eLawyering Blog : Online Legal Services : DirectLaw : Document Automation, Web-Enabled Document Assembly, Virtual Lawyering

Wizilegal,  a relatively new company based in San Diego is offering a virtual law firm service to solos and small law firms. The company recently relaunched its web site with a focus on enabling law firms to compete against LegalZoom.  Like DirectLaw, Wizilegal offers web-enabled document automation that enables law firms to offer  legal documents and forms through a law  firm's web site. It is good to see new competition come into this market space  because it is healthy sign that the "virtual law firm" concept is receiving wider acceptance among solos and small law firms.

We have previously defined the "virtual law firm" as a law firm that has a secure "client portal" integrated with its web site that is accessible by a client only with the use of a secure user name and password. From this "client portal", the  law firm is able to offer various legal services online.

A number of companies have emerged during the past two years that offer a "client portal" that can be branded with the law firm's logo and integrated seamlessly with the law firm's web site. Typically, the client portal is provided as a SaaS on a subscription basis. These companies include DirectLaw, Total Attorney's Virtual Law Office Technology, Clio's Web-based Practice Management Software, and now Wizilegal. These companies are to be distinguished from web-based practice management software companies like RocketMatter , that offer just "back-office" practice management tools, but no "client portal." application.

Here is a quick summary of key features of the Wizilegal offering:

• A web-enabled document authoring solution that is claimed to be very easy to use. (But no pre-automated legal documents or forms are included in their package). The document automaton function incorporates intelligent rule-based document assembly and can be applied to both text documents and .PDF forms. Interactive questionnaires appear within the web browser. I have not worked with this system, so I can't tell how easy it is to build out complex documents and forms. We welcome comments from users of Wizilegal about ease of use of the authoring system.
   
• The capability of offering document downloads and reviews;
   
• Integrated payment processing through PayPal. (but not through MC, VISA, or American Express);
   
• The capacity to create a law-firm branded client portal;
   
• Law firms can set up their own system almost immediately using the the company's web tools.
   
• Pricing is based on a $49.00 set up fee, plus $65.00 a month with no long term contract. In addition for every  document created by a client there is a $4.00 per document charge. There is no document charge for documents created internally, but for each administrative log-on there is a separate $55.00 administrative fee.
  

As competition increases in the virtual law firm provider space, it will be interesting to see how much market share Wizilegal will be able to capture with its approach. It will also be interesting to see whether a new cadre of web-enabled "virtual law firms" offering a true legal services  will be able to have an impact on LegalZoom's growth rate. With  LegalZoom's superior capital resources and national branding power, it may be hard for individual law firms operating online to capture mind share. Out of date ethical rules that govern the legal profession don't help the competitive position of law firms when they go up against new non-law firm players like LegalZoom. So the playing field is not level and the legal profession operates from a disadvantage.

It doesn't help when Robert Shapiro of OJ fame, is proclaiming every few hours on many cableTV channels that "The Law  is on Your SIde". What does that mean anyway?

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The Kre8tive Law Group, managed by Solicitor Andrea Riccio in Calgary, Alberta, has become Canada's first virtual law firm using DirectLaw's virtual law firm platform. The firm offers "unbundled legal services" to both individual and small business clients.

Clients can:

• buy completed legal documents together with legal advice
• pay for legal advice at a fixed price
  
• communicate with a lawyer on a secure basis
• upload documents received from other parties for our review
• archive copies of their completed documents

Solicitor Riccio said that he thought that it was important to provide a virtual law firm presence for web savvy clients and clients who wanted to work with their law firm over the Internet.  Riccio said that "our fixed price approach is appealing to clients who want to be able to control their legal expenses."

Kre8tive Law Group was founded in 1994. Andrea was admitted to the Ontario Bar in 1990 and practiced for a Bay Street firm in Toronto, Canada, working primarily on commercial real estate transactions, eventually becoming a partner of the firm. He was called to the Alberta Bar in 1994 and gained extensive experience in a broad range of corporate and commercial matters through his association with a local Calgary firm. His belief that "better people make better lawyers" led him to found Riccio Law. He also provides pro bono legal services to numerous non-profit organizations including the Italian-Canadian community at a local, regional and national level. He previously served as a national director of the National Congress of Italian-Canadians Foundation and President of the Calgary Italian Club.

