Yes, but with some cautionary advice from Brook Alverez, the host of FactZone on the Onion News Network. [JH] Brooke Explains Why She Has No Problem with Drunk Texting
Posts Tagged ‘network’
Friday Fun: Congress Considers Cutting 12 States from the Union to Reduce Spending
26
Aug
The Onion News Network’s Brooke Alvarez gets reaction from ordinary Americans. [JH]
Friday Fun: New Oklahoma Law Allows Doctors to Perform Fake Abortions
15
Jul
Doctors in Oklahoma will now be able to act like they’ve just given a woman an abortion and send her on her way. Of course, the Onion News Network is highlighting by way of humor a very serious and concerted…
NJ Attorney Advertising Committee Rules that a TotalAttorneys WebSite is Misleading
30
Jun
The Committee on Attorney Advertising of the New Jersey Court System issued an Advisory Opinion this week that stated that a Total Bankruptcy web site, published by TotalAttorneys®, a law firm marketing and services organization based in Chicago, is misleading and in violation of the Rule of Professional Conduct 7.1 (a) .Download Full Opinion .
The Committee also ruled that the web site was not an impermissible referral service and that Attorneys are not flatly prohibited from paying for advertising on a "pay-per-lead" or "pay per click" basis. That’s good news for TotalAttorneys and other performance-based marketing schemes on the Internet.
The Committee sets out clearly that "Attorney advertising cannot be misleading or omit operative facts." and found that the website did not provide sufficient information to the user and is misleading.
In this case, the user was directed to only one attorney based on the purchase of exclusive rights to a geographical area. To avoid misleading consumers, the Committee stated, the methodology for the selection of the attorney’s name must be made clear, including the fact that the website limited participation to one (paying) attorney per geographical area. Further, the Committee specified that all requirements to participate in the website must be clearly specified; a full list of participating attorneys must be readily accessible, and the website must inform the user that the attorneys have paid a fee to participate.
It is easy for attorneys to violate their professional obligations and expose themselves to bar sanctions, by ignoring the fine print in their agreements with Internet-based marketing websites.
For example, no less a credible organization as Lexis-Nexis®, recently launched a direct to consumer web site, called EZLAW.COM. The website purports to offer wills, powers of attorney and advance directives forms bundled with legal advice for a fixed and reasonable fee. A goal I would heartily endorse.
However, the site seems to suffer from the same issues as the TotalAttorney’s web site when viewed through the lense of the New Jersey Advisory Opinion.
At EZLAW, the site operator provides a mechanism for consumers to assemble legal documents on-line and then make available a network of attorneys to provide legal advice as part of the offered package. In describing its Attorney Network, EZLAW states that:
They are all prescreened by EZLaw to ensure that you get professional, experienced and confidential legal counsel. To be included in our network, attorneys must meet our rigorous 12-point checklist of criteria.
This suggests that EZLAW is vouching for the quality of the qualifications of the participating attorneys, not only whether an attorney has practiced a number of years or maintains a certain level of malpractice, and this could be construed as misleading.
Moreover, the NJ Opinion states clearly that as a form of attorney advertising, " a full list of participating attorneys must be readily accessible," but on the EZLAW web site no list of participating attorneys is to be found.
Moreover the limited representation agreement executed by the client with the law firm is provided by EZLAW on behalf of the law firm, so the client never knows the identity of the law firm prior to entering into an engagement with the attorney. Normally you would expect that the client would enter into a limited retainer agreement directly with the law firm. I never heard of a retainer agreement that wasn’t entered into directly between the client and the law firm. Not in this case.
Click here for a copy of the Representation Agreement between EZLAW and the client. You decide whether this agreement is ethically compliant? I am interested in hearing other opinions about this agreement. If you have one. please comment.
So what’s the bottom line? Lawyer’s need to read the fine print. Lawyers need to have a full understanding of how their ethical obligations apply to these new Internet-based marketing schemes lest they be caught in a web of disciplinary proceedings that wasn’t part of the bargain.
Friday Fun: Filming of Congressional Reality Show Disrupts Committee Meeting
10
Jun
Is it just me or are you thinking you would love to supplement your income by being a writer for the Onion News Network. Imagine, for example, what would happen if the Onion News Network turned its attention to law…
Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering Goes to Orange County Legal Aid
24
Mar
The James I. Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering for 2011 is going to the Legal Aid Society of Orange County for their Legal Genie Project, reports the eLawyering Task Force of the Law Practice Management Section of the ABA, the group that makes the Award.
James Keane was the first appointed Chair of the group, and passed away tragically from cancer six years ago.
Bob Cohen is the long time leader of Orange County Legal Aid, and provided the leadership for this Project.
