Today I gave a presentation which was live but also webcast for the Chicago Bar Association. Here are the slides from that talk. I’ve started just using graphics on slides so I’m not sure how useful these will be to anyone without the context, but here they are anyway!
The NY State Bar Association Committee on Professional Ethics has published a new ethics Opinion 964 on April 4, 2013 that affects virtual law offices. (HT to Niki Black for bringing it to my attention.)
The opinion is more related to lawyer advertising than virtual law offices, but it affects advertising for virtual, traditional and hybrid delivery models. The opinion was prompted by an inquiry from a lawyer who delivers immigration law services primarily online. Like many lawyers with virtual law offices, the lawyer rarely meets with clients in person and communicates using video conferencing and other digital methods of communication. Working from home, the opinion explains that the lawyer did not want to have clients coming to her home office. Accordingly, she preferred to use a PO Box or other mailbox service than providing her home address.
We have seen this question in other states. NC’s proposed ethics opinion on the use of leased time-shared office addresses ran through a similar scenario and inquiry. Virginia’s recent disciplinary case with a lawyer who claimed to have a state-wide virtual law firm in his misleading advertising also raised the issue. So how did NY decide to respond? Hint: I think they had a BYOB pow-wow with the NJ ethics folks.
For what it’s worth, here are some thoughts on my quote that was published in an article on Attorney at Work today by Ruth Carter entitled, Is Work-Life Balance a Fraud?
I’ve been asked about work-life balance since I launched my virtual law office in 2006. (Yes. I am a mom to two young children and sure, that adds a layer of challenge to life, but I get things done and the kids don’t seem to be deprived or permanently scarred for life, yet.) Many assume that trying to achieve work-life balance is a motivating factor for anyone to set up a virtual law practice. It is certainly one of the reasons why I chose this form of practice, but not the only one. I’ve got a long-term side mission running to increase access to justice and online delivery and tech in law practice is a part of that.
Many of the lawyers that I help to set up virtual law firms, from web-based unbundled delivery to hybrid firms with both traditional and online delivery, want the flexibility that virtual practice provides. It’s great that the technology is available to allow us all to make choices that provide more flexibility, but it’s got to be a choice based on what’s right for us and our clients, and that may not be what works for another lawyer and their practice, their clients or their personal lives.
Anyway, here’s my thought on the exhausting work-life balance debate that Laura Bellow, current Pres. of the ABA re-raised earlier this year, as quoted in the article:
Balance is possible, but it’s BALANCE based on choices that we have made in our personal and professional lives. It doesn’t guarantee happiness. I think it’s a way of coping with the phases we all go through in life. Even with the best of examples and role models, I don’t believe a 20-something man or woman in law school has any idea what his or her 30- or 40-something self is going to want or need. So we make decisions because we have to, without fully understanding the consequences or what will have to be sacrificed personally and professionally later on down the line. That’s just a fact of life. Work-life balance is an attempt to adjust to those decisions based on where we are currently in our lives. And that means different things get sacrificed at different times—in both personal and professional spheres—to make the most people and ourselves happy. That’s the balance.
Please take a minute to read Richard Granat’s post entitled “10 Top Law Schools Teaching Law Practice Technology.”
The eLawyering Task Force is working on a project to identify law schools that are adequately preparing their students to enter practice with practical skills related to the use of technology. The Task Force is currently reviewing the programs and courses offered at different law school and has identified ten that meet the criteria discussed in the post.
What is your law school doing on this front? Is it enough?
This weekend I gave a presentation for Avvo’s Lawyernomics Conference in Las Vegas. I was talking about the subject of my new book and giving examples of the online marketing tools that branded networks provide for lawyers in their network to use to connect and work with clients online. There were several great questions from the audience throughout, but one question in particular struck me: Couldn’t we use the same techniques the branded networks are using on our own law firm sites?