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It seems like LegalZoom's practices are finally catching up with it. The company is being sued in Missouri on the grounds of unauthorized practice of law and the plaintiff's are requesting class certification. To give an example of how popular LegalZoom's services have become, LegalZoom in its petition for removal to Federal court claims that it has served over 14,000 Missouri residents in a five year period, generating over $5,000.000 in sales. Missouri is a relatively small state, so you can get some idea of what kind of business LegalZoom is doing nationwide. No wonder the legal profession is getting nervous and starting to pay attention to this disruptive player in the legal industry.

A good discussion of the case can be found on the IPWatchdog Blog in an article by the Blog's Founder Gene Quinn.

Click here for a copy of the Missouri Complaint,  LegalZoom's petition for removal to Federal court, and a copy of a letter from the North Carolina Bar requesting that LegalZoom Cease and Desist from operating within North Carolina because it is violating North Carolina's UPL statute when it prepares incorporation papers.

In its defense, LegalZoom in its removal petition,  claims that it is:

" a company whose principal business consists of providing an
online platform for customers to prepare their own legal documents. Customers choose a
product or service suitable to their needs and input data into a questionnaire. Where applicable,
the LegalZoom platform then generates a document using the product and data provided by the
customer."

It this were the case, LegalZoom would be functioning only as a "scrivener" transcribing the client's information into a form. It is well established in some states, including California, where LegalZoom is based, and also Florida for example, that non-lawyers, often called "legal technicians" can help consumers prepare legal documents, as long as they don't give legal advice.

The question of whether LegalZoom's  staff do more than they say, and actually provide legal advice, even if it is limited legal advice, is a question of fact to be determined. It  would be interesting to see what the discovery process turns up and what the  LegalZoom, "platform" actually does and how it works.

For comparison, We the People, a retail chain of 35  "Legal Document Preparation stores  operating in six states, operates under the same principles. Customers complete paper questionnaires which are faxed to a central processing center where a technician simply inserts the client's data into a desktop document assembly program which generates a form. (This is  the same process that many lawyer's use, except lawyers provide legal advice and analysis).  This document preparation process is essentially the same as LegalZoom's except that it takes place off the Internet through a network of retail stores. We the People has been attacked by the Bar in several states for UPL, but the company has worked hard to assure bar authorities that its staff and franchisees don't provide  legal advice.

In theory, We the People, stores are able to reach a market of customers that do not have Internet access and prefer to deal with a human being directly. This market base is likely to have even lower incomes, and ignored by  both attorneys as a target market, and have too much income to qualify for legal aid.  Ironically, however, the We the People pricing is even higher than the LegalZoom pricing, probably because of the cost of maintaining a  retail location. Yet the remaining We the People stores, ( down from a high of 140 stores), seem to be sustainable, if not thriving.

Both companies provide a needed service in the sense that they provide an alternative to consumers who are willing to invest their own time and resources to make sure that the forms offered are the correct forms for their particular situation. Neither company can advise a consumer about what form they should use for their situation, as that would be a form of legal advice. Consumers may be taking a risk when they buy from a self-help document preparation forms company, but it seems this is a risk that consumers are willing to take to avoid what are perceived by many as high legal fees for the same  transaction. For these consumers, what they get is a "good enough" result at a price they can afford.

The other reality is that it is deceptive for LegalZoom and We the People , to claim that using their services will save hundreds or thousands of dollars in legal fees, when two very different category of services are being compared: 
 

• one a legal information service;
• and the other a true legal service from a licensed attorney.
  
  The content of the services are fundamentally different and to compare the services to each other is like comparing "apples' and " oranges". 
  
  Sometimes you get the same legal result when you use a document preparation service, but often you don't.  Apart from UPL issues, it seems to me that this is a misrepresentation in advertising and these claims should receive closer scrutiny from state consumer protection agencies. (Although I am sure that many of LegalZoom's satisfied customers would say that they don't need any protection).

Both companies demonstrate the principle that you can solve certain legal problems by having access to "legal information." Legal information by itself is a problem solver for many consumers, and the access to legal information and legal forms on the Internet, has simply accelerated this trend at a much faster rate in the last five years than the self-help law book industry has been able to accomplish in 30-35 years of its existence. This means that lawyers will have to do more to demonstrate their value to the consumer, particularly solos and smaller law firms that serve the broad middle class.

