Is It Time To Deregulate the Practice of Law?

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.

Free White Paper: Virtual Law Practice; Success FactorsEssentially, 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.

 

Should law firms be owned by non-lawyer investors?

There has been much discussion recently in various venues about whether 5.4 of the US Rules of Professional Responsibility should be amended or revised to permit investment in law firms by non-lawyer, or non-lawyer entities, or even ownership of US law firms by non-lawyer entities. The ABA's Ethics 20/20 Commission is circulating a paper on the subject and is soliciting comments.

Known in the United Kingdom as Alternative Business Structures (ABS), this new form of law firm organization, authorized by the UK Legal Services Act of 2007,  will be permitted after October 6, 2011. Alternative Business Structures are already permitted in Australia, where several law firms have already gone public.

Other than the State of North Carolina where there is bill pending to permit non-lawyer ownership of up to 40% of a law firm, there has been little movement in the US to make change Rule 5.4 Some hybrid models are beginning to emerge in the US,  but they are a workaround the existing rules.

There is no clear path for non-lawyer ownership or investment in a law firm in the United States, and as a result it is arguable that the legal services delivery system lacks the capital necessary to innovate and create the efficient systems that are necessary to serve not only the "latent market for legal services", but existing legal markets more effectively.

Now comes Jacoby & Meyers, a law firm that has pioneered in changing the way legal services are delivered, filing multiple law suits in the Federal District courts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut against the presiding state justices in those states responsible for implementing and enforcing Rule 5.4, requesting that the Rule by overturned. The Complaint makes clear that Jacoby & Meyers "seeks to free itself of the shackles that currently encumber its ability to raise outside financing and to ensure that American law firms are able to compete on the global stage"

Click here for a complete version of the Complaint.

Andrew Finkelstein, the Managing Partner of Jacoby & Meyers, and also the Managing Partner of Finkelstein & Partners, said that "No legitimate rationale exists to prevent non-lawyers from owning equity in a law firm. The time has come to permit non-lawyers to invest in law firms in the United States,"

Now the fun begins!

Disclosure: Finkelstein and Partners is a subscriber to our  DirectLaw Virtual Law Firm Service.

 

 

 

 

Future of Legal Education

Last week I was privileged to attend a Conference on the Future of Education, sponsored by New York Law School and Harvard Law School. This conference was the third in a series on this subject. The purpose of this conference is to initiate a conversation among and between law schools on how to make legal education better, cheaper, and faster, as Dean of New York Law School, Richard Matasar frames the issue. Personally, I think that Matasar's presentation on the problems and prospects for legal education was the best that I have ever heard.

The format for the conference was a series of presentations of very inventive proposals presented by teams of legal educators and other legal specialists, mostly academics, 12 teams in all.

As participants, we each had $1,000,000 to spend as if we were venture capitalist's listening to start-up pitches.

The team that I was part of actually won the competition, by receiving the most "venture capital" dollars. Credit goes to  Ron Staudt from Chicago-Kent Law School and Marc Lauritsen from Capstone Practice who did the heavy lifting on developing the proposal. The proposed project called for law students in clinical programs to be engaged in the development of "Apps for Justice" that could be used by legal service programs to provide tools for access to justice. The title of the project is "Learning Law by Creating Software"  Click here for a copy of the proposal.

Marc and Ron receiving their $10,700,000 check.

Ron Staudt and MArc Lauritsen

 

DAvid Johnson receiving his venture capital investment

David Johnson from New York Law School won second place for a proposal to create "legal apps" that are games that would be used to teach and learn. The "State of Play" Academy.

Click here for a link to many of the other proposals.

 

Will LegalZoom Become the Largest Law Firm in the US?

 

LegalZoom has been beta testing a concept which links its marketing capabilities to a network of law firms that offer legal services under the LegalZoom brand. With some state bar associations accusing LegalZoom of  the unauthorized practice of law,  it might makes sense for the company to seek deeper alliances with networks of attorneys who are able to offer a full and ethically compliant legal service. Solos and small law firms, leveraging off the visibility and prominence of the LegalZoom brand, could reduce their marketing costs and enable these firms to better capture consumers who are part of the “latent legal market”  on the Internet. It could be a win/win for both parties.

Unfortunately, linking the capital and management resources of profit-making organization with private law firms is almost impossible in the United States, given the regulatory framework that governs law practice. Unlike, the United Kingdom, which is in the process of deregulating the legal profession, enabling profit-making companies, from banks  and insurance companies to retail chains like Tesco,  to actually own a law firm, and/or split legal fees with a non-law firm, these practices in the US are strictly taboo.

In the US, law directories can charge a flat marketing fee for a listing, but sharing legal fees with a marketing organization can get you disbarred.

