Last month, I spoke at the annual conference for the IP Paralegal Institute in Cary, NC. The topic of my presentation was about how to create an “eOffice” – to move away from paper and go digital. I started the talk with an overview of the legal marketplace for unbundled and online legal services and ended it with a look at where the profession will be in the next five years. I discussed decision-making systems like Neota Logic and document assembly and automation technologies as well as online case and client managegment systems that automate many of the functions of a law office. The final question from the attendees afterwards was a new one for me, probably because it was the first time I had spoken to a room of paralegals rather than lawyers: “With all this technology, how many human bodies do you think it will replace in the law firm?”

Last week I gave a presentation at Stanford Law School entitled “Unbundling and the Future of Legal Service Delivery.” We had some great questions from the attendees at the end of the talk. Thanks again to Stanford CodeX and the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession for inviting me out there. I am introduced by Tony Lai, one of the founders of LawGives who I also had the pleasure of spending time with while in Palo Alto. Below is the video from my talk.

Today, the Apple Apps Store has released the Total Attorneys practice management platform’s iPad and iPhone app. This clean app allows a lawyer to operate a law practice from the iPad and/or iPhone with secure access to the virtual law office platform. Case and client management features are all integrated into the app, and it syncs with the full browser version of the software.

For awhile now I have been interested in learning about virtual practice models that go beyond the purely web-based model that I operate. Over the past year, I’ve been talking to Chad Burton, the founder of Burton Law, LLC, to understand his firm’s structure and how it uses technology to operate. Burton Law launched at the beginning of 2011 and is based in Ohio. They offer legal services in several practice areas, including business, data privacy, dispute resolution, estate planning and probate and intellectual property.

The March issue of the South Carolina Lawyer features an article I co-wrote with Courtney Kennaday entitled “Ethics of Virtual Law Practice.”

The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 published its revised draft resolutions for comment regarding Technology and Confidentiality at the end of last month. Under Comment [16] to Rule 1.6 “Confidentiality of Information”, the revised draft contains a list of factors that determine whether the lawyer has made reasonable efforts to prevent “unauthorized access to, or the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure of, confidential information.”

At its meeting on January 27, the NC State Bar Council adopted and published the last version of 2011 Formal Ethics 6 “Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property”. The last version of this opinion was sent to subcommittee in July 2011, but the discussion over the structure of the opinion has been almost a year and a half-long process.

CALI is hosting a MOOC (massively open online course) called Topics in Digital Law Practice. I gave a presentation for them today. Below are the slides. There is a homework assignment posted on the blog for this session and students are encouraged to create homework wikis. Looking forward to reading some of those.

An exciting new resource for lawyers and legal educators has been published online for free thanks to the sponsorship of Harvard’s Berkman Center LawLab. The book project called Educating the Digital Lawyer is now available for download as an epub file here.

The ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services has written a letter to the Commission on Ethics 20/20 providing its recommendations regarding lawyer advertising rules. In an interesting move, the Committee has recommended the deletion of Model Rule 7.2(b). For those of us in virtual practices who depend on online advertising methods perhaps moreso than traditional law firms, this would be a potentially revolutionary change to the rules.