Virtual Law Practice

Category: Cloud Computing

  • Illinois State Bar Ethics Opinion Discussing Virtual Practice

    I discovered another state bar ethics opinion related to virtual practice when researching ethics opinions for the online marketing tools book this weekend. The Illnois State Bar published Ethics Opinion No. 12-09 in March 2012 regarding multijurisdicitonal practice, choice of law issues, and unauthorized practice of law. Here is the text regarding the virtual office scenario:

    The advent of the virtual law office, or online legal practice, has raised several ethical challenges, including concerns about the unauthorized practice of law. Such issues can and should be analyzed under the framework of the Rules of Professional Conduct. See, e.g., Ohio Sup. Ct., Bd. of Comm’rs on Grievances & Discipline, Op. 2011-2 (October 7, 2011).

    In the context of a virtual law office involving lawyers from different states, each lawyer should take care that any out-of-state practice is not systematic and continuous. (more…)

  • Slides from Digital Lawyering Program

    I posted a sample of slides on Slideshare from the Tech in Law Practice session for the Digital Lawyering Program that I’m teaching online for the University of Dayton School of Law this fall. Note that this is just a sample from one of the classes, we have an entire syllabus full of different topics involving law practice technology, including all the ethics issues and best practices.

    We are using Marc Lauritsen’s book The Lawyer’s Guide to Working Smarter with Knowledge Tools as the framework for discussion and Richard Susskind’s End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services. We are also reading some of the chapters from my books and using podcasts and videos from other experts. The students have access to a virtual law firm simulation as well as several other legal tech applications for them to get hands-on, practical experience based on their future career paths and what interests them.

    Next up in the program is a session on Social Media for Lawyers.

  • California Publishes New Ethics Opinion on Virtual Law Offices

    UPDATE: The State Bar of California has published its formal ethics opinion on virtual law offices, No. 2012-184. I wrote a post on the proposed draft of this opinion that came out this past spring.

    The summary reads:

    As it pertains to the use of technology, the Business and Professions Code and the Rules of Professional Conduct do not impose greater or different duties upon a VLO practitioner operating in the cloud than they do upon an attorney practicing in a traditional law office. While an attorney may maintain a VLO in the cloud where communications with the client, and storage of and access to all information about the client’s matter, are conducted solely via the internet using a third-party’s secure servers, Attorney may be required to take additional steps to confirm that she is fulfilling her ethical obligations due to distinct issues raised by the hypothetical VLO and its operation. Failure of Attorney to comply with all ethical obligations relevant to these issues will preclude the operation of a VLO in the cloud as described herein. (emphasis added) (more…)

  • Teaching Digital Lawyering with a Virtual Firm Simulation

    This summer I taught an online course for the University of Dayton School of Law entitled “Unbundling and the Future of Legal Services”. My 14 law students were required to read Richard Susskind’s End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services and chapters from my books on unbundling and virtual law practice, along with podcasts and other digital materials throughout the course.  The course was held completely online three nights a week. The students could see me on live video feed and I also shared my desktop with them to go in and out of different technology applications.

    Aside from discussing the materials we were reading, the most practical teaching experience came from the use of our virtual law firm simulation. I created a virtual firm for the class by importing pretend contacts into the Total Attorneys’ platform and creating existing case files for several of those contacts.

    Each student in the course was a member of the virtual firm. We assumed general competency in all practice areas and set our jurisdiction as only “licensed” in Ohio. As part of their grade, each student at some point in the course had to put themselves in the shoes of a prospective online client with a legal need. They had to register through the client portal and request legal services online from the firm. This gave them the opportunity to experience the process from the client’s perspective, but also gave us new material as a firm to discuss during class time. I also set up a few ethics or malpractice issues in the cases for the students to handle particular issues we were discussing in the course materials, such as jurisdiction and conflicts checks, UPL, choosing when to unbundle online and when to refer the matter out, etc.

    I was impressed with the creativity of many of the students on the virtual firm simulation. (more…)

  • Review of SubTech2012 at New York Law School in Tweets

    Yesterday was a productive day of brainstorming at New York Law School which is hosting the 2012 Twelfth International Conference on Substantive Technology in Legal Education and Practice (SubTech). Topics discussed at the roundtable included Automation of Legal Work,
    The Nature of the Current and Future Legal Profession, Technology and the Law School Predicament and Re-Invention. You can see a list of the attendees on the site. The discussion was heated at times because of the mix of technologists, academics and practitioners.

    I’m posting my notes which were tweeted below. For the record, these are not all my thoughts. The moderators asked that we not attribute anything that was said in the discussion to any one particular individual. They are also posted backwards below so read from the top up. I’m sure there is a better way to scrape tweets off of Twitter. If you don’t care about the law school dilemma and only want to read about the legal technology, jump straight to the bottom. The ideas are there. Enjoy, comment.

    Heading back to SubTech this morning to listen to individual presentations that address some of the topics we discussed yesterday.

    ______________

    Wonderful wrap-up from Liz Chambliss at #SubTech2012. Looking forward to more productive discussion at dinner.