A better solution for consumers, as we have advocated in these pages, is for attorneys to offer legal forms bundled with legal advice at an affordable price, perhaps slightly higher than LegalZoom, but offering much greater value, over the Internet. This is often called. "unbundled legal services," enabling a consumer to purchase just the legal services they need, and no more.

Using virtual law firm technology, like DirectLaw's virtual law firm platform, lawyers can be even more efficient that the LegalZoom or We the People models, because the entire document assembly process is software driven creating a legal document instantly from the user's input, ready for the lawyers further review, drafting, and advice-giving. The increased productivity that results from a web-enabled document automation process enables the lawyer to offer a very price competitive service that in fact offers more value. The value of each sale is lower, from the attorney's point of view, but volume can be much higher if effectively marketed. (Neither LegalZoom nor We the People have such a technology in place. No wonder there prices are so high for what you get!).

As long as the legal document preparers don't give legal advice, they should be able to coexist with the legal profession, for certain kinds of common legal transactions, but not all.

But lawyers will have to work harder to provide their value and start offering true legal services online over the Internet. Driving non-lawyer legal document preparers out of business on UPL grounds is not an answer. At the end of the day prosecution efforts, will seem to the consuming public as just another attempt by the legal profession to maintain high legal fees for common transactions, while avoiding the cost of innovation.
 

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When we designed the DirectLaw web service we relied on theories developed by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in their best selling book Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant .

Our concept is that a technology platform that enables law firms to offer limited legal services over the Internet could tap into the "latent markets" for legal services.

We also used this analytical approach to develop our online non-lawyer document preparation service approach and our approach to offering automated legal forms over the Internet which are also designed to serve the "latent market for legal services". LegalZoom is demonstrating that there is a huge latent market that is satisfied with a "good enough" solution.

Nicole Garton-Jones, a lawyer based in Vancouver, Canada, and a user of our DirectLaw platform has posted a detailed analysis of how her law firm development strategy is an example of Blue Ocean Strategy in action. See her blog post on this subject. Its worth reading.
 

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DirectLaw is pleased to announce the opening of a new virtual law practice by Tim Ferraris in Knoxville, Tennessee.   The firm will provide services in the areas of business, family and divorce, estate planning, landlord/tenant, and name changes over the Internet throughout the state of Tennessee.

Tim founded Ferraris Law Group and its unique On-Line Office with the mission of providing convenient and cost-effective legal services to people throughout Tennessee. Tim is passionate about being his clients' trusted legal advisor throughout their lives.

A resident of Knoxville since 1984, Tim obtained a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Tennessee and graduated with high honors from the U.T. College of Law.

In addition to his law practice, Tim serves as Director of "Hit the Road, Leukemia," an annual event that raises funds to benefit blood cancer research efforts.

The online service allows the firm to provide cost-effective legal services so that everyone in the state can have access to affordable legal services.

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The Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association is sponsoring a Teleconference on the The Virtual Law Firm: Benefits, Costs, and Ethical Pitfalls to Avoid, on Thursday, December 17, 2009 between 1:00 P.M. and 2:30 P.M.

The program is a Live Audio Webcast with PowerPoint support.

I am participating in the program, together with Stephanie Kimbro of KimbroLaw Services and Marc Lauritsen, President, Capstone Practice, and Co-Chair, eLawyering Task Force, ABA Law Practicement Section .You can register online.

 

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DirectLaw is pleased to announce the opening of a new virtual law practice by Montreuil & Associates in Macon, Georgia.   The firm will provide services in the areas of business, family and divorce, estate planning, landlord/tenant, and name changes over the Internet throughout the state of Georgia.

The firm provides both traditional legal services and an online legal solution platform to serve new and existing clients. The online service allows the firm to provide cost-effective legal services so that everyone in the state can have access to affordable legal services. Ms. Montreuil says that she is committed to the idea of using the Internet to providing increased access to the legal system.

Renay Bloom Montreuil has an undergraduate degree, magna cum laude, from Youngstown State University and a law degree from Mercer University School of Law. Renay has been a Pro Bono Volunteer for Georgia Legal Services and has worked with Life support as a mentor for woman and youth.  She is licensed to practice law in Georgia and Florida.

For more information see website.

