Is it cost effective to pay more to keep it off your record? ANSWER: Generally yes. Insurance companies routinely check their client’s records and an
Posts Tagged ‘client’
Is It Worth The Extra Money It Costs For A Ticket Amendment?
29
Jan
Is it cost effective to pay more to keep it off your record? ANSWER: Generally yes. Insurance companies routinely check their client’s records and an
What is a Defense Attorney’s Job? Defend At Any Cost, Confuse Witnesses If Possible
17
Dec
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The latest edition of the ABA’s Law Practice Today webzine has good articles on elawyering and virtual practice and a really innovative piece by Marc Laurtisen titled, Dancing in the Cloud, and an introduction to the elawyering concept by Stephanie Kimbro — Getting Started With eLawyering).
I also wrote a short article on Document Assembly Over the Internet , which as readers of this Blog will know is an old theme for me.
For our latest analysis on what is working in the virtual law firm space, download our White Paper on Virtual Law Practice: Success Factors.
How Do Lawyer Bidding Sites Work?
30
Nov
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Recently several Web sites have emerged that enable consumers to bid for legal services. Examples include: ExpertBids and Shpoonkle. (Don’t ask me how to pronounce it). They all work pretty much the same way.
You submit a description of your project or the service you want, your location and your estimated budget. You create a secure account with a user name and password. Your service request is then posted or published to a lawyers who have registered for the service so they can bid on your work. When a lawyer bids for your work, you receive an email (each bid includes a rate, a description, and the lawyer’s profile, rating and client reviews). When the lawyer bids, whether bid by the hour or fixed price, you receive an email which includes a rate, a description, and the lawyer’s profile, rating and client reviews. The process gives you options and a basis for comparing how different lawyer;s will submit bids and pricing for similar work.
The process is always free to the potential client. Once you are connected to a lawyer you can continue your conversation either online or off-line. The sites enable you to communicate with the lawyer online directly, but often you don’t get any free legal advice or any legal service until you accept a retainer agreement and the lawyer/client relationship is established.
For law firms that have learned how to offer legal services for common legal matters for a fixed fee, these bidding sites could be another channel to the consumer and potential clients. These law firms, often virtual law firms, are low-cost producers of legal services, and can out bid more traditional legal firms without sacrificing quality or their profit margins.
Many of these law firms offer what are called, “limited legal services”, which enable these law firms to offer a low cost solution to consumers, but often consumers have no understanding of this concept. See for example the law firms listed in the MyLawyer.com Directory of Virtual Law Firms. We think that the bidding sites should have articles and information on their web sites describing the “limited legal service” concept as this would be way to educate consumers about another way to cost effectively buy legal services.
A problem that we see with the bidding sites that we reviewed is that there is no easy for the consumer to describe that they want “limited legal services“, as distinguished from traditional legal services. There are options for bidding by the hour, or by the project, but no option for limiting the scope of representation. “Unbundling legal services“, is a relatively new idea, but many states (more than 35) have already passed amendments to their Professional Rules of Responsibility that enable law firms to offer “limited legal services” as long as the retainer clearly defines the scope of representation.
I think this is a critical gap in the way the operators of these site understand how middle class consumers want to purchase legal services. I also think that there is likely to be a disconnect between what the consumer bids for a service, and what they law firm delivers for the bid price. Without a clear specification of the scope of services, there is bound to be miscommunication and confusion.
It is too early to predict whether these “bidding sites” will survive. In the “dot-com boom and bust” era, there were several experiments with lawyer bidding, but all the sites failed because they could not generate enough volume to support their overhead structure.
Susan Cartier Liebel, the President of Solo Practice University has written a good blog post analyzing these sites, that is worth reviewing by consumers who are interested in this approach to securing legal services.
What Does A Defense Attorney Actually Do For A Client?
24
Oct
Wondering what a Defense Attorney actually does? Evaluates evidence, prepares a case for trial, and goes to court for the Defendant. Continue reading
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.
Am I anti-semitic?
