentation focus more on virtual lawyering for BigLaw and seem to take a different, broader definition of virtual law practice that includes the Axiom and VLP model.  So there’s more content on the internal collaboration between members of the firm and outsourcing rather than the actual delivery of legal services to clients online.  The slides show how the Thomson Reuter’s Engage product which launched this past spring works to fascilitate elawyering and alternative fee arrangements for larger law firms.

There was another session on cloud computing in law practice management entitled “Collaboration in the Cloud: The Paradigm Shift”.  From the slides it reads like it covered the basics of cloud computing and SaaS as it relates to the security and confidentiality required by legal professionals, but also the cost-savings and productivity benefits to law firms and their clients.  Another session’s slides focused purely on the security, privacy and records risks of cloud computing.

I’d love to hear from anyone who was actually at these sessions who can share what the Q&A portions were like.   It sounds like the focus was more geared to BigLaw than for small firms or solos like myself, but with cloud computing, disruptive technologies become affordable and as easily implemented by a solo practitioner as they are by a large law firm.  There were some twitter comments I was able to follow, but it would be great to know about the overall take of the presenters and attendees on topics like client portals and the online delivery of legal services.

There different ways to approach the analysis of whether of not virtual law practice is a good fit for your solo practice or law firm or a good fit for your clients or practice area.  These posts highlight a couple of those positions, but they are far from complete in analyzing all of the various forms or structures of elawyering to deliver legal services to clients online.

Lee Rosen, “What the Virtual Law Office Advocates Aren’t Telling You.”

Carolyn Elefant, “The Virtual Law Office Debate: Virtually Impossible To Succeed or Not?”

Susan Cartier Liebel, “The Virtual Law Office Debate…Really?”

Richard Granat, “Framing the Discussion about Virtual Law Firm Practice.”

Is anyone aware of other state bar committees that are reviewing this topic?  I believe that the ABA Center for Professionalism is currently reviewing cloud computing and considering the need to create some form of guidance or regulation related to the use of it in practice management.  The elawyering task force is also working on drafting guidelines for the use of cloud computing.   It would be great to know if there are other state bar initiatives related to SaaS, cloud computing or virtual law practice.

Below is the introduction to the post.  Many thanks to Jared Correia for the opportunity to share my research and writing with the readers of the LOMAP blog.

From the guest post:

The delivery of legal services online carries with it a number of ethical concerns; however, these ethical concerns are not all that unlike those that have traditionally been addressed by offline law firms. The online lawyer is able to mitigate risks associated with virtual law practice just as a traditionally-practicing attorney would with an offline practice when, for example, installing and using software for law practice management. There are two separate categories of ethics matters to address in connection with the virtual practice of law. The first pertains to the attorney’s duty in selecting the service provider that will be setting up, hosting and maintaining the virtual law practice. With any cloud computing service, there are precautions that must be observed in researching and choosing a software provider. The second category of potential ethics concerns relates to the attorney’s daily operation of the virtual law office; and, the focus there is on ways to mitigate potential malpractice risks when working with clients online. Further issues related to each category are discussed in greater detail below; and, in addition, suggestions are made and additional resources are pointed to, for further guidance.

You can read the rest of the guest post on the LOMAP blog.

I sat on a panel discussion entited “20/20 Vision: The Impact of Technology and Globalization on Ethics for the 21st Century Lawyer” and was pleased to see a packed audience as well as have the majority of audience questions pertain to virtual law practice.  Here is a link to a video interview of our panel’s moderator, Judith Miler. 

The questions from the audience after the panel discussion were the same ones I hear at a lot of presentations.  The primary concern is still related to the basic security of entrusting law office data to cloud computing.  The second greatest concern is about the verification or authentication of client identity online.  “Can you really form a relationship online without seeing the whites of their eyes?”  Sometimes it’s just a matter of being comfortable with the technology and getting used to using it to communicate that helps answer these questions.  Overall, the response was positive and hopefully, the details and resources I provided in the manuscript for the attendees will go a long way in answering their questions about the security and cloud computing concerns in virtual law practice.

Will Hornsby joined Marc Lauritsen, Richard Granat and myself for a lively panel discussion on virtual lawyering on Friday.  Richard informed me that he also provided a presentation on virtual law practice to a room of state bar presidents and other bar officials who were very receptive to these concepts in practice management. 

ABA President Carolyn Lamm during her presentation on Sunday night on a panel entitled “Lawyers Surviving in a Darwinian World” mentioned online legal service companies and emphasized the legal profession’s reponsibility to step up to meet the needs of the public who are going online to seek out legal assistance.   The ABA Journal has a write-up of her comments during the presentation. 

Social media was also a hot topic at several CLE sessions at the annual meeting.  At one of the vendor booths I picked up a copy of Wild West 2.0: How to Protect and Restore Your Reputation on the Untamed Social Frontierby Michael Fertik and David Thompson.  I’ll try to post a review of the book on this blog when I get a chance to read through it.  Even the Twitter hashtag for the event was active this year indicating a growing comfort by my fellow attorneys to embrace technology to communicate.  And to top it off, I got to meet Heather Armstrong, mommy-blogger and famous Dooce.comwriter, at the WestlawNext CLE about social media in the workplace. 

