Virtual Law Practice

Tag: Technology

  • No New Restrictions On Use of Tech & Client Development

    The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 has published for comment its draft proposals on Lawyer’s Use of Technology and Client Development.   Proposed changes relate to Model Rules 1.18 (duty to prospective clients), 7.2 (advertising) and 7.3 (direct contact with prospective clients).

    Overall, the Commission concludes that no new restrictions need to be added to a lawyer’s use of technology for client development.  The proposed changes adequately reflect two major impacts of the Internet on our profession: 1) public accessibility to lawyers online, and 2) the immediacy of communication with prospective and future clients over the Internet.  Below is a brief look at each rule’s proposed changes.

    “Communicating” with Prospective Clients Online

    Proposed changes to this rule include switching out the word “discusses” with “communicates.”  “Communicate” is a much broader term and is probably something we do online with prospective clients far more than actually “discussing” a potential attorney/client relationship.  Communicating could be anything from having them fill out a “contact us” form to sending you a tweet asking if your firm handles their specific legal need.  Something as simple as “Liking” your law firm’s Facebook page is a bit of a stretch because it’s not specifically “about the possibility of forming a client-lawyer relationship.”

    This would be a dangerous rewording if not for other new lines added to clarify the definition of a prospective client: “A person who discusses communicates with a lawyer about the possibility of forming a client-lawyer relationship and has a reasonable expectation that the lawyer is willing to consider forming a client-lawyer relationship with respect to a matter is a prospective client.” [proposed additions in italics] (more…)

  • Guest Post: A Quest to Modernize the Legal Profession

    The following guest post was written by John Wires.  John is part of the Foredex initiative to have all lawyers in Ontario connected online. He practices corporate commercial litigation at Wires Jolley LLP (www.wiresjolleyllp.com) in Toronto.

    I read about this project and was impressed with its broad implications for virtual law practice and greater access to justice in Canada. Could an initiative like this be duplicated in the States?  Some court systems here are attempting to take part of the process online, but nothing on this scale that integrates legal research, case law, local rules, etc. in one online space with regular contributors and a strong online community.  This is something to watch.  A big “thank you” to John for sharing this initiative.
    _______________________________________________________________

    The legal system in Canada is facing a crisis. In Ontario, the average cost of a trial is now well over $60,000. Courts are backlogged with 80,000 cases being filed each year and less than 300 judges to hear and manage them. Despite numerous reports by the Attorney General the courts have been slow to adopt appropriate technology to manage cases, digitize and automate the claims process and interact with lawyers.

    Likewise, lawyers fees are often making litigation prohibitive for middle and lower income families and individuals.

    Noticing a similar trend in Europe and the United States, best selling author Richard Susskind now  urges lawyers to ask themselves what elements of their current workload could be undertaken more quickly, more cheaply, more efficiently, or to a higher quality using different and new technologies and methods of working. He argues that the market is unlikely to tolerate expensive lawyers for tasks that can be better discharged with support of modern systems and techniques.

    He claims that the legal profession will be driven by two forces in the coming decade; by a market pull towards the commoditization of legal services, and by the pervasive development and uptake of new and disruptive legal technologies. The threat here for lawyers is clear – their jobs may well be eroded or even displaced. At the same time, for entrepreneurial lawyers, Susskind foresees quite different law jobs emerging which may be highly rewarding, even if very different from those of today.

    In Ontario (as in the Untied States), we have already begun to see the “commoditization of legal services” which Susskind wrote about. The
    rise of online service providers (such as MyLegalBriefCase.com for small claims litigation and legal document providers such as LegalZoom.com) are becoming more attractive to those who can’t afford lawyers and access to the justice system. Yet, few lawyers have ventured into reducing costs by setting up virtual legal practices (Cognition LLP and Sapna Law being the early adopters in Canada). (more…)

  • Top Ten Basic Security Practices for a Virtual Law Office

    I love SaaS.  I depend on SaaS to operate my virtual law office.  I support an attorney’s right to choose their own practice management tools and make their own business decisions whether it’s in the cloud or in a filing cabinet.  But there are responsibilities that come along with choosing any practice management system and that means sticking to your own security policies and best practices.