 

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The eLawyering Task Force,  which is part of the Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association has been developing a recommended set of minimum requirements for law firms delivering legal services online.  The draft that has been published is a working draft and we are soliciting comments as we move towards a final document. The draft document can be downloaded here.

The ABA does not have a comment facility on their web site, but comments can be contributed on this blog, well as a discussion group  that has been set up on LinkedIn called Virtual Lawyering.

Any comments that are submitted will be circulated among members of the Task Force.

Disclosure: I am Co-Chair of the eLawyering Task Force

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 DirectLaw is pleased to announce the launching of SlatterLaw its third virtual law firm in the State of Georgia. SlatterLaw will provide online legal services to small businesses and individuals throughout Georgia.

Kerry Slatter founded the law firm with the goal of providing convenient and cost-effective legal services to small business owners and individuals across the state of Georgia. In addition to small business legal services, the Slatter Law Firm also provides counsel in various other areas, including estate planning, corporate law, and employment law.

From the web site:

 "Slatter Law provides the following core values for its clients:

• Customer Service – Provide value and legal solutions to exceed client’s expectations.
• Cost Efficiency – Provide cost efficiencies to enable clients to obtain more value from their legal budgets.
• Responsiveness – Limit attorney workload and the number of clients. The motivation to build long term relationships with clients drives this goal.
• Convenience – Utilize excellent customer services and technology to provide legal services in a convenient manner for the client (via secure online website client space, by email or by phone as needed).
• Innovation – Promote innovation for all aspects of client legal services, including the use of cutting edge technology, resources, and fixed fee arrangements."

Mr. Slatter has an undergraduate degree from Morehouse College and a law degree from State University of New York at Buffalo School of Law and is licensed to practice in Georgia.

 

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We are pleased to announce the launch of the law firm of Pfau and Associates that will provide online Estate Planning services to Nevada residents. This is the first DirectLaw law firm in the State of Nevada.

Pfau and Associates concentrates solely on the areas of estate planning and probate to ensure the highest quality of legal representation. The firm offers both online digital estate planning solutions and in-office services to provide for the client’s estate planning needs. Among the online offerings are simple living wills and trusts, durable powers of attorney, and advance healthcare directives.

Matt Pfau says that his philosophy is, “We make sure that we are always available to our clients for any type of support that they need. Since the choices that you will make are deeply personal, we will provide you with individualized, one-on-one attention"

Matthew Pfau has an undergraduate degree from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and his law degree from Wittier Law School. Matthew is admitted to practice before all courts in the State of California and Nevada.  He is also admitted to practice before the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.  For more information visit his website.

 

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The Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association awards the James I Keane Memorial Award in Excellence in eLawyering, annually at the ABA TechShow in Chicago. Nominations are now open for the Award to be in March, 2010. Candidates can self-nominate. The Award Requirements can be found here. The nomination form can be found on-line here.

Here is a brief summary of the Award criteria:

• The project or law firm must demonstrate the use of the Internet to deliver legal services.
• It must be unique. It should be an on-line legal service that has never been done before, or not quite this way before.
• Absence of precedent - Never been done or done quite this way before.
• There should be some measurable outcome that would indicate that the innovation is accomplishing what it was intended to do.
• Action must have taken place no more than three years prior to this entry, and the legal service must be operating for at least one year prior to submission of the Application.
• Additional consideration will be given to projects that focus on the delivery of legal services to individuals of moderate means.
• The nomination should describe how the service was developed, how it is managed, and how it has been evaluated.
• The nomination should describe how the service can be replicated by other law firms in terms of development costs, required technology, people requirements, and ongoing maintenance costs.

 

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On Friday, October 2nd, I presented at Vancouver’s Pacific Legal Technology Conference on the topic of Virtual Law Practice with Simon Chester of Heenan Blaikie and Nicole Garton-Jones of Heritage Law.

 

We discussed the two heads of the definition of virtual law practice:  practising law over the Internet through a secure online portal and practising law under one brand through satellite offices (which are often home offices).

 

Nicole is an early adopter who described her experience in managing Heritage Law, a paperless office where most staff work from home.  Some staff are located in places such as Victoria and the Sunshine Coast that are remote from Heritage Law’s central office in West Vancouver.  Heritage Law soon will be implementing DirectLaw through a separate business model called Heritage Law Online, subject to regulatory approval.

