Last week at the ABA Techshow in Chicago, I was pleased to launch the publication of my new book on unbundling.

Writing a book on limited scope services seemed like a logical next step in the process of reevaluating how the legal profession can adapt to the changes it faces as a result of disruptive technology, economic recession, Internet empowered consumers and other factors.

Most lawyers who have researched ethics opinions related to online advertising are familiar with the Total Attorneys ethics matter, which began in April, 2009 when a single Connecticut lawyer filed an ethics complaint with the state bar disciplinary counsel in 47 states. The complaints targeted not just the company, but also more than 500 of its bankruptcy law firm customers. Here’s the final update on how this played out along with my thoughts on the significance of this process.

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.

  This Saturday I’m giving a live lecture focused on virtual law practice marketing strategy for my students in Concord Law School’s Small Business LLM program. I’m having the students slowly add in components of a business plan with each assignment so that by the end of the semester they have a complete and ready-to-implement business plan for [...]

South Carolina has published a new Formal Ethics Opinion 11-05 about attorney’s using services, such as Groupon, to offer discounts and deals on their legal services. To my knowledge, the ethics opinion is the first from a state bar that is specifically related to this topic. The question posed in the opinion is: Does a [...]

Today’s Wall Street Journal published an article on Shpoonkle, an online auction site similar to eBay where lawyers can bid on clients.  Both Susan Cartier Liebel and Scott Greenfield had blogged about this site in the past month.  Robert Ambrogi even chimed in that the concept is old news and will hopefully fall to its demise sooner rather [...]

Gary Munneke, Chair of the Law Practice Management Committee, at the New York State Bar Association has written a thought-provoking article entitled “Dueling Sanctions . . .  And More” in a recent NYSBA publication.  He refers to an incident reported by the ABA Journal  about a law firm that came under heat from another firm for [...]

This past weekend I presented a CLE session for the North Carolina Association of Women Attorneys (NCAWA) annual meeting on the topic of social media for legal professionals. Anyone involved in virtual law practice needs to understand social media and how it can be used to market a virtual law office, but also about how [...]

Take a look at the new Florida State Bar rule on attorney online advertising, 4-7.6 “Computer Accessed Communications.”  In particular take a look at page 10 of the PDF. The ABA Journal also ran an article this week on the rule. Fortunately, the State Bar is holding off on the rule enactment until August 16th [...]

The second post in my three-part series on virtual law practice has been published on the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program (LOMAP) blog.  This post discusses how to market a virtual law office while complying with state bar rules and regulations regarding law practice marketing and advertising.  From the post: Marketing a virtual law [...]