    I’m a solo virtual lawyer, so the burden is on me alone.  Larger practices can designate an associate or hire an IT consultant to keep them up to date and to make any necessary security policies and safeguards.  Regardless of where you are engaging in virtual law practice, it’s always good be reminded of some basic security practices for delivering legal services online.  Here is my list of the top ten basic security practices for a virtual law office:

    1) Keep up to date on the security issues. Read Lifehacker, Slashdot, TechCrunch, etc.

    2)  If you use wireless networking, ensure that all wireless traffic is encrypted with WPA2.

    3)  Keep antivirus software and all software patches updated and turn on the software firewall for the computer.

    4) Use a safer browser, such as Mozilla with the NoScript add-on installed.  Or use another pop-up blocker. Do not use free Wi-Fi hotspots when using any cloud computing application remotely.  Use a cellular phone modem adapter instead.  I just got the 4G wireless hotspot which I highly recommend.  This also serves as backup internet access in my home office as well.

    5)  Never write down usernames and passwords.  Create strong passwords and change them regularly.  Use Keepass or other password management tool and generator.

    6) Go straight to privacy/account settings in any cloud-based application immediately after you register for and change the defaults for better protection.  Then check back occasionally to make sure they haven’t changed their privacy setting options again.

    7) Watch your back when you work in a public place to make sure the person behind you isn’t able to watch your screen as you enter your username and password or your client’s social security number.

    8) Encrypt your hard drive with Truecrypt, free open source encryption software.  Easy to use, free, protects you if your laptop is stolen.  Backup daily with an external hard drive with Truecrypt on it in addition to regular cloud-based backups.

    9) Make sure that the applications you are using to store and transmit confidential law office data are encrypted.  Look for HTTPS in the URL before proceeding.  Don’t enter data unless you know it will be encrypted.

    10) This isn’t going to be a popular one, but be wary of doing a lot of confidential work on your iPad with just any app.  With my virtual law office, I can open the browser and work in https, but other apps, especially iPad and other mobile device apps, do not have this level of security.  Unencrypted email is permitted by the state bars as exercising reasonable care, but most of us know better.  Text messaging your client is not a wise idea for a lot of reasons.

     

  • Revised Proposed Ethics Opinion on SaaS

    UPDATE: CHECK OUT THIS POST by Erik Mazzone, Director of the Center of Practice Management at the NC Bar Association, on his Law Practice Matters blog.  Erik is concerned that the proposed opinion will limit the cloud-based vendors that attorneys in NC can use based on the location of their servers.  While most legal SaaS vendors will probably be in compliance by housing the data on servers located in the States, other non-legal SaaS companies, such as Dropbox, Google, etc., may not be in compliance with the proposed opinion because their servers are located overseas.  Will this proposed ethics opinion have a broader reach than expected? Are these other services really safe to be using with law office data in the first place?  See this post by Information Law Group discussing a recent Ponemon Study about cloud providers and security.

    The North Carolina State Bar published the revised version of its proposed ethics opinion on the use of SaaS in law practice management on April 21st, entitled, “Formal Ethics Opinion 6: Subscribing to Software as a Service While Fulfilling the Duties of Confidentiality and Preservation of Client Property”.

    The direction that this opinion takes provides guidance to the practitioner, rather than attempting to write technology standards into an ethics opinion, which is not the safest place for it.  Instead, the opinion requires that the attorney do a thorough job investigating the technology provider and any agreements with that providers to ensure confidentiality of the client data.  They also include a reference the ILTSO standards in the footnotes of the opinion (www.iltso.org) along with links to other resources for attorneys to accomplish this process. (more…)

  • NYSBA Report Reviews Virtual Law Firms

    The New York State Bar Association published its Report on the Task Force on the Future of the Legal Profession on April 2, 2011. Written for the practitioner rather than the IT consultant, the report provides suggested guidelines for the adoption of technology solutions as well as a discussion of current trends.

    The report devotes an entire section to virtual law firms and does an excellent job of defining the online delivery of legal services and distinguishes it from extranets and other forms of mobile lawyering, which have their own sections.  Describing changes in firm structure, virtual law offices are included as a significant and growing trend both for connecting lawyers with each other for collaboration purposes and for delivering services online to clients.

    The report also discusses new legal products and services that are being created through the use of technology-enabled law firms. This section does not specifically mention that the primary delivery of these new services is online or through a secure virtual law offices, but they acknowledge the use of newer knowledge management systems and document assembly and automation tools used in unbundling legal services.  The report also recognizes that the use of this technology can create greater opportunity for unique legal service delivery systems to develop as well as facilitate multijurisdictional practice.