During the dot-com boom around 1999-2000, a company emerged by the name of AmeriCounsel that tried to create a hybrid organizational structure similar to the LegalZoom experiment. The company sought to enable a network of attorneys to offer legal services at a fixed and reasonable price and to mediate between the consumer and the law firm in terms of guaranteeing the quality of the legal services offered. The company failed during the dot-com bust for various reasons, including lack of financing, but on the way to failure, secured some opinions from state bar associations that blessed their model and provides a blue print for hybrid delivery systems which combine the expertise of a law firm with the marketing, management, and technological resources of a non-law firm.

One such opinion was issued by the Nassau County Bar Association New York State.

The Bar Association reasoned that the AmeriCounsel scheme was permissible because:

[S]ince AmeriCounsel does not charge attorneys any fee and since AmeriCounsel does not “recommend” or “promote” the use of any particular lawyer ’s services, it does not fall within the purview of DR 2-103(B) or (D). Rather, AmeriCounsel is a form of group advertising permitted by the Code of Professional Responsibility and by ethics opinions interpreting the Code.

In this model, AmeriCounsel provided technology and administrative services to link the client with the lawyer, but the law firm made no payment to AmeriCounsel. Instead, a separate administrative/technology fee was paid by the consumer to AmericCounsel for using the web site and gaining access to the lawyer. (This is not a practical scheme in today’s web environment, in my opinion), Moreover, AmeriCounsel did not choose the lawyer. The client was able to compare the credentials of different attorneys and choose their own lawyer. Thus no legal referral was involved, which would not be permitted in New York, as only an approved non-profit organization can make legal referrals.

In my opinion, this model, forced on AmeriCounsel, by the Rules of Professional Responsibility, is cumbersome, hard to implement, and was not economically viable for AmeriCounsel. Perhaps this was one of the causes of its failure.

Almost a decade later, companies that want to enter into this kind of hybrid relationship with lawyers, have to follow the same rule structure, as the ABA Model Rules of Professional Responsibility as the rules have not changed in any significant way. changed.  It will be interesting to see whether the ABA Ethics 20/20 Commission, which was set up just last year, will address these issues at all.

Perhaps there should be a “safe harbor” that enables organization’s like LegalZoom to experiment with new patterns of legal service delivery that could operate for a limited period of time in a specific state, like California, The experience would be evaluated carefully as a basis for rule and policy change. The evaluation would be aimed to see if client's interests are compromised in any way, and whether the delivered legal service is less expensive, without compromising the quality of legal service.

Instead of creating legal profession regulatory policies that are based on the legal profession's idea about what is good for the consumer, policy could be based on real experience and facts. Experimentation is good. It leads to change, and in other industries improvement of methods and approaches over a period of time.

Of course, I don’t believe that this will ever happen in the US, at least not in my professional lifetime.

 

LegalZoom Sued for UPL in Missouri

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.
 

ABA Journal Announces First Group of Legal Rebel Profiles

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.

 

LegalZoom Challenged by North Carolina Bar

Legal Zoom has been challenged by the North Carolina Bar which claims that Legal Zoom is violating the unauthorized practice of law statute in North Carolina. The essence of the Bar's complaint is that even though Legal Zoom asserts that their legal documents are created by a web-based software system,  this constitutes the practice of law because Legal Zoom selects the content that is incorporated into the system. The Unauthorized Committee of the Bar cites  In re Reynoso, 477 F.3d 1117 (9th Cir. 2007) , a case that was decided by a Federal court in California on a different set of facts. In fact, in the case of Legal Zoom, a paralegal or legal technician, conducts something called a "review" , which Legal Zoom uses as a rationale to charge a higher fee. This review is not supposed to be "legal advice", but apparently this gives the North Bar UPL Committee problems as well. We think the In re Reynoso decision is limited to the particular facts of that case, which the Court notes, so it can be argued that is not appropriate for the North Carolina UPL Committee to cite this as precedent,  We also that in California there are many non-lawyer providers who provide alternatives to lawyers, including Legal Zoom , which is based in Hollywood, California. So what is the unauthorized practice of law in North Carolina, is not in California. This doesn't make sense.

This is an ominous development as it indicates that the organized bar will go to any  length to maintain its monopoly over the delivery of legal services, even redefining what is essentially a "legal information service" as  the practice of law.  The legislature of the State of Texas was faced with a similar situation several years ago, when the Bar was trying to shut down a legal software publisher on the theory that the purchase of a  legal software program from Staples was the practice of law, and responded by passing a statute in response to consumer demand that exempted legal software programs as falling within the definition of the practice of law.

This is not an issue that will stir North Carolina's citizens to rise up in anger at the organized bar for restricting their choices and keeping legal fees unnecessarily excessive, but they should. They should follow the path of Texas's citizen's and put the North Carolina bar in its place.

