Back in mid-November, in a post titled More TR Legal Layoffs? I reported that a reliable tipster informed me that Thomson Reuters Legal may announce another wave of layoffs soon and that the layoffs may affect customer service operations. Official…
Posts Tagged ‘Service’
More TR Legal Layoffs?
18
Nov
According to an unnamed source, Thomson Reuters Legal may announce another wave of layoffs soon, perhaps even as early as today. The layoffs may affect customer service operations. As of yesterday evening the local press had no reports about this…
Warrant for Failure to Complete Community Service? Solve the Problem Voluntarily.
08
Nov
If you have a warrant for failure to complete community service or Sheriff’s Work Program, there is a way to request a second chance. Continue reading
Opening: Law Librarian & Director, Hamilton County Law Library, Cincinnati
26
Oct
The Hamilton County Law Library (Cincinnati, Ohio) is seeking applicants for the position of Law Librarian & Director. In service to Hamilton County’s legal community since 1837, the Law Library is governed by the Hamilton County Law Library Resources Board…
Rejoinder: "Is the Virtual Law Model Coming up Short?"
24
Sep
Jay Fleischman in a blog post entitled: “Is the Virtual Law Firm Model Coming up Short?” states:
"The ABA elawyering Task Force tells us that, “[t]o be successful in the coming era, lawyers will need to know how to practice over the Web, manage client relationships in cyberspace, and ethically offer “unbundled” services.”
Bull—t.
Jay also states:
"Email doesn’t substitute for a phone call. A phone call isn’t the replacement for a handshake."
"Those who offer the virtual law firm are selling something most people don’t want. People want to be able to make a personal connection with other people, to build trust in a lawyer’s expertise. They don’t want to be met with a password-encrypted firewall and triple-redundant backup systems.".
Unfortunately, like some commentators of a well known news network that make up facts and then offers opinions based on those false assumptions, Jay makes up facts to support his point of view.
Jay is entitled to opinion, but not to his own set of facts.
Here are some of the facts:
1. The ABA/LPM’s eLawyering Task Force
The eLawyering Task Force , of which I am co-chair (with Marc Lauritsen), through it’s web site, publications, and statements has never made the claim that delivering legal services online was the only way that law firms should connect with clients. The value of an online platform depends on the kind of law practice and the kind of clients served. Clients obviously have preferences that lawyers who serve those clients must respect.
Many firms will have a "virtual component" incorporated into a traditional practice. As Marc Lauritsen puts it, there will be:
" a shared online environment that is persistent across the life of a matter. For instance, providing interactive questionnaires on their web sites to gather information from prospects and clients, or supplying do-it-yourself document generators, checklists, or calculators.Or opening up a shared space for collaborative deliberation about a particular decision, using interactive visualizations like I ‘ve been promoting under by ‘choiceboxing" idea."
In fact, the firms that are getting the most successful results from the addition of a client portal are those that have a traditional practice and who add an interactive online component.
We know this from the analysis that we have done from observing over 200 law firms that have subscribed to our DirectLaw virtual law firm service during the past two years. We have also learned why some law firms fail to successfully implement an online strategy. We also know that some lawyers have an unrealistic expectation of what it takes to be successful as a "pure play" virtual law firm.
To read the results of our analysis download our White Paper on Virtual Law Firms: Success Factors.
Also see these blog posts on this topic: Online Legal Services: Is it Hype or a New Way of Delivering Legal Services?; Framing the Discussion About Virtual Law Firm Practice; and Defining the Virtual Law Firm .
2. Affordable Legal Service and Access to the Legal System
The work of the eLawyering Task Force has always focused on identifying ways in which lawyers can become more productive and efficient by using the Internet as platform for the delivery of legal services and ways in which clients can benefit from the use of Internet technologies in terms of the fees they pay for legal services.
President Bill Paul of the American Bar Association, who created the Task Force, had the idea that through the use of Internet technologies it would be possible to lower the cost of legal fees to make the legal system more accessible to those who cannot afford typical attorney fees.
Instead, rather than the legal profession responding to this challenge, we see the emergence of companies like LegalZoom, SmartLegalForms, CompleteCase, LegacyWriter, Nolo, and the dozens of other non-lawyer internet-based legal solution providers who are responding to the need of consumers for a ":good enough" legal result at the lowest possible cost. For millions of moderate and middle class consumers the purchasing of traditional high cost legal services delivered on a one to one basis is no longer an option. Their choice is to do the best they can with a legal solution provided by a non-lawyer provider, (which now may be a court or an online legal aid provider).
Jay seems to imply that if a client can’t afford the profession’s legal fees, then so be it. Who cares?
My opinion is that it will be harder to justify the profession’s monopoly on the delivering of legal services when it only serves a tiny portion of the US population.
The reality is that many of us didn’t become lawyers just for the money. We want to serve people and help them with resolve their legal problems. Now there are technologies that can help us do that in a cost effective way and expand the market for legal services. We shouldn’t ignore these technologies, just because we are not practicing law like the last generation of lawyers.
3. The "Secure Client Portal" Concept":
Examples of Internet based applications range from web enabled document automation, to paying legal bills online, to the provision of written legal advice online, to simply storing the clients legal documents online so they can be referenced later. All of these functions require that the client have access to a secure client portal within which these functions can take place.