This project combines the use of advanced web-enabled document automation technology to generate Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 documents, as well as California divorce pleadings. It is unique because it involves a network of lawyers who provide legal advice, document review, and other assistance to clients who use the program. The use of Internet technology makes it possible for the lawyers to be involved, and to also get paid a fee, because the entire transaction is made more efficient. The lawyers who participating get the benefit of the Legal Aid brand, and the marketing that results from promoting the project.
The Project demonstrates how a vertical branded network of attorneys, empowered by a robust technology platform, can provide legal services at an affordable fee to individuals who could not normally afford a lawyer.
This is from the Legal Genie website:
“Legal Genie is a simple, affordable and reliable online service created by Legal Aid Society of Orange County. It is designed for people who do not qualify for legal aid and cannot afford the services of an attorney. It asks simple questions and puts answers on the forms in the correct place.
"Legal Genie is different from other services because it connects you to a licensed attorney on our Lawyers Referral Service panel. The LRS attorney will give you telephone consultations, review your documents and give you legal advice. Legal Genie combines the magic of technology with the help of a professional at a price you can afford.”
The formal granting of the Award will be on April 12, 2011, at a Lunch for all of the attendees of ABA TECHSHOW in Chicago, Illinois at the Hilton Hotel.
LawPivot: Another Legal Advice Web Site
29
Jan
Another interesting start-up has emerged out of Silicon Valley to provide crowdsourced legal advice to other start-ups for free.
Vertical Q&A web sites seems to be the next new thing among venture capital investors. Even Facebook rolled out this year a crowd-sourced Q&A service.
LawPivot, a legal Q&A web site founded in 2009, hopes to fill a niche by providing legal advice to the founders of start-up and early stage high-tech companies based in California at a legal fee they can afford — FREE. Legal advice is provided by an experienced network of high-priced business law attorneys, recruited from the top 200 hundred or so law firms, who hope to pick up new clients by entering into discussions by providing free legal advice services to start-up companies.
Free legal advice or the “free consult” has been employed by lawyers for years, pre-Internet, as a tried and true marketing strategy for acquiring new clients. Now many lawyers are beginning to offer free legal advice online from their web sites directly. See for example, VirtualEsq.Com . By next year there will be hundreds of these free legal advice services offered directly by lawyers from their web sites as the virtual law firm movement begins to scale.
However, free legal advice from an individual law firm’s web site, is not the same thing as a vertical web site that aggregates answers from many lawyers, giving consumers a wider variety of responses to their particular situation.
Free legal advice online is not a completely new idea. FreeAdvice has been doing it for years, and consumers can get answers to their basic legal questions from sites such as AVVO, RocketLawyer, and JustAnswer. What is new, is that LawPivot provides through its network of lawyers “real” legal advice that applies to the client’s particular situation, as distinguished from merely legal information. And this advice is reputedly to be "high quality" given the stature of the lawyers recruited to the LawPivot network.
However, genuine legal advice, [as distinguished from “legal advice” that is characterized as “legal information” ], like any legal service, has to be delivered in an ethically compliant way requiring that the client’s information be kept confidential, that an attorney/client relationship be established, and that the attorney providing the legal advice be a member of the bar within the jurisdiction where the client is located. Presumably LawPivot is addressing these issues. The LawPivot service is presently limited to California, but the company, according to its representations, plans to expand nationwide.
Although the company recently raised $600,000 from Google Ventures, the venture capital arm of Google, after a $400,0000 round from from a group of angel investors, it will be interesting to see how or whether it survives. At this point, neither the clients are charged for legal advice, nor are the participating attorneys charged an advertising fee. So there is no revenue, and apparently no business model. However, I doubt that the investors thought they were making charitable contributions, so there must be a business model lurking in the background somewhere?
Unfortunately, the only business model that is ethically compliant in the US, is one where the participating lawyers pay an advertising fee to play (get listed) and get exposure. Splitting legal advice fees between a law firm and a non-law firm , is a big “No, No” and an ethical prohibition that exposes the participating attorneys to bar sanctions which could lead to disbarment. Perhaps because Google is now involved as a major backer of LawPivot , and the company is planning to move to the GooglePlex campus start-up incubator, "they can do no wrong.!"
Many other Western common law jurisdictions, like the United Kingdom, have abolished the division of fees, but the rules against splitting fees with non-lawyers remains sacrosanct in the US, on the theory that splitting fees would compromise the independent judgment of the attorney. However, in the UK, lawyers are permitted to work for a profit-making company and provide legal advice directly to consumers, and no one seems to be complaining about compromised judgment. [ See: FirstAssist in the UK for an example ].