    From the report:

    “Mass customization,” for example—broadly defined as the use of flexible computer-aided systems to produce custom output—can serve the objective of combining the low unit costs of mass production processes with the flexibility of individually tailored services to increase variety and customization without a corresponding increase in costs. While the technology for creating such applications—such as form agreements for repetitive transactions, or “macros” that assist in the development of first forms—has existed for some time, changing dynamics in lawyer/client relationships may make the investment in developing and maintaining such proprietary applications more attractive. Another example of the opportunity for this kind of investment in automation is the development of integrated systems for specialty and multijurisdictional legal projects.

    I choose to read that as a call for innovation.

    The report concludes with the recommendation that “NYSBA’s Committee on Standards of Attorney Conduct should study and make recommendations concerning the ethical and risk management considerations associated with new technologies such as social networking, third party hosted solutions, and virtual law firms.”

    We will see if this recommendation results in a set of separate guidelines or best practices for New York-licensed attorneys wanting to engage in virtual law practice.

  • Why I Read Hacker Mags

    If you are using technology to deliver legal services online then it’s part of your responsibility to keep up to date on the technology that you are using. Different security risks pop up every day and if you aren’t aware of the them then you can’t protect your law practice and your clients.

    For example, just this week the WSJ reported that Apple and Google collect location information from their users’ mobile devices.  How many virtual lawyers are transmitting confidential client information via mobile devices without any idea of what information is being collected?  Maybe location isn’t a major problem but what about sending photos taken by you or your client on mobile devices across unencypted email and those photos store the locations of where they were taken.  There are situations where this information could put your client (or their children, friends or family members) at risk.

    There are so many benefits to using cloud based technology to deliver legal services online, but we also have a responsibility to protect the confidentiality of our client’s data.  This means understanding how the technology works and how to use it responsibly on a daily basis.

    Several times at the ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago last week after giving presentations I was asked how I keep up with technology.  There are a lot of great law and tech bloggers, but frankly, if you really want to keep up to date on technology and security risks then you need to step outside of the legal profession.  Go into the world that programmers live in or look at the way that the banking or medical industries are handling the transfer of sensitive information using cloud-based systems.

    Yes, I enjoy reading hacker magazines. I understand about 3/4 of what’s in them because I don’t know how to read a lot of code, but it gives me good insight into the risks that are out there and how hackers are able to get ahold of data and manipulate it. I don’t condone the actions of the authors because a lot of it is illegal.  But why not learn from the pros and turn it around to protect my own practice and my clients by making sure my own system is not vulnerable to attack?

    For example, this last spring issue of 2600 had a great article about passwords from a hacker who had downloaded several databases of usernames and passwords and then compiled statistics that showed what is most popular and the vulnerabilities.  That teaches me what I need to do to be more secure online and how to educate my clients when they create usernames and passwords for themselves.

    Here are my two favorite hacker mags:

    2600 (a classic, written by anonymous and well-respected hackers who break systems mostly for the purpose of revealing vulnerabilities; starting to put some issues online)

    phrack (sometimes a little hard to plow through to find gems, but worth the time; posts issues online)

    If you don’t enjoy keeping up with the technology, which includes understanding the security risks, or don’t find this at all interesting, then you should find someone in your firm who does and can keep you updated.  Or you could always retain an IT consultant who will charge you for that education. Or maybe operating a virtual law firm is not something you should be jumping into at all.  You might decide to trust your legal SaaS provider to keep your system updated and maintained to protect your data from vulnerabilities, but they can’t be responsible for your own use of the hardware. Keeping up has to be part of your daily regime because of how quickly it moves.

     

  • International Standards for Legal Technology

    This morning the International Legal Technology Standards Organization (ILTSO) published its standards for the use of technology in law practice.

    This resource has been a long time in coming.  The standards will be open for public comment and feedback after it has been out there for awhile.  It will be a continual work in progress as something like this should be.

    My hope is that the state bars and other regulatory entities will use these standards as a resource for their attorneys.  Rather than each state bar creating these vastly different ethics opinions that are rarely updated in a timely fashion that attempt to dictate how we use technology in our law practices, these entities could instead remind attorneys of the rules of professional responsibility that they must comply with and then point them to regularly updated technology standards such as these and other resources for education.   Especially with the rise in multijurisdictional and virtual law practice, the need for standardization of technology and security is becoming even more critical.  Plus the standards take into consideration the needs of different types of practices that have different resources available to them, from the solo to a BigLaw firm with a full-time IT consultant. The suggestions are ranked accordingly and also written with very technical descriptions next to “easier to implement for the not so tech-savvy” explanations.