 

I analyzed Web-enabled virtual law practice using the Eliminate-Reduce-Raise-Create grid, which sets out a framework for contrasting innovative value propositions with conventional value propositions.  It comes from a book called Blue Ocean Strategy.  Among other things, Web-enabled virtual law practice eliminates the visit to the lawyer’s office, reduces cost and waste, raises a lawyer’s reach beyond his or her immediate geographical area, and creates a packaged solution.  I also discussed Chrissy Burns’ PhD thesis, entitled “Online Legal Services—A Revolution that Failed?.”  It is found at http://tinyurl.com/kvtden.

 

Simon discussed the regulatory issues involved in setting up a virtual law practice in Canada.   Canadian regulators have not addressed virtual law practice specifically but there are issues with regard to limited scope representation, preservation of data, and the client identification and verification rules.

 

Our PowerPoint slides from the presentation are located here:

 

http://www.pacificlegaltech.com/download/SSF2.pdf

 Reported by Darryl Mountain, President, Ontago, Inc.

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Virtual Law Office Technology, LLC, (VLOTech) based in North Carolina has been acquired by TotalAttorneys, a well-regarded law firm marketing and management services organization based in Chicago. VLOTech should do well and flourish under TotalAttorneys management umbrella, and with TotalAttorneys' financial backing, VLOTech will continue to be a major player in the emerging market for web technology that enables law firms to deliver legal services virtually. Stephanie Kimbro, the co-founder of VLOTech,  was the winner last year (2009) of the James Keane Award in Excellence in eLawyering, awarded by the Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association, for her work in designing and operating her virtual law firm in North Carolina, (which was the prototype for the VLOTech technology).

As many of our readers know, we have been a friendly competitor of VLOTech , through my company, DirectLaw,  a client-centered hosted web service for solos and small law firms , in the sense that the more vendors that are in this space, the less time it will take for these ideas to move beyond early adopters to capture the interest of the mainstream of the profession. My view is that the more competitors in this market space the better, as each will come up with their own unique innovation to respond to the differing needs that law firm's have as they migrate their practices to the web. Our experience is that it always takes longer than we can predict for these innovative ideas to catch the interest of the bulk of practicing lawyers.  Congratulations to Stephanie and her team and good luck with their new partner. Click here for more details.

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We have been observing the dip in employment of recent law school graduates and the number of lawyers being terminated from mid and large size law firms. We think this will result in a resurgence of start-ups of solo and small law practices, as traditional employment opportunities for lawyers dry up.

To help these lawyers get their law practices up and running with a virtual law firm component, DirectLaw, our company which offers a turnkey virtual law firm solution for solos and small law firms announced today a new discounted program for new lawyers during their first year of practice, and lawyers who are leaving their law firm employers to start up their own law firm. The program is described in detail here.

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There has been some recent blog comments [See: Carolyn Elefant 's Blog  [about  the meaning of Robert Capps article  in this month's WIRED Magazine, (September 2009) about the concept of "Good Enough",  "Good Enough" solutions, (when cheap and simple is just fine). , and my quote about how this concept applies to the legal profession.

When I was interviewed for the Wired Article, I didn't know the focus of the article, and I was simply reporting my experience in offering limited legal services to consumers for a fee they can afford. I wasn't saying at all that lawyer's should do less competent or less excellent work. Rather I was thinking about how legal transactional events between consumer and lawyer can be restructured to get to the "good enough result" that many consumers seem to want.

My best example is one that I participate in daily, and which I mentioned in previous blog post. Divorcing couples opt for a quick settlement, even if they don't get "every right" they are entitled to in the interest of reducing their legal fees and getting on with their lives.

Divorce lawyers can charge from $5,000 - $10,000 (low-end of fee schedule) for even a relatively simple divorce. case. The lawyers will say there are no simple divorce cases. But that is from the the viewpoint of the lawyer. From the consumer point of view, they have a choice to spend $5,000 for each counsel who is representing either party- or to take the money and use it to get on with their lives. The question is--  what is the ROI from the consumer's point of view?  Sometimes the investment of $5,000.00 in legal fees is worth it. ($5,000.00 is really a low end estimate). Consumers don't think so, or there would not be thousands of pro se litigants representing themselves in family court. Pro Se Representation is a good example of a restructuring of the lawyer/client relationship to get a "good enough result." The success of LegalZoom -  admittedly a service which is a very small step above a bare legal forms service is more evidence of consumer preferences.