There were also some vendors that I spoke with who are making an effort to facilitate virtual law practice for attorneys.  This might be in response to the ethics and UPL complaints raised by some state bars to the documents produced by legal service companies.  Both Legal Zoom and Rocket Lawyer are combining their document assembly and automation technologies with the ability to connect an attorney with the consumer going online to fill out and purchase basic legal forms.  I’m reaching out to both vendors to find out more about how their systems will allow for this type of delivery to be controlled by the attorney as a practice management tool for delivering online legal services. 

The overall tone I left with at the end of the annual meeting was that technology to deliver legal services online and to communicate with our clients and other legal professionals is embraced as the future. Rather than the over-emphasis on the security and risks that I’ve seen the past few years at other conferences, the tone seems to be an acceptance of virtual law practice and a move towards finding ways to responsibly integrate it into our practice management toolboxes.  I much prefer this optimistic, but realistic, mood.

Based on my research, not many state bar ethics rules or advisory opinions actually address the use of cloud computing or the delivery of legal services online.  The North Carolina State Bar’s proposed opinion related to SaaS in law practice managment that was published this summer is one of the first to my knowledge.  There are opinions out there that are related to the hosting of law office data by third-party providers, but none that really discuss the actual delivery of legal services online to clients. 

My main concern with the development of any future ethics opinions is that they should not attempt to define the technology too narrowly.  This is a problem that attorneys have now in trying to interpret the existing rules and regulations based on way that they were drafted years ago.  Try figuring out how to apply rules related to email, fax and cell phone usage to the cloud computing apps you currently use in practice management.  There is a lot of uncertainty in trying to comply with the rules when the rules weren’t really written to take the rapid growth of technology into consideration. 

I was impressed with the way that the NC State Bar wrote the proposed opinion related to SaaS because they wrote guidelines to help the attorney in their research but did not attempt to provide the attorneys with requirements knowing that those requirements could change in the next year.  The risk with too closely regulating the use of cloud computing for practice management is that it could hinder the innovation of future technogy to deliver legal services online. 

And future innovations in practice management depend on cloud computing.  It’s the only cost-effective way to spread the cost of developing these apps over a wide number of users and getting it into the hands of attorneys for the use of delivering legal services online to the public.

The one ethics rule that exists as a hinderance to virtual law practice is the bona fide office rule or residency requirements that some state bars have over their members.  These rules need to be more flexible and take into consideration the different forms of virtual law practice and the public demand for online legal services.  I’ve written here before about the NJ State joint opinion that came out this spring related to the bona fide office rule.   Given the trends in outsourcing and the globalization of law firms and the fact that so many of our clients are going online actively seeking out online legal services, these residency requirements must take into consideration the fact that sticking with geographic boundaries is not an effective way of handling their concerns about zealous representation and the clients not being able to contact their attorney. 

For some practice areas, there is a need for in-person representation and a completely web-based virtual law office would not be responsible or ethical.  However, the rules do not take into consideration other practice areas or the benefits to a variety of different clients with different legal needs.   The concerns are legitmate; they just need to be reinterpreted to reflect the realities of how attorney are actually communicating with their clients using technology and how the public is expecting to receive legal services. 

After researching state by state all of the ethics opinions related to technology and the unbundling of legal services, these were the two main concerns that I have with the way that ethics rules were handled.  I’m very honored to have the opportunity to discuss these ideas at the annual meeting and look forward to the question and answer session that follows to hear what others have to say about this.  Any thoughts?  Drop me a line in the comments.

Jim Calloway and Sharon Nelson have published a new podcast on The Digital Edge entitled “Virtual Lawyering Goes Mainstream.”  Calloway and Nelson discuss ways that virtual lawyering is starting to take off within the legal profession. 

Over at the Slaw.ca blog, Sharon Nelson and John Simek has a post entitled “The Virtual Lawyer Stampede.”

Jim Calloway also discusses virtual lawyering on his practice management blog under the post “Virtual Law Offices Are Becoming a Real-World Alternative.”

Live Presentations:

I will be participating in three events at the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco in a couple weeks that are related to virtual law practice.  

• August 5th, Thursday, 10:30am, 20/20 Vision: The Impact of Technology and Globalization on Ethics for the 21st Century Lawyer. This is a panel discussion in which I will be touching on cloud computing and virtual law practice.
• August 5th, Thursday,12:30 to 2 pm, Legal Rebels: 10 Ways to Build Your Perfect Practice and Career.  I will be attempting to give a 6 minute presentation of 20 slides on a topic related to elawyering.
• August 6th, Friday, 2:00 p.m. – 3:30 p.m., The Virtual Law Firm: How to Build Your Practice in An Online World.  I will be presenting with Will Hornsby, Richard Granat and Marc Lauritsen at this session.

Update (via elawyering blog):  

eLawyering Task Force Meeting, Saturday, August 7, 2010, Hilton Hotel, Union Square, 9:00 – 11:00 A.M.Open Meeting
National Conference of State Bar Presidents, Joint Workshop 3A – Keeping Pace with the Evolving Practice of Law