A very provocative post by Richard Granat at  eLawyering  questions whether LegalZoom will end up as the largest law firm in the United States.

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.

One might expect my reaction to be slightly negative to such a suggestion.  After all, I’m no fan of the concept of half-baked self-help, nor unbundled services that glom as much money as the client is willing to cough up while taking no responsibility for helping them out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.

But I’m not entirely negative about the concept.  Not that the name LegalZoom sounds any better to my ears than its predecessors in cheap, fast legal services, but more along the lines of the Wal-Mart concept.  Lawyers are inaccessible to most people, and lawyers are starving.  It’s a lose/lose at the moment.

Much of the reason, I suspect, is that too much time and effort are put into gaining clients through extraneous means, and the costs of running a well-functioning practice are too high.  If we could eliminate the client acquisition aspect, and at the same time gain beneficial economies of scale, perhaps we could do a heck of a lot better delivering excellent legal representation at a lower cost to clients while maintaining a reasonable level of income to lawyers.  Granat’s win/win.

The fear, of course, is that it won’t end up that way.  The fear is that the lawyers who would hook up with as shabby an outfit as LegalZoom would be the low-renters, doing ever less to earn their buck and delivering the least and worst legal representation possible.  Who would be there to stop them?  Who would toss the losers out on their butt for failing to do right by their clients?  LegalZoom?  Gimme a break.  As long as they get their piece, Robert Shapiro will go on smiling.

Granat raises this problem:

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.

This involves a risk, but there is no change that doesn’t.  Since we aren’t doing much now to deliver high quality low cost legal services, it seems like a risk worth taking, provided some very serious thought goes into it to make sure that we’ve minimized the risks to clients and leave no one the worse for the experiment.

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.

This, unfortunately, is where Granat’s plan scares me.  I can understand why he doesn’t want the same, old stodgy ABA types killing any novel concept before it gets half a chance.  Clearly, they’ve made a royal mess of things thus far, and the idea of putting into the official hands of the bar to come up with ways and means to save us from the official hands of the bar seems, well, counterproductive.

But then who?  No really, that’s a question.

There’s no potential client out there who won’t tell you that the cost of legal representation seems unbearably high.  Sometimes they’re right.  It’s unlikely that we will ever be able to provide legal representation that satisfies everyone, or is affordable to everyone, and when it comes to indigent defense, there can be no substitute for providing a competent, and not overworked or uncaring, lawyer to every defendant charged with an offense who is unable to afford counsel.

But that leaves a huge swathe of Americans without access to a lawyer.  Pretending that anybody can be their own lawyer is a sham, which will ultimately end badly.  Pretending that lawyers can fix this on their own is nuts.  We need to open our minds to new concepts that will fulfill the promise of delivery of legal services to all who need at as reasonable a cost as possible. 

It’s not that I have an answer on how to accomplish this, and it’s not that I don’t see the pitfalls and problems some ideas present, but we need to find a new way to do this.  The first step is opening our minds to new approaches.