So is the movement towards "limited legal services." Lawyers, mostly solos and small law firms, that think that otherwise and think that full service representation is the only way to go are not facing consumer reality. These lawyers are living in a dream world.

Consumers want solutions to their legal problems. If they can get legal solutions in a different form than a traditional legal service from an attorney that is "good enough" at much less cost, they will turn away from the legal profession and seek those alternatives if they get a result that satisfies their expectations. 

 

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The American Bar Association Journal has started a new Legal Rebels project to get lawyers thinking about how to change the legal profession. The Journal recognizes that the legal profession is undergoing structural change accelerated by the current recession, and that as the economy emerges from this recession, the landscape of the legal profession will be very different from the one that we have now know. 

Searching for new ways of practicing law, the Journal will profile 50 or so lawyers who are demonstrating new ways of serving clients by expanding their markets, delivering legal services in a different ways, or creating new styles of legal practice. The plan is to tell the stories of these lawyers through a variety of social media channels using text, pictures, audio and video.

A colleague of mine,  Jeffrey Hughes, was named today in the first group of profiles for his innovative and ground-breaking work in combining a law practice within the context of a coffee house under the Legal Grind brand, serving "legal counsel" and good coffee in a community setting. Legal Grind is an excellent example of delivering "unbundled" or "limited legal services" at prices that people can afford.

By the way, I was honored to also be included in this first group of profiles.

 

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The month's WIRED Magazine, (September 2009) has an interesting article on how the Internet is enabling "Good Enough" solutions, (when cheap and simple is just fine). I have maintained for a long time that often there is a certain amount of overkill when lawyers tackle a problem, when consumers really want a quick and reasonably priced result. Consumers will often sacrifice securing every "right" they have in order to save thousands of dollars in legal fees. I see this in the divorce area in my online practice all of the time. Often the divorcing parties want to get on with their life at the lowest possible cost. Rather than spend $15,000 in legal fees pursuing every right that the parties think they have, often the best solution is to use the funds that would have been spent on legal fees to invest in their individual futures. The present recession is accelerating these trend.

Lawyers are taught to represent a client "zealously". In fact they are required by the ethical codes of professional conduct to do so -- but at what price. Pursuing every legal angle results in prohibitive legal fees that the average consumer or small business can't afford. There must be a better way to practice law without breaking the bank.

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It has been a very busy summer at DirectLaw. We are constantly adding features to our DirectLaw Virtual Law Firm Platform. Sometimes new features are suggested by our growing network of DirectLaw law firms; often one of our staff gets a good idea and we push it out to the Platform to see what kind of response we get from consumers and our client law firms. The nature of a SaaS (Software as a Service) offering, like DirectLaw, is that we can can modify and enhance the platform at any time and all law firms in the network benefit immediately. Our clients don't  have to wait until "the next quarterly software release."

Here are some of the recently features that have been added to the DirectLaw Virtual Law Firm Platform:

June 17, 2009 - New virtual law firm platform for consumer bankruptcy attorneys released. Click here for more information.

July 13, 2009 -  DirectLaw Workspace™. brings the benefits of web-enabled document automation for clients who are not online by enabling law firms to use our web-enabled document automation system for regular office-based clients.  

July 29, 2009 - A new "collaboration" function that enables law firms to communicate and collaborate securely with their clients over the Internet. Click here for screenshot.

August 5, 2009 - We installed a new "billing" function that enables law firms to bill clients online for traditional legal services and supports online bill payment by clients through their MyLegalAffairs page. Click here for screenshot.

August 20, 2009 - Today we released a new user friendly design for the Legal Services Page ,  which is now available to all law firms in the DirectLaw network of law firms. Each legal service offered by the law firm now appears on a separate tab, with detailed explanations of the scope of the legal service. Legal services offered by the law firm can be added or deleted and the fees charged increased or decreased at any time by the individual law firm using the Attorney Dashboard - the Administrative area that the law firm uses to manage their virtual law firm platform.

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DirectLaw  has announced that the Law Office of Kyle Rhodes, based in Fort Worth, Texas has subscribed to DirectLaw's virtual law firm platform to enable the firm to offer legal services over the Internet to Texas residents. The firm focuses on offering Texas, Wills, Texas Trusts, and other asset protection documents for a fixed price, bundled with legal advice.

