If you are dealing with a citation for driving without a valid license under vehicle code section 12500(a), getting it reduced to an infraction is a good result. Continue reading
Posts Tagged ‘result’
What is a Speed Trap Defense? Take a look at California Veh. Code 40802(a)
30
Aug
A California Speed Trap is defined by Vehicle Code section 40802, which places the burden to prove a violation was not the result of a speed trap on the government. Continue reading
Is It Time To Deregulate the Practice of Law?
23
Aug
An editorial appeared in today’s (08/22/2011) Wall St. Journal , titled "Time to Deregulate the Practice of Law", by Clifford Winston and Robert W. Crandell, both Fellows at the Brookings Institution. [ Ungated version here ]. The editorial argues that it is time for the legal profession to be deregulated, as other industries have been, in order to create price competition for legal services, spur innovation in the delivery of legal services, and reduce the premium that lawyers get for pricing their services as a result of strict occupational licensing. The editorial is a summary of the conclusions of a book soon to be published by the authors, and Vikram Maheshri, titled, "First Thing We Do, Let’s Deregulate All the Lawyers" (2011, Brookings Press). This book is the opening salvo it what is sure to be an expanded debate about who should be allowed to provide legal services to the general public.
New Methods of Legal Service Delivery
With online companies such as LegalZoom, RocketLawyer, JustAnswer, LawBidding, Law Pivot and our own MyLawyer.com, pushing the boundaries of new ways to delivery of legal services, there is renewed pressure on the organized bar to respond to consumer demand for affordable, transparent, competent, and reliable legal services. Law firms are exploring ways to delivery legal services online to compete with non-lawyer providers, but are often constrained by bar regulations.
Essentially, the authors argue that lowering the barriers to entry into the legal profession would force lawyers to compete more intensely with each other, and face competition from non-lawyers and firms not owned and managed by lawyers. The authors argue that legal fees are higher because of occupational licensing and can be reduced by deregulation without sacrificing the quality of legal services.
Since heading the Philadelphia Institute for Paralegal Training, the nation’s first paralegal school and the institution that pioneered the paralegal profession in the United States, I have argued that you don’t need a fully-trained and credentialed attorney to provide services to consumers for simpler, more routine legal problems, any more than you would need a brain surgeon to treat a headache, when a pharmacist will do. I am well aware of arguments that some lawyers make that there are no simple legal problems, but the reality is that many consumers will settle for a "good enough" result, rather than spend thousands of dollars in legal fees.
On the other hand I am not comfortable with the idea that we should abandon all occupational licensing for legal professionals, lawyers and legal assistants, essentially converting the United States in a completely unregulated free market.
Arguments for a Regulated Legal Profession
1. The analogy between the legal profession to other deregulated industries, such as the airline industry, that the authors cite, is simply not relevant. There is fundamental differences between the manufacturing, mining, communication, transportation, and financial industries and the human service professions where the delivery of the service is expected to be of sufficient competence to accomplish the task at hand. If you follow the author’s logic, we should also deregulate the dentists, the teachers, the nurses, the social workers, and the doctors because it results in lower pricing and therefore would increase the availability of those services. e.g., Instead of going to a "Dentist" to get your root canal work, you would have the option of going to the "Tooth Fairy."
2. The authors assume that the quality of legal services would not deteriorate any more than when the planes didn’t stop flying when the airline industry was deregulated. Unfortunately the authors have no facts to back up this assertion. It is just wishful thinking.
3. When you look at the facts, however, a more thoughtful response to reforming the delivery system for legal services is required.
On the anecdotal level, I can testify to the literally hundreds of botched legal matters that I have reviewed generated by "Immigration Specialists", Legal Technicians" and other non-lawyers operating in the grey area of offering document preparation services. In some instances, I have seen immigrants actually deported because of improperly prepared papers by "Immigration Specialists." I have reviewed "failure to discharge notices" issued by U.S. Bankruptcy Court because of improperly prepared bankruptcy petitions. I have reviewed dozens of divorce petitions filed by "pro-se" parties, assisted by online document preparation companies that were rejected by the courts. I have seen enough of these cases to know that in many of these situations incompetence and lack of knowledge and skill is evident. In some cases there is outright fraud and misrepresentation.
4. There have been almost no empirical studies that I know of that support the argument of the authors that the quality of legal services would not deteriorate in a completely deregulated marketplace – save one- and that study does not support the author’s conclusions.
Legal Services Consumer Panel Study
Very recently the Legal Services Consumer Panel of the Legal Services Board in the United Kingdom, the agency in charge of deregulating the legal profession in the United Kingdom, conducted an empirical study of the quality of wills prepared by both solicitors and non-lawyers.