Charging clients an administrative fee to “use” the web site, as an alternative revenue source, has been tried before in an earlier Internet era, and it failed then. [ e.g. AmeriCounsel ]. I doubt that this model will work today when consumers are expecting everything on the web to be for free.
I think it is a good sign that innovation is happening in the legal industry, and that private capital is finally looking for a way to get a return by investing in the delivery of legal services. [See: Total Attorneys Receives Multi-Million Dollar Investment ].
I would like to see companies like LawPivot thrive, but at this point I don’t see the juice. Are advertising revenues sufficient to make this venture sustainable, or has LawPivot figured out another legitimate source of revenue that doesn’t violate US ethical prohibitions? Only time will tell.
Will LegalZoom Become the Largest Law Firm in the US?
05
Jan
LegalZoom has been beta testing a concept which links its marketing capabilities to a network of law firms that offer legal services under the LegalZoom brand. With some state bar associations accusing LegalZoom of the unauthorized practice of law, it might makes sense for the company to seek deeper alliances with networks of attorneys who are able to offer a full and ethically compliant legal service. Solos and small law firms, leveraging off the visibility and prominence of the LegalZoom brand, could reduce their marketing costs and enable these firms to better capture consumers who are part of the “latent legal market” on the Internet. It could be a win/win for both parties.
Unfortunately, linking the capital and management resources of profit-making organization with private law firms is almost impossible in the United States, given the regulatory framework that governs law practice. Unlike, the United Kingdom, which is in the process of deregulating the legal profession, enabling profit-making companies, from banks and insurance companies to retail chains like Tesco, to actually own a law firm, and/or split legal fees with a non-law firm, these practices in the US are strictly taboo.
In the US, law directories can charge a flat marketing fee for a listing, but sharing legal fees with a marketing organization can get you disbarred.
During the dot-com boom around 1999-2000, a company emerged by the name of AmeriCounsel that tried to create a hybrid organizational structure similar to the LegalZoom experiment. The company sought to enable a network of attorneys to offer legal services at a fixed and reasonable price and to mediate between the consumer and the law firm in terms of guaranteeing the quality of the legal services offered. The company failed during the dot-com bust for various reasons, including lack of financing, but on the way to failure, secured some opinions from state bar associations that blessed their model and provides a blue print for hybrid delivery systems which combine the expertise of a law firm with the marketing, management, and technological resources of a non-law firm.
One such opinion was issued by the Nassau County Bar Association New York State.
The Bar Association reasoned that the AmeriCounsel scheme was permissible because:
[S]ince AmeriCounsel does not charge attorneys any fee and since AmeriCounsel does not “recommend” or “promote” the use of any particular lawyer ’s services, it does not fall within the purview of DR 2-103(B) or (D). Rather, AmeriCounsel is a form of group advertising permitted by the Code of Professional Responsibility and by ethics opinions interpreting the Code.
In this model, AmeriCounsel provided technology and administrative services to link the client with the lawyer, but the law firm made no payment to AmeriCounsel. Instead, a separate administrative/technology fee was paid by the consumer to AmericCounsel for using the web site and gaining access to the lawyer. (This is not a practical scheme in today’s web environment, in my opinion), Moreover, AmeriCounsel did not choose the lawyer. The client was able to compare the credentials of different attorneys and choose their own lawyer. Thus no legal referral was involved, which would not be permitted in New York, as only an approved non-profit organization can make legal referrals.
In my opinion, this model, forced on AmeriCounsel, by the Rules of Professional Responsibility, is cumbersome, hard to implement, and was not economically viable for AmeriCounsel. Perhaps this was one of the causes of its failure.
Almost a decade later, companies that want to enter into this kind of hybrid relationship with lawyers, have to follow the same rule structure, as the ABA Model Rules of Professional Responsibility as the rules have not changed in any significant way. changed. It will be interesting to see whether the ABA Ethics 20/20 Commission, which was set up just last year, will address these issues at all.
Perhaps there should be a “safe harbor” that enables organization’s like LegalZoom to experiment with new patterns of legal service delivery that could operate for a limited period of time in a specific state, like California, The experience would be evaluated carefully as a basis for rule and policy change. The evaluation would be aimed to see if client’s interests are compromised in any way, and whether the delivered legal service is less expensive, without compromising the quality of legal service.
Instead of creating legal profession regulatory policies that are based on the legal profession’s idea about what is good for the consumer, policy could be based on real experience and facts. Experimentation is good. It leads to change, and in other industries improvement of methods and approaches over a period of time.
Of course, I don’t believe that this will ever happen in the US, at least not in my professional lifetime.