This law firm is not a pure virtual law firm as Attorney Rhodes maintains a downtown Ft. Worth office for clients who prefer to meet with him face-to-face. This is a good example of what I call, "click-and-mortal" - combining a virtual law practice with an off-line physical practice.  The market research that we have conducted suggests that the most effective implementation of the "virtual law firm" concept is as an add-on to a office-based practice, as this combines the best of both worlds.

For more information visit the website. The firm utilizes Rapidocs, DirectLaw's web-based document automation system to enable clients to complete online questionnaires which generate documents ready for lawyer review and editing.  This is DirectLaw's third law firm launch in the State of Texas. 

 

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The Rimon Law Group, based in Israel, is a virtual law firm of lawyers who are members of various U.S. bars but who live in Israel and offer their services to lawyers and corporate legal departments in the United States at fees which are less than half U.S.-based legal fees.  The Group claims that its attorneys all have experience in complex legal matters and can deliver legal services that are comparable to legal services offered by U.S. based lawyers for much less cost because of the different cost structures between the U.S. and Israel. I think this is an interesting example of a law firm building a virtual business based on identifying a niche market and maximizing a comparative economic advantage.

With today's connectivity, some  kinds of legal work no longer require face to face interaction. This  results in a kind of economic leverage based on geographic location. It is interesting to note that the Rimon Law Group has as its clients other law firms and corporate legal departments, rather than working with clients directly.

To take this model even further, one could envision a virtual law firm of attorneys who are members of various U.S. state bars, and who are active members of those bars, but serving clients directly by telephone and email, and using virtual tools that are now being developed that facilitate the delivery of online legal services directly to consumers. These attorneys, for various reasons may live in locations that are lower in cost, than our major metropolitan areas, such as downtown Chicago or New York, and and are able to translate lower costs into reduced fees. Such lawyers don't have to live in Israel. They could live where ever it is possible to leverage a lower cost of living into reduced legal fees particularly, for the same commodity transactions that traditional face-to-face lawyers, with dedicated expensive offices, charge out at a much higher rate.

After all, I operate a virtual law firm in Maryland, where I am an active member of the bar, from my home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. Not a bad life style if you make it work.

I predict we will see many more "virtual networks" of lawyers emerge in the coming decade, some based in the United States, and some based in other parts of the world, serving not only client law firms in the U.S., but U.S. consumers directly.

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Stephanie Kimbro, a solo practitioner who operates Kimbrolaw.com, a virtual law firm in North Carolina, has been selected as this year's winner of the James Keane Memorial Award for Excellence in eLawyering. This award is given annually by the eLawyering Task Force of the Law Practice Management Section of the American Bar Association, a group which was founded by Jim Keane an active and long-standing member of the ABA/LPM section who died tragically from lung cancer several years ago. I am the present Co-Chair with Marc Lauritsen.

Ms. Kimbro's law firm is a completely virtual law firm that serves individuals and small business over the Web. Our group concluded that Kimbrolaw.com  met the criteria for the Award perfectly as it demonstrates an innovative online model for delivering services to the broad middle class. Clients access their own individual web space where they can consult with their attorney, have their documents reviewed, and conduct other legal tasks -- all online.

The Award will be formally given to Ms. Kimbro at the American Bar Association's TECHSHOW on April 2, 2009, immediately before the key note speech by Richard Susskind, who will discuss his new book: The End of Lawyers: The Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services.

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EssentiaLegal, based in Atlanta, Georgia, and founded by Robert Arrington, Latif Oduolo-Owoo, & Michael Mason, three alumni from large law firm practices in Atlanta, is a new style law firm, part virtual and part physical that is designed to serve the broad middle class with unbundled legal services. The physical office is located in a shopping mall for easy access, but the virtual component is powered by our DirectLaw Service and enables the firm to serve clients throughout the state of Georgia. Clients can complete Questionnaires either on-line, or within the physical office, which results in the instant creation of the first draft of a document or form, ready for the lawyer's review and further modification. Clients have the option of meeting with an attorney at their offices or relating to the firm on purely virtual basis through the MyLegalAffairs application created within the web site by our DirectLaw Web Service. I believe that this "click and mortar" strategy will be ultimately more effective than a purely virtual strategy because clients have the option of face to face contact with their attorney. "Click and mortar" refers to a business model that has both on-line and off-line components.