Yes. Lawyers can use very similar techniques on their websites to draw prospective clients. Lawyers can create web calculators, provide free legal forms and resource libraries, use real-time chat and video to hold initial free consultations, and provide a way for prospective clients to register to request legal assistance directly on their website. These are all things that many virtual law offices include in their website design. These lawyers add various “calls to action”, create landing pages, and connect the resources provided on their site with the sharing components of their different social media account activities. They share and put their valuable content out there for the public. It builds and expands their firm’s online brand and reputation. Lawyers may use different tools to run analytics on their site and their different marketing campaigns and refine them as needed. However, it is still difficult to use all of these same techniques as branded networks and compete effectively. It’s just not enough was the message I had for them.
Why is it not enough? Because the companies marketing direct to consumer are not restricted by any lawyer rules of professional conduct, whether it’s advertising rules or the lovely Rule 5.4 that restricts fee sharing and protects the “independence of the lawyer.” Branded networks are not small business owners, but companies who typically have sizable marketing budgets devoted solely to the purpose of D2C marketing. They can pour a lot of that money into building their brand and spreading it to particular target markets for online, personal legal services. In terms of competing with these companies for purchasing Google AdWords or keywords in any search engine, it is going to be very difficult for any solo, small or medium sized firm to do for a long enough period of time for it to have an impact on client development.
I was honest with this audience. I told them that seven years ago it had been easier to be a solo virtual lawyer, such as myself, to market my online unbundled services using online marketing and social media engagement. However, as the years went by and the options for online offerings increased, especially in personal legal services such as estate planning and family law, it became increasingly difficult to compete in the search engine rankings without investing a significant amount of marketing dollars on online campaigns. What could have been done before 2007 on almost zero cost other than my time and energy and consistency, now takes a significant monetary investment.
That was the reality I shared with these attendees and asked them to look at the future development of this trend in the online delivery of personal legal services as an opportunity for collaboration rather than as a threat to their law firm model. Clearly, virtual law offices that are completely web-based without a traditional law office are going to be the most threatened. But it’s also even more important that these practices learn how to ethically use online marketing tools provided by branded networks and engage in their lawyer networks in a way that helps them build and expand their brand and push traffic and prospective clients back to their firm’s site rather than just exert all their energy providing free content and value to the branded network.
Developing best practices and a law firm policy for using the online marketing platforms provided by branded networks is going to be a key component in the future of lawyer advertising – whether you have a virtual law practice or a traditional one.
This is the video of my brief interview with Colin O’Keefe about the topic of my presentation for Avvo’s Lawyernomics Conference next week in Las Vegas.
This is a video I recorded for a technology exposition that is being held at Wake Forest University. It explains how I am using the virtual law firm simulation to teach a course for Wake Forest Law School entitled Technology in Law Practice. Thanks to Total Attorneys for the continued use of their platform for this purpose. I also provide the students in my course with access to a number of legal SaaS products from practice management systems to document automation and assembly tools so that they will have a wide variety of hands-on experience. The video explains the rest.
I have had a couple years of teaching online courses for different law schools and providing guest lectures on various legal tech related subjects. I am working on a post about distance education in law school from my unique perspective as an adjunct.
Here is some spring reading. Every six months for the past couple of years, I publish a post that lists the top updates in virtual law practice and links out to the news, events and articles over that time period. Well, virtual law practice has gone more mainstream and curating all of that content is way more time consuming and difficult to narrow down.
So instead, here are the top articles that have come out in the past six months that I think any virtual practitioner should read. Most deal with the future of law practice, but others are practical advice on security and tech issues. I use Twitter as my reader these days so I know I’ve missed a few. They are in no particular order. I’m purposefully not putting the great law school reform/legal jobs debate in here.
– Jordan Furlong, The Evolution of the Legal Services Market, five part series on Law21.
– V. Mary Abraham, What Technologists Can Teach Lawyers on Legal Technology Today.
