Change my name after marriage? How do I do it, do I have to, and what’s the easiest way? Here’s what you need
to know about your married name and legal options. What is necessary in YOUR state?
Posts Tagged ‘change’
Name Change After Divorce
16
Oct
Name change after divorce can be easy. It can be emotionally healing and financially benificial – or not.
Name change for kids. Legal name change kits – What’s necessary in your state?
LSAC Working to Audit LSAT and GPA Statistics Provided By Law Schools
11
Oct
One the heels of my post yesterday, Senator Boxer Calls Out ABA On Jobs Data And Scholarships, comes news that the LSAC has had a change of heart and will now audit LSAT and GPA scores reported annually by law…
Another Disruption: AttorneyFee.com
21
Sep
The legal profession has witnessed the rise of new players that are disruptive of existing patterns of law practice.
First came LegalZoom, AVVO, TotalAttorneys, Rocketlawyer, MyLawyer (our company), and Law Pivot, disrupters that are having an impact on the way legal services are identified and delivered to the broad middle class.
Now comes AttorneyFee.com that holds promise of making legal fees more transparent.
For many years I have been critical of the fact that lawyers charge widely differing legal fees for the same work. In a study I was involved at the University of Maryland Law school some years ago, we discovered that for simple family law actions, such as a no-fault divorce, lawyers would charge any where from $500.00 to $3,000.00 for essentially the same work. This variation in legal fees for the same work tasks is another cause of the distrust that the average consumer has of the legal profession.
AttorneyFee.com is a welcome development for law firms that are already experimenting with fixed fee legal services delivered online. Law firms that are using online delivery technology will in fact have a competitive advantage over law firms that use higher cost productive methods. Sites like AttorneyFee.com expand the reach of these firms by giving them another channel to advertise their fee information to consumers.
I registered my Maryland virtual law firm at AttorneyFee.com yesterday. I found the interface to be clean and simple and the registration process easy.
My only criticism was that there was no field to display a law firm’s web address — only an email address and a telephone number. This means that an interested prospect will have to contact the law firm to get more information by phone or email, without the opportunity of easily clicking through to the law firm’s web site.
In my case, the page describing the pricing of my services does not provide enough information to the consumer about the scope of my services. There is no place to indicate that we offer “limited legal services” for pro se parties exclusively. For a new company that prides itself on transparency, this feature is less than transparent.
Moreover, when my firm comes up, a form also pops up that enables the prospect to ask for a free consultation. Except in our case, we don’t provide free consultations. Since we sell a legal advice service by the question for a modest flat fee, offering a “free consultation” from professionals like Alex Spiro is not consistent with our business model.
When I asked Robert Komaiko, one of the co-founders of AttorneyFee about these issues, he said they have other features planned for the site but they felt it was important to launch the site, get feedback, learn, and revise. As a believer in the lean startup method of starting a company, which is now all the rage in Silicon Valley, I agreed with Robert that it was important to get the concept launched and to work out the kinks later. There is certainly enough benefits and features already built into the site to see if this concept gets any traction. Better to launch the service , get feedback, and revise, as opposed to waiting for a year, adding every feature imaginable, and then discovering that consumers have no interest in the service.
AttorneyFee using a proprietary search technology,has already listed the prices that over 20,000 law firms are charging on their web sites. The company plans to have over 70,000 law firm sites indexed within a relatively short period of time. This information alone will provide a useful consumer resource for comparing fees charged by law firms for similar tasks.
Some lawyers are bound to be critical of this web service as it is another indication of the commercialization of the legal profession but as Beibei Que, the other co-founder of AttorneyFee, and its CEO, told me:
We have all known that this moment was coming for a long time. The profession can no longer limp along with one foot in the for-profit economy and another in a quasi-clergy role. If we wish to reap the benefits of the for-profit economy, we must be prepared to comport ourselves like private market actors, and this means not retreating from conversations about price or concealing them behind closed doors.
AttorneyFee.com is a welcome addition to the family of new disrupters shaking the legal profession to its core.
Will the PACER Fee Increase Change Your Research Habits?
19
Sep
Erika Wayne is conducting a quick survey on Legal Research Plus here. [JH]
The WestSearch Straitjacket For Legal Research – Thinking Beyond The Keyword: Part II
14
Sep
In Part 1, we examined evidence for two kinds of limitations on WestSearch’s effectiveness. Ron Wheeler has studied limitations related to how WestSearch ranks documents for importance and relevance. (Does WestlawNext Really Change Everything?, 103 Law Libr. J. 359 (2011))…
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.
PLL-SIS Change as Action Summit "Held in Conjunction" with Philly 2011: With a "Thank You" to the Sponsors — LexisNexis, Wolters Kluwer, Priory Solutions, BNA, and Law 360
02
Jun
It’s time to remind all AALL members who may be attending Philly 2011that in this cranky old law librarian-blogger’s opinion, the damn best program will be presented before the regular sessions of Cream Cheese, Cheesesteak or Karaoke, namely the PLL-SIS…