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We are exhibiting our DirectLaw Web Service at LEGALTECH in New York on February 2-4, 2009. This show is one of the largest legal technology shows involving over 450 legal technology vendors which attract over 13,000 participants. The show is at the New York Hilton at 1335 Sixth Avenue. We are Booth #1621 on Level II.  If you are planning to attend, please stop by for a demonstration of our DIrectLaw Service or just to chat about new developments in the delivery of online legal services. We will be introducing the latest version of Rapidocs, known as Rapidocs 4.0, which is our web-enabled document automation solution that operates totally within the web browser without requiring the downloading of an Active X control, Java Applet, or other software application.  Come see legal documents assembled in real time within the web browser.

Richard Cohen, CO-CEO of EPOQ, our sister company in the London, will also be in attendance and is up to date on new developments to de-regulate the legal profession in the UK and EPOQ's new mylawyer network of web-enabled UK law firms that serve consumers.

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Bernardo Granwehr has launched Iowa's first virtual law firm focusing on family law matters and wills at IowaLawyerOnLine. The law firm offers legal forms bundled with legal advice for fixed price. For example, Iowa Divorce Forms with Minor Children sells for $299.00 and a Will sells for $100.00. The divorce services are designed for pro se itigants. The web site is powered by our DirectLaw hosted service which includes the Rapidocs web-enabled document automation capability. Cllients complete on-line questionnaires which generate completed forms and documents ready for attorney review. The use of a web-enabled document automation capability keeps the cost of document  creation to a minimum enabling the attorney to spend time giving legal advice and additional custom-drafting at still make a reasonable fee for the time expended.

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 Myrna Arroyo, a solo practitioner in located in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who specializes in estate planning, has launched a virtual law firm site that offers wills, living trusts, and other estate planning documents bundled with legal advice for a fixed price. The site is designed to provide an alernative to web sites like LegacyWriter, Do Your Own Will, LegalZoom, and Wills-Online, which offer legal forms without any legal advice. None of these legal form web sites offer documents that are specific to the State of Louisiana because of the particular nature of Louisiana law, which is based on the French Civil Code. Users are able to complete an on-line questionnaire which generates a completed legal document, ready for lawyer review, analysis, and further customization. Web enabled document automation enables saves time in document creation, enabling Ms. Arroyo to provide legal advice with the document for a fixed price. The site is powered by Epoq's, DirectLaw Web Service.

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There has been some recent press about the concept of the virtual law firm.  Craig Johnson has started a web-based law firm called Virtual Law Partners, P.C. The idea is to eliminate the overhead of a physical office or offices and to increase client collaboration over the Internet. I think this is a positive trend and indicates that lawyers are beginning to think about new ways of delivering legal services over the Internet. We would not call this firm, however, an instance of eLawyering, in the absence of digital applications that substitute for the labor of a lawyer -- such as web-enabled document automation. While these pioneering virtual law firms, may be saving the cost of a brick and mortar infrastructure resulting in lower fees to clients, their attorneys still work the same old way which is to bill for their time. Web-enabled digital applications on the other hand substitute for the time of an attorney and are truly disruptive as this time saving feature can result in more radical cost savings and translate into dramatically lower legal fees. We can envision that emerging virtual law firms will incorporate digital applications into their business models creating fixed price service packages for less complex legal services. At that time, these firms will morph into true providers of elawyering services.

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I recently ran across another virtual law firm in Texas called Texas Law on  Demand .
The law firm is a solo practice run by the Patricia McCartney. Legal forms are offered with legal advice for a fixed fee. Fixed fees are reasonable. A Texas no-fault divorce costs $349.00 and includes a 20 minute phone consultation. Other transactions includes wills, powers of attorney, leases, deeds, and Protective Orders, and LLC formation. The service is designed for pro se litigants and the plaintiff is expected to file his or her own documents. We expect to see more virtual law firms like this in the future offering "unbundled legal services" over the Internet.

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http://www.illinoisdivorce.com is another web site that offers low cost no-fault divorce forms bundled with legal advice. Operated by the Chicago law firm of Cowell Taradash, P.C., this web site offers useful legal information on Illinois divorce issues, an offer of free consultation with an attorney by telephone, and an offer to answer simple legal questions on family law by email for free. The basic fee for an uncontested, self-help divorce is only $185.00.

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