10
Sep
August 11, 2006
People have often asked me this question. They say “Look what the Jews did to you, Judge Arnold Gold put you in prison the day before you had to appear in court to start defending yourself in the cases brought by Lynn and Nicolette, then kicked you out of your house to sell it and pay for the fees of opposing counsel (who sued you in the first place) who were 1. your wife’s divorce designer attorney Emily Shappell Edelman (Jewish), whose killer tactics no doubt helped kill her client, and 2. Nicolette Hannah’s vicious attorney (Jewish), James R. Eliaser, whose killer tactics deprived a small boy of his father, who, I discovered too late, concealed the fact that he used to be an employee of the judge’s law firm Pachter & Gold. By granting these attorneys’ wishes, the judge effectively created the loss of my small son to me and me to him, and the exodus of the entire Clark family, less me, to the East Coast, and the fracture of the Redgrave brand.
Then there was Family Court Supervising Judge Aviva Bobb, who I believe is Jewish, who backed Gold up, kept awarding new fees to Eliaser, and then refused to let me buy my guest house so that I could continue to live in Topanga, keep my dogs, and not store my belongings and not live in a trailer. Just a reminder here of my expectations that celebrity pandering could not happen in Hollywood’s hallowed halls of justice since we read this on their
An Appeal to the Second Circuit got me a negative review from Justice Miriam Vogel, also Jewish.
An Appeal to the Supreme Court, after I had written to Chief Justice Ronald George, who I believe is also Jewish, was turned down.
And the media, which wouldn’t stop, appeared to get more fodder from the site of Hebrew University, where one of their professors made me her target for an absurd made up story setting out to prove her totally inapposite use of me in a legal paper. Her name was Hila Keren, and to this day, I have received no response from her.
And then of course, there was Lew Wasserman, the top Jew in Hollywood, from the old House Calls breast feeding case.
Well, my answer to this all-important question is that far from being anti-semitic, I am, perhaps surprisingly, PRO-Semitic, and HUGELY ENVIOUS of them.
I have always respected the culture of the Jews, and their education, which certainly exceeds mine. I look up to them, and their low numbers among the world’s population has always astonished me. Always an outsider, I even believe I have the soul of a Jew. I have made a point of making close friends with Jewish people. (In fact, more than one of my girlfriends was Jewish.)
I WANT TO BECOME JEWISH, so that I could be completely like them, recognizably the same, but without their religious beliefs, a secular Jew.
I believe that there is the APPEARANCE of networking and mutual backscratching taking place. Of course, business is all about mutual backscratching, nothing wrong with that, but if I am right, I want to be a part of THAT network.
It is absolutely no coincidence that I believe I could then enter the places where Jewish mingling and socializing take place. Clubs, temples, agents’ offices and so forth, where right now I would be unwelcome and refused entry. Perhaps because I am no longer attached to a celebrity.
It was Adolph Zukor, that originator of things Hollywood, founder of Paramount Pictures, who ages ago gave this deathless advice to newcomers to the Hollywood scene: “Talk British but think Yiddish!” That was right up my tree.
To this end, I have entertained the thought of taking a hint from Careen Johnson, a struggling black bricklayer and funeral parlor assistant who, dying to become successful as an actress, changed her name to Whoopee Goldberg. She was smart, it got her an Emmy, an Oscar, a Tony and a Grammy. And of course she had the great talent to back it up.
Now me, I could change my name to Clarkstein or Clarkberg, but would it help? Not bloody likely! If I became a Jew aspiring to become successful as an actor or a celebrity, I would surely be advised to change it back to Clark.
Don’t think so? Look at Emmanuel Goldenberg, Muni Weisenfreund, Julius Garfinkle, David Kaminsky, Bernard Schwartz, Jacob Cohen, Joyce Frankenberg, Aaron Chwatt and Ephraim Goldberg. They changed their monikers to Edward G. Robinson, Paul Muni, John Garfield, Danny Kaye, Tony Curtis, Rodney Dangerfield, Jane Seymour, Red Buttons and Frank Gehry respectively. And then there was Larry King (interesting choice, but what is wrong with “Larry Zeiger Live”?)
No, I’m afraid that that can only be my fantasy.
But getting back to the law, I did make a point of hiring Jewish lawyers, who always keep their original names perhaps as a badge of office, oh, and a Jewish press agent, thinking that would help.