    The goal of the ILTSO standards is to meet this need in the legal profession and to keep those standards updated as the technology and security changes.  The board of the non-profit is made up of legal professors, international consultants, malpractice insurance carriers, IP attorneys, IT consultants and programmers, legal SaaS vendors, and attorneys from solo to BigLaw firms.  I became involved in this non-profit about two months ago when called upon to review the draft manuscript of the standards.  I specifically worked with them on the drafting of the ethics portion of the manual, but also advised as a solo practitioner with limited resources to implement really complex in-house tech solutions.

    As with everything it seems, some in the industry will feel threatened by the creation of standards and attempt to find something negative about the formation of this group.  I’m just glad that this resource is out there for the many attorneys that I speak to who are actively seeking this type of guidance.  I look forward to the feedback from others as they read through it.

  • Adapt or Get out of the Way: Standards to Protect Client Property/Confidentiality Change

    Last week during a guest lecture on virtual law practice at the University of Dayton School of Law, the subject of protecting client property and confidentiality of client data in electronic communications came up again.   My prediction (perhaps overly optimistic) is that in the next few years the state bars will recognize that unencrypted email communication between attorney and client is not the highest standard.  The state bars will look at the newer data privacy laws in Nevada and Massachusetts and  reconsider why attorneys should be using unencrypted email in our profession while other business professionals are required to encrypt personal client data. 

    The standard that the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct and most state bars take is encapsulated in Rule 1.6 (a) of the ABA’s Model Rules of Professional Conduct.  This rule states “[a] lawyer shall not reveal information relating to the representation of a client unless the client gives informed consent, the disclosure is impliedly authorized in order to carry out the representation.…”  Specifically comment 17 to this rule provides that lawyers must take “reasonable precautions” to safeguard confidential information and prevent it from going to unintended recipients during the transmission.   The ABA Formal Opinion No. 99-413 added in March 10, 1999 specifically allows for the use of unencrypted email. 

    “Reasonable precautions.”  What qualifies as “reasonable” should change as technology to communicate with our clients and other professionals develops and security risks in those electronic methods are exposed.  (more…)

  • Accepting Nominations for the ABA Keane Award for Excellence in ELawyering

    If you are an attorney or law firm that uses technology in innovative ways to deliver legal services to your clients, please consider filling out a nomination form for the ABA’s Keane Award for Excellence in ELawyering.  Or if you are aware of an attorney or law firm that deserves recognition for the innovative use of technology to deliver legal services, please consider nominating them. 

    From the Task Force website:

    The purpose of this Award is to give recognition to law offices that have developed legal service innovations that are delivered over the Internet. The focus of the Award is on the innovative delivery of personal legal services, with special attention given to firms and entities that serve both moderate income individuals and the broad middle class.

    More information about the Award and the nomination criteria is here.  The Award is given out by the eLawyering Task Force at the ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago usually following the keynote speaker (and I’m thrilled to say this year that speaker is Professor Larry Lessig!)  Nomination forms are due January 14, 2010.

  • New ABA Ethics Opinion on Websites

    The ABA has published a short description of its efforts to examine the impact of technology, including cloud computing & SaaS, social media and websites, and has released a new ethics opinion related to attorney websites.  

    Last week I wrote a post about the Commission’s call for comments related to cloud computing and protecting client confidences.  On October 14th, they will hold a public hearing to gather information from interested individuals and entities on the subject.  

    The ABA’s review of technology in law practice management is being conducted through the ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 created in 2009 by then ABA President Carolyn Lamm.  One goal of the commission is to review the ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct to see if revisions are needed given the changes that technology has brought to the practice of law.  Part of this review also involves an examination of the regulation of attorneys in our country and how the current system may or may not be working well given the increase in globalization of law firms, outsourcing trends and the use of technology to facilitate these practices.   

    More recently, the ABA has released a new ethics opinion pertaining to attorney websites.  The opinion was issued on August 5 of this year, but has only now been posted online.  Formal Opinion 10-457 covers the use of a website by an attorney as a way to communicate with prospective clients.  (more…)

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