Virtual Law Practice

Tag: Power of Attorney

  • Online Document Signing for Your Virtual Law Practice

    One of the questions I hear regularly about virtual law practice is related to the execution of legal documents and how that process can be handled through a virtual law office.  I’ve written before on this blog about the establishment of the attorney/client relationship online and how an attorney may rely on a clickwrap agreement to ensure that the client has read and accepted all of the terms and conditions and the scope of the legal representation that will be conducted online. 

    I use a clickwrap to serve as the engagement letter for my virtual law office.  Other attorneys will use the clickwrap in addition to uploading a traditional engagement letter for the online client to sign, scan and upload back to the virtual law office.  There are many other examples of when an attorney may need to have his or her client sign a document.  Having the client give the attorney a Power of Attorney to act on the client’s behalf is one of those situations. 

    Enter Right Signature.  This application provides a way to obtain a legally enforceable digital signature on a document without your online client having to own a scanner or having to go to the trouble of printing it, signing it and uploading it back to you on your virtual law office.  (Many thanks to Lee Rosen of the Rosen Law Firm for pointing this product out during our recent CLE presentation). 

    You can try Right Signature for free to see if it would work for your virtual law practice.  It has authentication and security technology that make the digital signatures binding and legally enforceable.  The product is a SaaS hosted application so the documents and the digital signatures are stored on a secure server.  The process is really simple for your clients to execute so it may actually be faster to get them to sign digitally online than requiring them to upload a traditional, scanned-in signature on a document.  As a useful tool for your virtual law practice, I’d say this one is worth the monthly $14 fee if you need your clients’ signatures on a regular basis or don’t want to rely on the clickwrap agreement alone.

  • Ethics Question for the Virtual Attorney

    Practicing online I often receive this question as an ethics challenge to my virtual practice:

    How can you be sure that the person you are communicating with online is really person you are drafting the documents for?

    Because I handle estate planning, attorneys who operate more traditional practices express specific concern about the power of attorney and the broad authority that it provides to the attorney-in-fact. What if the person I am drafting the document for is really someone else who plans to use the power of attorney for nefarious purposes?

    While I will conceed that the Internet facilitates the potential for individuals to commit fraud regarding their true identities, I do not believe it is my responsibility as an attorney to ensure that the final use of the legal documents I have created never fall into the wrong hands. Superwoman, I am not. I can draft legal documents to the best of my abilities with the information the client provides to me, and after that, I cannot control my client’s actions or the actions of their families in enforcing or following through with the dictates of these documents. To claim that I could control this or should be reponsible for a client’s conduct would be ridiculous.

    I provide my clients with fixed fees through my VLO and the majority of my business comes from packages containing several different estate planning documents. My clients are required to accept two clickwrap agreements and a price quote for services which tells them upfront both the nature of unbundled online legal services and the exact legal fees which they will owe me for my services.

    Once I complete the documents, it is my client’s reponsibility to take them to a notary public in North Carolina to have them properly executed. I provide my clients with detailed instructions to provide the notary public and they know that they may contact me if they run into any questions during this process. It is the notary public’s responsibility to check the driver’s license of the individuals signing these documents to ensure that they are who they say they are. Additionally, most of the estate planning documents require two witnesses to also be present for the execution.

    How do I know my online clients are who they say they are if I never meet them face to face?

    Do most attorneys (or their paralegals) in a brick and mortar law office check the driver’s license and photo id of every client for whom they provide legal services? Nope. In fact, I recall hearing of a case at one of the firms I worked for before going solo where an attorney had filed an lawsuit on behalf of the client only to find out during discovery that the client had multiple identities in several states and was not who he claimed to be. Had that attorney met with the false client face to face in the brick & mortar law office? Yes, several times. Did that prevent the client from pulling the wool over the eyes of the law firm he retained? Nope.

    Professional standards of conduct require that I communicate with reasonable diligence and promptness when dealing with clients. Operating a virtual law practice does not mean that I mass generate legal forms in an impersonal manner. I communicate individually with each of my clients. I ask the questions that I need to know to handle their legal matters. Sometimes they upload documents for me to review and we often work on mulitple drafts. Rarely do I need to call a client on the phone discuss something in person, but if it’s necessary to provide the best legal services for them, then I do it.

    Many of us reconnect online with family and friends through Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. We create strong online business connections through networking websites, such as LinkedIn. Likewise, the virtual law practitioner uses the web-based technology to build personal and ongoing professional relationships with clients.

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