The first to defend me was Melvin S. Goldsman, and Marci Levine, Esqs. of Freid & Goldsman, their names giving them away.
I fired them when I found that my Mel allowed his Jewish adversary to write a time sensitive stipulation to Nicolette that could have led to the cessation of hostilities, didn’t read it because he was out of the office and there’s no money in ceased hostilities, and told his secretary to tell me to sign it, which I did. Boy, was I green at the beginning. Perhaps they were old friends. Perhaps they performed regularly for the Beverly Hills Bar Association.
My next was Steve Mindell, Esq. I fired him because he was about as aggressive as my little son’s kindergarten teacher. When I asked him to get Lynn to open a joint bank account with me so that she could pay her share of the upkeep of our joint property during the three years of my lone occupation, he simply told me she wouldn’t agree. When I asked him to get our joint stock portfolo released from the freeze put on it at the height of the dotcom bubble so we could cash out, again, he wouldn’t do it. It would have meant getting a court order, and he wouldn’t go to court for it. Nothing appeared to be happening, other than his endless bills.
So then I hired noted hit man Mike Kelly, Esq., a referral from a Topanga millionaire divorcee lady friend. Of course, he’s Irish, (the worst kind, I hear someone shout – but that’s a joke). I fired him after stretched-out months when he alleged I was trying to get Nicolette evicted from her little house by not paying the property taxes, so that it would be sold by the taxing authorities. He didn’t read the 1-page notice, which had been sent over to him by her tricky attorney Eliaser, who I’m sure had read it. It wasn’t for me, it belonged to another John Clark, on a rundown foreclosing property in South Central Los Angeles!
My last lawyer (apart from my Appeal lawyers, also Jewish) was a Cy Schaffer (also a Jew), to whom I paid $50,000. In court, Judge Gold said he had made an order that I was not to use funds from a tax refund to pay this lawyer, and he should immediately refund it to me. Schaffer protested. Gold hunted for his order, then said he couldn’t find it, and told him he could keep the money. Of course. Naturally.
So now I was out of lawyers because I got sick of their dishonesty and stopped believing in them. More important, I’d lost six hundred thousand dollars to them, and had no more money. That’s how I came to represent myself in court, and had to learn what it is to be a PRO SE.
Having wised up, my first appearance before Judge Gold was over the unread-by-my-attorney property tax inquiry. There was Eliaser, sputtering to the judge that I was trying to get his client evicted. I showed the court the 1-page notice showing it didn’t belong to me. Judge Gold just smiled, and thanked me for being smart enough to catch it. I asked for a sanction against Eliaser for wasting the court’s time. Not granted. Of course. Naturally.
As for my Jewish press agent, a gentleman named Michael Levine, a self-styled media expert, I hired him to give me advice on handling the media now that I was suing Larry Zeiger -sorry, King. I got no advice at all; he refused to visit me at my house, but I did find that my money, about thirteen thousand dollars, went towards starting his new wannabe Drudge Report, aimed at bringing down the likes of Mel Gibson and Michael Jackson and maybe me and others who APPEAR to be breaking his moral code (chuckle chuckle). Networking again, is my opinion. But unlike Red Buttons, I did get a dinner, several actually. It wasn’t until after I had dropped him that I discovered that he used to be married to King’s current wife by whom he had a child. I think he should have told me about that before I paid him a penny.
So thanks, Arnold Gold, but no thanks. However did you get your robe of office? Must be quite a story, which I tell if you click here, and then scroll down a bit.
If I ever get as drunk as Mel Gibson, I’m told that I tend to act out my Jewish fantasy while singing the freedom chorus of the Hebrew slaves in their banishment. My God, the middle one looks like HIM!
But when I sober up, I get to thinking more about what “they” did to me. Here I am, my possessions lost or stolen, alienated by my kids and my family (I face back East to see them), removed from my house and my wealth by quasi-military enforcers, and exiled from Topanga, my Homeland. Then these words come to me.
As long as deep in the heart,
The soul of a Jew yearns,
. . . . . . . . . .
Our hope is not yet lost.
And Barbra comes to my rescue in song.
No Record of Your Citation at Traffic Court? Get Proof You Were There.
21
Aug
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