The Panel concluded that on the issue of quality:
"one in four wills in the shadow shops were failed with more than one in three of all assessments scoring either poor or very poor. The same proportion of wills prepared by solicitors and will-writing companies were failed. Wills were almost just as likely to fail when the client had simple or complex circumstances. Key problems where the will was not legally valid or did not meet the client’s stated requirements, were: inadequate treatment of the client’s needs; the client’s requests not being met; potentially illegal actions; inconsistent or contradictory language; insufficient detail; and poor presentation. Key problems relating to poor advice include: cutting and pasting of precedents; unnecessary complexity; and use of outdated terminology."
The United Kingdom has a legal market which is not only more deregulated that the US market, but will become even more deregulated in the future. Despite this more open environment, the Panel concluded that:
"Inherent features of will-writing services place consumers at risk of detriment. Consumers lack the knowledge to identify technical problems or assess whether the additional services offered are necessary or represent good value for money. The reliance on extracting good information about the consumer‟s circumstances and preferences, combined with the range of possible ways to deal with these in the will, means there is potentially wide scope to give bad advice."
and
"However, there is a need to make consumers better aware of the suitability of online services as these received the highest proportion of fail marks in the shadow shopping, but wills sold over the internet are difficult to regulate."
Thus, the Panel proposes that:
"will-writing services should be made a reserved legal activity. Any business – not just a solicitors firm – satisfying an approved regulator‟s entry standards could provide will-writing services."
The UK approach is not to restrict will-writing just to lawyers, but to open up the system to any providers that can satisfy the educational, regulatory, and accountability standards within the reserved activity. This is a vastly different approach than eliminating standards all together, as the authors seem to suggest.
The compete UK Report on Regulating Will Writing can be downloaded here. See also our Resource Page on Regulation of the Legal Profession. The Report is worth reading by any policy maker who is thinking about doing away with all regulation of the providers of legal services to the general public.
Some final thoughts:
The authors claims of the benefits of deregulation in general are not supported by current evidence.
Consider:
- Deregulation of the mortgage baking industry brought the American economy to its knees;
- Deregulation of the US banking industry has wreaked havoc on the world’s economy;
- Lack of strong regulation of the proprietary higher education industry has resulted in thousands of graduates without an adequate education, low employment rates, and high default rates. (Of course, as the author’s point out, you could say the same about law schools and law school graduates, but then again the accreditation of law schools by the American Bar Association, it can be argued is another example of an "unregulated activity" without substantive standards that are meaningful).
The list can go on.
Perhaps I am premature in my judgment as the book has not been released, and I have just reviewed the salient conclusions. I can’t wait to give it a full read and review.
Driving While Suspended
19
Aug
Driving while suspended DWS is a serious charge that result in jail time. Here’w what you need to know to sort it out with success.
DWR Driving while revoked has serious consequences.
Strategies or "Top Ten Tips" for Legal Research Cost Efficiency: Big Law’s O’Grady or WestlawNext’s Flocchini
28
Jun
In Cost Effective Research Training Part Deux: The past, the present and the solutions, Jean O’Grady writes If cost recovery for online research is to survive at all, it will be as the result of a radical shift to simplicity…
What Every Lawyer Should Know About Document Automation
18
Jun
For years some law firms, but not all, have used some form of document automation in their law offices. Ranging from an MS Word macro to long standing programs such as HotDocs, as well as automated forms distributed by legal publishers such as Willmaker by Nolo, some law offices have incorporated some form of document automation in their law practices. Document automation of legal documents that are generated in high quantity by a law firm is an indispensable process for increasing law firm productivity and maintaining profit margins in an era of intense competition.
Legal Document Creation the Old Way
The manual process of cutting and pasting clauses from a master MS Word document into a new document, is a productivity process which is fast becoming out dated. It reminds me of the time before there were automated litigation support programs, and legal assistants would duplicate a set of case documents three or four times. The next step was filling one file cabinet with a set of documents in alpha order, filling another filing cabinet with a set of documents in date order, and finally, filling another filing cabinet with a set of documents in issue or subject order to enable "fast" retrievable of relevant paper documents. It took awhile, but almost all litigation lawyers now use automated litigation support methods.. This is not true of transactional lawyers, many of whom still use out-dated methods of creating legal documents, as if each legal document were a unique novel, poem, or other work of fiction.
Barriers to Change
An obstacle to wider use of automated document assembly methods, is typically the lawyer’s insistence on crafting the words in each clause to their own satisfaction. Because most lawyer’s do not have the requisite programming skill to automate their own documents, law firms by default will opt to use their own non-automated documents, rather than risk using the legal documents automated by an independent provider, because by definition the content of the documents is "not their own." As a result, many law firms do not even use desk-top document assembly solutions when the forms are published by an independent provider or publisher, remaining stuck using more time consuming and less productive manual methods.
Typically, when a law firm does use document assembly methods, a paralegal inputs answers from a paper intake/questionnaire into a document assembly program running on a personal computer. This results in the extra time-consuming step of inputting data from the intake questionnaire to the document assembly program, but it is still more efficient than manual methods.
Web-Enabled Document Automation
Now comes, "web-enabled legal document automation" methods." Web-enabled document automation is a process whereby the intake questionnaire is presented on-line to the client through the web browser to be completed directly.
