Virtual Law Practice

Tag: Practice Management

  • LegalTech Startup Weekend – San Francisco

    If you are in the San Francisco area, consider checking out the LegalTech Startup Weekend. I’ll be one of the mentors for the event along with several other founders of legal tech companies, including LawPal, Ravel, One400, Judicata, LawGives, Casetext, and more.

    Teams form Friday evening, August 15th and final presentations with be on Sunday, August 17th. The teams will tackle four challenges listed on the event site and compete for prizes.

    The intersection of law and technology presents unique challenges and exciting opportunities for growth and creativity. Recent years have seen a surge of answers to law’s need for innovation, such as e-discovery tools, contract generation apps, law practice management SaaS, virtual firms, and websites changing the way lawyers research. Myriad possibilities remain to integrate tech into solutions for consumers, attorneys, businesses, and the government. SF LegalTech Startup Weekend will bring together legal professionals, policy geeks, programmers, designers and students to innovate the legal services market and bring it into the 21st Century – one solution at a time. SFLegalTechStartupWeekend

  • Second Edition of Virtual Law Practice Book

    book pic2I am updating the second edition to the Virtual Law Practice book that I wrote back in 2010. The book needs to be almost completely re-written based on the way that technology has changed since I wrote about the set up of online delivery in law firms only four years ago.

    I am expanding the book to include my newer experiences working with law firms and lawyers to integrate online delivery of legal services into different law firm business models. Over the past four years, I’ve taught law school courses on the subject of virtual practice and related topics, such as unbundling of legal services and law practice management. Some of the content and material from my courses will end up in the text of the updated edition of the book.

    At the time of writing the first edition, I was very focused on the idea of completely virtual law offices, mostly operated by solos or small firms. However, since then, I’ve worked with so many varieties of business models that use technology to deliver online services that I realized I need to expand the book to include these different models. In many cases, in terms of economic success, these other methods of delivering online services seem to be more successful than the purely virtual law office model.

    In terms of statistics and specific data about the operation and success of any form of virtual practice, we still have very little concrete information to share. Companies like Clio and MyCase may gather useful information on the use of their systems to help with their marketing campaigns to lawyers. However, no one else seems to be able to gather data on how many lawyers deliver legal services online, what tools they use,  how it integrates with traditional delivery models, who their customers are, and any success they may or may not be having. I have my personal experience and that of my colleagues in elawyering working with many law firms and lawyers to create virtual law practices. Perhaps in the future as more lawyers add unbundled, online legal services to their offerings, the state bars will assist in collecting this data.  For the second edition, I will try to locate more statistics that might be useful in helping practitioners determine what the risks and benefits are of the different models of delivery.

    I’m going to spend the next two months finishing up this second edition and then turn my focus back to the work on my fellowship at Stanford Law School with the Center on the Legal Profession. I am attending the GSummit event in San Francisco next week to learn more about gamification and games and to think of ways to apply this form of increased online engagement to the legal profession and to serving the public.

    If anyone who read the original book would like to make suggestions about anything that you would like to see me cover in this updated edition, please let me know. Thanks and I look forward to having new content to share on this blog and elsewhere in the very near future!

  • Video: Legal Technology in the Public Interest

    A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation on a panel entitled Legal Technology in the Public Interest with Ron Staudt and Phil Malone for Stanford’s Future Law Conference.  Below is the video from this:

     

  • ABA Journal Covers Crowdfunding for Game for Legal Services

    CoverpicThe ABA Journal wrote an article about the RocketHub crowdfund campaign to develop the game for legal services, Estate Quest.

    I’m still working with Illinois Legal Aid Online on a game about eviction law, but the estate planning game has been on hold until I can get more funding to complete it. There are five days left in the campaign.

    Please consider helping to develop this project with me. If we can learn ways to increase online engagement with the public around the law and their legal rights, then we can increase awareness, access, and education. If you are interested in ways that other industries are using games to create positive change, check out Games for Change.

     

     

  • Article in Legal IT Today: The Engagement Game

    I wrote an article about the use of games for legal services in the March issue of Legal IT Today, an online legal tech publication. You can read the full article starting on page 31 of the publication.

    A couple of quotes from the article:

    Most people seek out assistance only after they suspect they have a legal problem, but what if we could provide increased legal awareness to the public at large through educational games for legal services?

    Because of the psychology behind gaming that supports positive engagement, games could be used to educate the public
    as well as provide a way for the legal profession to jump into the larger online conversation around legal services.