It is indisputable that a secure client portal is necessary for secure and confidential activities and tasks between to take place between lawyer and client. This doesn’t mean that a lawyer should not use email to provide confidential legal advice which I am sure happens all of the time, at whatever the risks.
On the other hand, it is not possible to pay your legal fee by credit card using email, and I have yet to see a web enabled document assembly solution being delivered through email. For legal work to be done securely online requires a secure client portal.
It us for this reason that the eLawyering Task Force included, as part of the definition of what constitutes a virtual law practice, that the firm make available to its clients a secure client portal. This seems very obvious to us. Communicating with clients using a mobile phone and by email, is not the same thing as using legal applications online that do legal tasks.
Most people use some form of a secure portal everyday. We do our banking online, our stock brokerage online, buy insurance online, book travel online. It’s not rocket science. Except that right now the legal profession is lagging behind every other service industry in the economy in its use of interactive web technology. According to Jay, we should stay where we are and eschew these web technologies. In my opinion, we do so at our peril.
4. Web-Enabled Document Automaton.
Jay seems to think that the use of a web enabled document automation application is not in a clients interest and has little value, or that client’s don’ t want "just forms." (It is hard to really know what he believes because of the confused logic that is used to support his argument).
I think he is wrong about this. He can read our White Paper on Web-Enabled Document Automation as A Disruptive Technology and these blog posts: Document Automaton as a Disruptive Technology and What Every Lawyer Should Know About Document Assembly.
5 The Legal Profession is Losing Market Share.
Solos and small law firms, with existing methods of delivering legal services, are pricing themselves out of the middle class marketplace. This is the real reason that LegalZoom is rumored to be generating more than 100 million in revenues this year. LegalZoom and other non-lawyer providers continue to increase their market share at the expense of solos and small law firms. The assertion that lawyers don’t need the people as clients that purchase forms from non-lawyer providers is a misrepresentation of what is really happening in the solo and small law firm marketplace. The clients that are turning away from law firms are clients that law firms need and who they previously served in an earlier, pre-Internet era.
6. eLawyering Applications are Not Just Tools.
It is not accurate to see state that eLawyering applications are just "tools". In fact they are can be disruptive of the typical law firm business model. If a consumer can get the result that they want by using a Internet-based legal solution, or "digital legal application" at a fraction of the cost of using an attorney, many will opt for that "good enough" solution. What is important to the consumer, is the legal result, not the fact that they have to go to an attorney to get it.
7. A New Generation of Clients is Coming Who Don’t Like to Talk on the Phone or Shake Hands With Their Lawyers.
It’s is true that many clients are not interested in working with their lawyers online, but we think that as a connected generation comes of age and they have legal problems that they will prefer to deal with their lawyers online and prefer to text rather than even talk on the telephone, much less meet with their attorney face-to-face, unless it is unavoidable. For facts to support this assertion, see books like New Rules of Engagement: Understanding on How to Connect With Generation Y. and the work of Christine Hassler.
In a study conducted last year by YouGov, a UK-based research and opinion firm, on consumer preferences for legal services, one of the conclusions was that:
"34% of respondents said they would be more likely to choose a law firm that offered the convenience of online access to legal documents over one that had no online capability; 22% disagreed and 37% neither agreed nor disagreed."
Younger males were the most likely to choose a law firm with online services and access: 44% of 25-to-39 year-old males (and 40% of such women), along with 40% of 16-to-24 year-old males, would choose a law firm offering online access to documents over another law firm."
There is obviously a generational shift happening. As a younger generation matures to the age where they have legal problems, their desire to deal with lawyers online becomes a requirement, not a preference.
Summary
These are serious issues for the legal profession. The American Bar Association Legal Technology Resource Center reported last year in one of its technology surveys of the legal profession that only 52% of solo practitioners have a web site. That means that almost half of solo practitioners don’t even have a web site. Is it that these practitioners are making so much money that they don’t have to even have a presence on the web? Or are we as a profession so out of touch with contemporary trends, that we will have to race even faster to catch up?
So where are we on this spectrum of evolution? Are we still stuck in Web 1.0 with brochure web sites, or are we evolving to interactive web sites that connect with clients who will want to work with their lawyers online or are we still stuck in Internet circa 2002?
Let’s expand this discussion, so that lawyers, particularly solos and small law firms, can figure out how to utilize these new technologies to expand and sustain their law practices in an environment that will become increasing competitive.
Disruptive web legal services such as AttorneyFee.com, Law Pivot, LegalZoom, are not going away. They will expand and proliferate. The "new normal" is here.
Google+ Goes Live To Everyone
20
Sep
Google’s new attempt at a social network is now open to the general Google user community, and from Google’s perspective, anyone who would like to join that community. The service started some three months ago and attracted interest from the…
Contemplating “RIP AALL” Ahead of Boston 2012: Muster of the Minutemen (and Minutewomen)
31
Aug
As an organization of institutional buyers, AALL is on the verge of becoming irrelevant. Just follow the money. Look at where our major “legal professional service vendors” are spending their ad and meeting sponsorship dollars for marketing their wares. It…
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.
Bankruptcy Lawyers
18
Aug
Bankruptcy Lawyers – Let them bid on YOUR case to get your best price. Free find a bankruptcy lawyer service.
Resources and Help filing chapter 7 bankruptcy.
