Speaking at the International Legal Ethics Conference

This week I will be attending the International Legal Ethics Conference (ILEC) in Banff, Alberta. I am taking part in a panel discussion with John Browning, Darrel Pink and Victoria Rees, entitled “The Challenges of Virtual Law Practice and Social Media.”

Several tracks run throughout the two-day conference: Culture, Ethics & Society; Empirical Approaches to Legal Ethics; Regulation of the Profession/Ethics and Education; and Philosophy and Legal Ethics. My session falls under the Regulation of the Profession track. This will include discussion about changing regulatory models, regulation of lawyers and other legal service providers, and ethics education for lawyers and in law schools. I’ve submitted my paper on regulatory barriers to multijurisdictional virtual law practice for this session and will talk about some of the newer ethics opinions that have come out which are related to virtual law practice.

I am most excited about meeting some of the individuals I have worked online with over the past year on different projects. Several individuals from the Law Without Walls team will be attending as well as more than a few of the speakers who participated in this month’s successful LawTechCamp London. I’m a huge fan of some of the legal technologists and educators who will be speaking in Banff so I will have to restrain myself from acting like a giddy teenager at a Justin Bieber sighting.

I expect to return home with a new perspective on how other countries are addressing ethics and regulatory issues in the legal profession and hopefully will come away inspired to continue my own education on these issues as they pertain to unbundling and the online delivery of legal services. I will make an effort to tweet while at the event or at least follow up with a blog post in the near future.