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When the client clicks the "Submit" button the document is instantly assembled, ready for the attorneys further review, analysis, revision, and customization if necessary. The result is a further leap in productivity because the client is actually doing part of the work at no cost to the lawyer, freeing the lawyer up to focus on analysis and further customization of the document.
This is what the work flow looks like when using web-enabled document automation methods:
Unfortunately, lawyers have been slow to adapt to this process as well, because of their reluctance to use legal documents drafted or automated by someone else. However in order to automate their own documents they must either acquire the skill to do the job, or commit the capital to have a skilled professional automate their documents for them. For solos and small law firms these two constraints create formidable obstacles to using more efficient methods.
Since neither condition is common within smaller law firms (programming skill, investment capital), the result is that the law firm gets stuck using older less productive methods of document creation.
Vendors that provide web-enabled document platforms include, our own Rapidocs, and Exari, Brightleaf, HotDocs, DealBuilder, and Wizilegal, to name only a few, all claim that their authoring systems are easy to use, but I have yet to see lawyers without any kind of programming skill create their own automated legal documents in any quantity. Thus, law firms become stuck in a negative loop of their own creation which reduces productivity (and profitability) :
"My legal documents are better than yours; I can’t automate them for the web because I don’t know how; thus I will be less productive and be required to charge you more because of my own inefficiency."
Competition
In the consumer space, now comes the non-lawyer providers to take advantage of the solo and small law firm’s competitive disadvantage. Research by companies like Kiiac provide support the conclusion that 85% of the language in transactional documents is actually the same. In more commoditized areas, where legal forms have been standardized, the legal form content is 100% the same in all documents. Taking advantage of this consistency of legal form content, companies like LegalZoom, Nolo, CompleteCase, SmartLegalForms, and LegacyWriter , with their superior on-line marketing and branding machines, now sell legal forms by the thousands at low cost which provide a "good enough" legal solution for consumers who would do any thing to avoid paying the higher fees to an attorney.
Its true that the consumer doesn’t get the benefit of the attorney’s legal advice and counsel, and the accountability and protection that dealing with an attorney provides, but consumers don’t seem to care.
What can be done?
The "web-based legal document automation solution" , used by non-lawyer providers, is a disruptive technology that is eating away at the core business base of the typical solo and small law firm practitioner.
What can solos and small law firms do to compete in this challenging competitive environment?
The American Bar Association’s Legal Technology Resource Center reported last year in their Annual Technology Survey that only 52.2% of solo practitioner’s don’t have a web site. Even if this number is underestimated, it is shockingly low compared with web site utilization by other industries. If you don’t even have a web site, the idea of "web-enabled document automation" is still a "light year" away.
What can be done to encourage more wide-spread use of web-enabled document automation technology by law firms, particularly solos and small law firms? A follow-up post will explore some solutions, but I am open to ideas from anyone.
MY NEW PLATFORM
31
May
My web hosts for this site offered me the chance to migrate to a new platform, from Movable Type to WordPress. I said yes, go ahead. The result is what you see now, a big improvement, I think. The layout and design is so much more versatile. It explains why I have been absent for a while. Another change, which I welcome, is that I now invite my readers to make comments, and interact with me.
There has been a problem which is to do with what is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization). I don’t want to lose the positions in Google, for example, which have been in prominent places for a long time now. But one also needs to avoid any “404s” showing up, in other words a dead link. This has meant the arduous task of tagging old entries with the “301″ tag, which means that the URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is redirected to a different permanent address on a different server.
As well, there has been a problem getting the old internal and external links to work, especially the pictures. Pictures and videos are all important these days. Readers/subscribers have become more sophisticated, and expect all the bells and whistles to be available. So we’re working on it.
Bear with me. I’m no expert, and this is all a learning experience for me too. But I want to get my story out in the best way possible.
The next stop will be an E-Book. Stay tuned.
Nursing Home Injury
06
Apr
Nursing home injury, neglect, or negligence often result from deviations from the accepted standard of care. Legal action is most frequently
sought for the following 12 causes of nursing home injury.
At the Chelsea Flower Show
I just read in the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail of the celebrities attending the annual Chelsea Flower show in London. Another opportunity to show off their hats.
I see that my old sister-in-law Vanessa was there with her daughter Joely. She named a rose in honor of her other daughter Natasha, who died as the result of a foolish escapade on the slopes of a Canadian ski run a couple of years ago.
I cannot help but ask her why she could not do the same for her young sister Lynn, who has just past the first anniversary of her death on the flats of Kent, Connecticut.
It could be named THE PRINCESS MARGARET ROSE (get it?). For Lynn felt she was always the second favorite daughter in her family.
Posted in "Chelsea Flower Show", "Joely Richardson", "Natasha Richardson", "skiing accident", "Vanessa Redgrave", COMMENTARY-Passing parade, My Family and Me