The End of Lawyers? Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services

 Richard Susskind's new book, The End of Lawyers?: Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services was just published by Oxford University Press, in the United Kingdom. I received a copy from my associates in London today, and US distribution should begin within 10 days.  For law firms thinking about the future of the legal profession, this book should be mandatory reading.

Susskind sees the legal market as “broken.” Access to justice is available only to citizens who are very poor or very rich. The cost of dispute resolution in the courts often exceeds the amount at issue. Small businesses invariably claim that mainstream legal services are beyond their budgets. And even the world's largest companies and financial institutions are seeking radically new ways of meeting their legal needs.

Susskind argues that, in this time of grave economic uncertainty, the market will no longer tolerate traditional, expensive lawyers who handcraft tasks that can be better discharged with the support of modern systems and techniques. He claims that the legal profession will be driven by two forces in the coming decade: by a market pull towards the commoditization of legal services, and by the increase of disruptive, Internet-based technologies. The threat here for lawyers is clear - their jobs may well be eroded or even displaced.

Susskind challenges the legal profession to ask what elements of their current workload could be undertaken more quickly, more cheaply, more efficiently, or to a higher quality using different and new methods of working. Susskind argues that if automation can streamline certain legal tasks and that the market will forces lawyers to adapt to the "digitization"  or they won't survive.

I am still working my way through this important book, so will have more to say in future blog posts when I finish it.

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About This Blog

eLawyering: Practicing Law on the Web

The idea of eLawyering can be traced to the early days of the Internet when such early pioneering law firm web sites such as Siskind Susser Bland first appeared in 1995. In January 2000, William Paul, then President of the American Bar Association, created the ABA eLawyering Task Force to help law firms deliver on-line legal services.   Thus, the idea of eLawyering was formally recognized as a way of delivering legal services.  President Paul’s vision was that lawyers would be able to use the power of the Internet to serve clients of moderate means who have been priced out of the legal market. In fact the concept of eLawyering is much broader than that, and law firms of all sizes are using the Internet to serve clients of all income levels in ways that enhance client service and increase lawyer productivity.

Marc Lauritsen, co-chair of the eLawyering Task Force in an article in Law Practice Magazine in January-February, 2004, p. 36, succinctly defined eLawyering as:

“all the ways in which lawyers can do their work using the Web and associated technologies. These include new ways to communicate and collaborate with clients, prospective clients and other lawyers, produce documents, settle disputes and manage legal knowledge. Think of a lawyering verb—interview, investigate, counsel, draft, advocate, analyze, negotiate, manage and so forth—and there are corresponding electronic tools and techniques.”

This is a good start to understanding the concept of eLawyering. In addition to this definition I would add that eLawyering is an attitude about how to build a law firm business model which exploits web technologies for competitive advantage. The core of this business model is a law firm web site that incorporates interactive and web-enabled applications that supports interaction between lawyer and client along a number of dimensions.

During the Internet bubble  the venture capital industry poured  almost $50 million into a cluster of Internet legal sites that attempted to connect lawyers delivering legal services to this so-called “latent-market” for legal services. Most of these companies, including US.Law.com, Americounsel.com, and MyCounsel.com collapsed when venture capital stop flowing in 2001.  In the following years, most law firms created what I call "first-generation" web sites that are ether little more than expanded yellow page ads, or at best, provide substantive content and free legal information to prospective clients. Only recently have we seen the emergence of law firm web sites that help clients solve their legal problems over the Internet in a way that is both satisfying and price competitive.

Moreover, with the rise of non-lawyer, well-capitalized legal service companies, like LegalZoom which is reputedly generating more than $50,000,000 in annual revenues, there is a renewed interest in the legal profession, particularly among solos and small law firms,  in exploring new ways to deliver legal services on-line.

It is time to re-visit the subject of eLawyering. Hence the inauguration of this blog.

This eLawyering Blog will report and comment on:

  • virtual law firm web site sites that demonstrate eLawyering;
  • regulatory obstacles to eLawyering and virtual practice;
  • technologies that support eLawyering and virtual law practice;
  • ethical issues related to eLawyering and virtual law practice and the delivery of legal services;
  • new models for the delivery of legal services to the broad middle class ( e.g. access to justice issues) .
  • marketing and legal service delivery issues;
  • and other subjects that that are related to delivering legal services online.

The opinions expressed in this blog are the personal opinions of Richard Granat and not the opinions of Epoq, US, Inc., a legal services support provider, or DirectLaw, Inc., a virtual law firm platform provider, companies that I provide leadership to as Founder and CEO,  the American Bar Association, or any other entity or organization with which I am associated. For more information on me go to: The Granat Group web site.