  • ABA Journal Article on Virtual Practice

    cloudThe ABA Journal published an article entitled “Lawyers’ definitions of virtual practice vary, but not when it comes to finding success“.  The article runs through the different definitions of virtual law practice and the wide variety of ways that lawyers are choosing to deliver legal services online. The debate over the definition of the term (which the online legal community hashed out in multiple debates over the past eight years) does not matter as much as the use of the technology to serve clients, increase access to legal services, and provide lawyers with flexibility in their business models.

    The most valuable content in this lengthy article is the second half that goes into the ethics issues and the value of a virtual practice and how that might differ from a traditional law firm. The article references the ABA eLawyering Task Force’s the Best Practice Guidelines for Legal Information Web Site Providers and recommendations for working with cloud-based providers.

    The ABA LPD has asked me to write a second edition of my Virtual Law Practice book which was published in 2010. I’ll be working on that over the next couple of months. I’m expecting to need to re-write the majority of the book. So much has changed in only a few years in the area of online legal service delivery.

  • Video – Disruptive Innovation in Legal Services at Harvard

    Last week I attended a conference hosted by Harvard Law School’s Program on the Legal Profession, entitled “Disruptive Innovation in the Market for Legal Services.”

    My primary reason for attending was to hear Clayton Christensen, a Professor at Harvard’s Business School and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma, speak about disruption in the legal profession. Unfortunately, he admitted to not really having analyzed our profession from the perspective of disruptive innovation so his talk was a bit of a rehash of both Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovative University. It was still really worth it to hear from the man himself, and following his presentation, the Senior VP of IBM Watson, Mike Rhodin, the CEO of Legal Zoom, John Suh, and GC of Charles River Ventures, Sarah Reed, weighed in on what they think disruptive innovation of legal services looks like.

    Chris Kenny, Chief Exec of the UK Legal Services Board, also spoke via video conferencing about how alternative business structures (ABS) are working out across the pond. According to Kenny, ABS is working great in the UK, increasing access to justice and creating healthy competition in the marketplace without risk to consumers or disciplinary issues in the profession. I found his presentation to be informative and encouraging in terms of looking forward towards real structural change in our profession. The ABA President-Elect, William Hubbard, weighed in after Kenny spoke to explain that the ABA was not on board with ABS, but he said he would like to see the gap bridged between main-street lawyers and the innovators and academics pushing for change in the profession. Of course the real reasons why we can’t move forward with ABS have to do with protectionism and the interests of the lawyers who sit at the helm of the Bar. Progress here will come slowly, and I still believe it will be consumers who push the change in the market forward, not the ABA House of Delegates.

    Bob Ambrogi wrote a good run-down of the morning’s presentations. (Note: it’s hidden behind a required registration wall.)

    After a very interesting morning session, the conference broke out into working groups. I attended one called “Lawyers and Technology.” There were also working groups on access, big data and analytics, and corporate pricing and matching. Several legal technology startups spoke briefly at each working group, but the discussions among the attendees was the most stimulating. Below is the video of the Working Group Report to the conference summarizing the key points from each breakout discussion.
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  • Slides: Engagement and Consumer Law

    This is a slide deck from a presentation I gave this morning as part of a panel for the South Carolina Law Review Symposium entitled, On Task?: Expanding the Boundaries of Legal Education. In it, I look at why increasing online engagement is critical for lawyers to think about, what methods of engagement might work, assessing engagement, and then the transfer that happens after engagement.

    There’s a good balance that must happen here between lawyers pulling in “leads” for new business and at the same time using these engagement methods to educate and empower the public to 1) know when they might have a legal need in the first place and to prevent issues before they happen, and 2) if they do have a legal need, having access to where to go for help (ie, intelligent matching systems). Another piece of the puzzle to explore.

  • Reinventing the Practice of Law: The Book

    Reinventing the Practice of Law: Emerging Models to Enhance Affordable Legal Services, edited by Professor Luz Herrera, has been published this week by the ABA. This book is full of practical ideas that could significantly increase access to justice. Richard Granat and I co-wrote a chapter for the book entitled “Serving Clients of Moderate Means with On-Line Legal Services.” There are other chapters covering:

    • ReinventingcoverUnbundling
    • Lawyer as peacemaker
    • Making lawyers more accessible to clients
    • Fee-shifting statutes
    • Lawyer incubator projects
    • Legal “launch pads”
    • Co-pay clinics, and more.

     

     

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