– David R. Johnson, Serving Justice with Conversational Law, for the World Future Society
– Ron Friedmann, A New Model Law Firm: A Closer Look at Clearspire, two part post on Prism Legal.
– Ron Friedmann, The Current State and Future of Big Law Online Legal Services , on Prism Legal.
– Richard Susskind, Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future, Oxford Press (2013).
– Dan Katz recaps the coverage of the ReInvent Law Conference in Silicon Valley on his Computational Legal Studies blog. Hopefully videos of the talks will be posted soon.
– Dan Katz, Quantitative Legal Prediction – or – How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Start Preparing for the Data Driven Future of the Legal Services Industry, Emory Law Journal, Vol. 62, 2013 on SSRN.
-Law Society of British Columbia’s Cloud Computing Checklist
– Sharon Nelson and John Simek, Through a Glass, Darkly: The Future of Court Technology, on Slaw.
– John Gregory, Crowdsourced Online Dispute Resolution on Slaw.
– Dave Einstein, Big Data in Law: Cloud Challenge, Analytics Opportunity, on Forbes.
– Pam Woldow, What Law Firms Can Learn from Hotels: Perspectives on Service
– V. Mary Abraham, Improve Your Legal Practice Through Gamification, in Law Technology Today
– Donna Seyle, eLawyering in an Age of Accelerating Technology, ABA GP/Solo Report (January 2013)
– Using Technology to Enhance Access to Justice, Harvard Journal of Law & Technology, Volume 26, Number 1 Fall 2012
– Dennis Kennedy, Thirteen Mobile Collaboration Tips for 2013, Law Practice Today (January 2013)
In case you missed reading it on the Attorney at Work blog, here is a link to my interview for them. I’ve gotten a huge response from this article in the form of emails from lawyers across the country so something in it must have struck a cord.
As the article says, I’ll be speaking at the Lawyernomics 2013 conference in Las Vegas on April 27 on “The Consumer Law Revolution: Lawyer Collaboration with Branded Networks.” More on that later.Here is part of the Attorney at Work interview:
The greatest opportunities for today’s lawyers are online. This is where the conversation about legal services is happening for the public, whether lawyers are present or not. It’s not just personal legal services that we are talking about. Companies and corporate clients are online, listening and engaging with their customers. Lawyers who understand and stay constantly up to date with the technology and the different opportunities to engage in online conversation are going to continue to grow and succeed. This is not only for client development. Lawyers need to know how their clients communicate and operate their businesses. The lawyer who does not understand online engagement is not going to be the best lawyer for a company whose customers are all engaging with the company online, whether wanted or not.
This Monday the ABA House of Delegates voted to adopt Resolution 108 supporting limited scope representation or unbundling. This resolution was crafted by the Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services. ABA Staff Counsel, Will Hornsby, and the Committee Chair, Ritchey Hollenbaugh, presented the Resolution to the House in Dallas.
Because unbundling is frequently used as a method of legal service delivery for virtual practice, I want to post the actual text of the resolution here. Obviously, unbundling has many different applications in our profession other than being used in online delivery. The adoption of this resolution shows progress on many fronts. Now let’s see the call in the second paragraph of the resolution come into play: state, local and territorial bar associations, the judiciary and court administrations, and CLE providers should increase support and education about unbundling.
Please also follow the link and read the full report which follows the Resolution.
RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association encourage practitioners, when appropriate, to consider limiting the scope of their representation as a means of increasing access to legal services.
FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association encourage and support the efforts of national, state, local and territorial bar associations, the judiciary and court administrations, and CLE providers to take measures to assure that practitioners who limit the scope of their representation do so with full understanding and recognition of their professional obligations.
FURTHER RESOLVED, That the American Bar Association encourage and support the efforts of national, state, local and territorial bar associations, the judiciary and court administrations, and those providing legal services to increase public awareness of the availability of limited scope representation as an option to help meet the legal needs of the public.