    UDSL has two online programs starting this fall. RT @rgranat: How about a Certificate in Digital Lawyering? idea surfaced at #subtech2012

    Collaboration among law schools on certificate programs with an assessment component that employers can verify. #SubTech2012

    Could we add more gamificaton to legal education and add multidisciplinary collaboration to that online system? #SubTech2012

    Not having to teach to the bar would also help deliver a product to students that would be more applicable in real practice. #SubTech2012

    Should law schools take a new role in training legal engineers, new firm roles, not just lawyers? #SubTech2012

    Reinvention of legal ed may have to figure out what happens to legal scholarship and research. What is value, who pays for that?#SubTech2012 (more…)

  • Regulators Concerns with Virtual Law Practice – Review from ILEC

    I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the International Legal Ethics Conference (ILEC) in Banff, Alberta last week. I took part in a panel discussion with John Browning, Darrel Pink and Victoria Rees, entitled “The Challenges of Virtual Law Practice and Social Media.” As with any good panel, we collaborated ahead of time and in the process, learned a lot from each other.

    I wanted to share some of the wonderful insights I gained from listening to Darrel Pink during his portion of our Virtual Law Practice panel presentation. He entitled his thoughts “The Regulator’s Dilemma,” and I think it provides a unique perspective on the concerns that states and other regulatory entities have as more of their members begin delivering legal services online.

    Many of the ethics concerns are similar to what every lawyer has to think about whether delivering services online or off. But when the practice
    is online, it raises interesting questions for the regulator as to how he or she can effectively monitor the practice, the client data, trust accounting
    practices, etc. How does the regulator provide oversight of the lawyers’ practice if it is online? How does he or she handle enforcement of regulations or auditing practices if required?

    Here are some ethics issues that Darrel brought up in his presentation with regards to the limitations on the regulator:

    •How does the regulator address limited jurisdictional reach? For example, how can he or she access data that is located in another jurisdiction
    or if it is in the cloud and the location is unknown?

    •What are costs of access to that data? How would a regulator obtain it?

    •He noted a concern with the ease of information being hidden online by an unscrupulous lawyer or deleted entirely before it could be accessed.

    •If the practice must be taken over in custodianship or receivership by a regulator entity, how is this accomplished if it is an online practice?

    •If the online law office data is requested by law enforcement agencies, such as by a search warrant or production order, how does the
    regulator protect the clients’ privileges when the scope of the seizure is indeterminate? How would the regulator have notice of such a request for
    data?What about the risk that the law office data is entangled with other data being sought?

    •And finally, how does a regulator set standards and enforce rules that are relevant and continue to reflect and adapt to the changes that are occurring with virtual practice? (more…)

  • 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.

     

  • Massachusetts Bar Association Publishes Cloud Computing Ethics Opinion

    The Massachusetts Bar Association published Ethics Opinion 12-03 regarding the use of cloud computing in law practice, specifically referring to lawyers’ use of Google docs. The scenario posed in the opinion is this: “A lawyer wishes to store and synchronize the electronic work files that he creates in the course of his law practice across multiple computers and devices (e.g., smartphones, iPads, etc.) so that he can access them remotely.”

    The question posed is “whether it [the use of cloud computing] would violate Lawyer’s obligations under the Massachusetts Rules of Professional Conduct to store confidential client information using Google docs or some other Internet based storage solution, and to synchronize his computers and other devices that contain or access such information over the Internet.”

    This opinion mirrors several that we have seen in the past year that focus on compliance with Rule 1.6 and protection of the client’s confidentiality. (more…)

  • What Constitutes Virtual Presence?

    The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 has released a new issues paper entitled “Issues Paper Concerning Model Rule of Professional Conduct 5.5 and the Limits of Virtual Presence in a Jurisdiction.”

    The Commission’s previous issues paper regarding systemic and continuous presence under 5.5 came out last September and raised some of the same questions. I posted my summary of that here.  The Commission’s newest request for feedback on the issue of presence has a deadline of July 31st and they specifically request to hear from virtual practitioners who would be affected by any changes to Model Rule 5.5, in particular Comment [4] to Rule 5.5(b). The proposed change to this would state:

    For example, a lawyer may direct electronic or other forms of communications to potential clients in this jurisdiction and consequently establish a substantial practice representing clients in this jurisdiction, but without a physical presence here. At some point, such a virtual presence in this jurisdiction may be come systematic and continuous within the meaning of Rule 5.5(b)(1).

    Check out the hypothetical of a virtual law practice posted by Andy Perlman on the Legal Ethics Forum blog. I’m attending a LSC Tech Summit this week so a longer response from me to this new call for comments will have to wait. There are so many potential and emerging business models that incorporate virtual practice. I hope the Commission receives a variety of comments from practitioners.

  • Online Legal Services – Updated List for Big Law

    Ron Friedmann over at his Prism Legal Blog has posted an updated list of big law firms delivering online legal services. Neota Logic sponsored the updated list and most likely provides the technology that facilitates the online delivery process for some of the listed firms. (I am a fan of Neota Logic and have been sharing how it works and its potential with the law students I teach.)

    I share some of Ron’s thoughts about the direction that online services are heading at least in the Big Law arena. It’s difficult to see how the changes affecting the legal profession in the UK under the Legal Services Act with its encouragement of alternative business structures is not going to eventually trickle over to the US. In the process that will encourage technology companies and innovative law firms to adapt to alternative forms of legal service delivery, including online and those that rely on decision-making and document assembly and automation systems.

    It’s also interesting to see that financial services are the primary online service for most of these firms. I would hope that as the technology becomes more affordable to customize, firms will see the potential in adding other practice areas. They might consider adding those services in practice areas that are transactions-based and delivered online to supplement other unbundled or full-service offerings that are delivered traditionally. If you are keeping track of the development of online delivery, Ron’s post is a good resource.

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