I received an email asking if I would do a podcast for someone or something named Rocket Lawyer.  I responded by asking who Rocket Lawyer might be, as the email took for granted that I would have a clue, and why I would want to spend my time doing Rocket Lawyer’s podcast. 

I heard back from Eva Arevuo, who informed me that she “co-hosted” and “produced” the podcast, with this blurb about the biz:

Rocket Lawyer is an online legal services company where we connect people looking for advice on anything from writing a will, to immigration issues, to estate settlement, to an independent lawyer who has chosen to work with us.

Reacting poorly to this response, I did some digging, and found that Rocket Lawyer, an entity I’d never heard of before, was in the business of selling legal forms to lay people and running a legal referral service to “pre-screened” lawyers, all of whom no doubt had a pulse.  I declined Eva’s offer and informed her that I did not support her business.

In Forbes, Daniel Fischer writes about the difficulty for non-lawyers to figure out what conduct violates the rules against the unauthorized practice of law.

For the better part of a decade, Della Tarpinian has been locked in a Kafkaesque battle with a trade association she doesn’t belong to, the Kentucky Bar Association. She’s been fined $5,000 and ordered to pay the costs of her investigation, for violating rules that the average non-lawyer might find maddeningly vague and hard to understand.

After a lengthy investigation, the Kentucky Bar determined that Tarpinian’s clients couldn’t possibly have figured out how to fill out the paperwork they filed in court, without her coaching them behind the scenes. What surprised Tarpinian — and many other document-preparers around the country — is that the Bar could drag her before the state Supreme Court and have her fined for, as she sees it, competing against its members. Especially since a jury acquitted Tarpinian of similar charges in a 2004 criminal trial, after less than half an hour of deliberations.

“They only charge people that’s making money,” said Tarpinian, who has a paralegal degree and worked in a lawyer’s office before opening her own document-preparation firm in Owensboro. “It’s so ambiguous, so unclear.”

His point has merit, as attempts to fine-tune a definition of the practice of law, drawing a line bright enough that a non-lawyer can know what conduct is prohibited.  Fisher further notes that some “favored” entities, such as realtors, manage to fly below the radar, preparing contracts for the most significant purchase in most people’s lives that evade scrutiny in many states.

This self-regulatory scheme bothers experts like Gillian Hadfield of the University of Southern California Law School, who thinks lawyers can use it to squelch  competition and innovations such as automated legal document services. 

Gillian has long made the point that legal services are priced well outside the ability of many Americans to pay, yet they’re held to standards of legal expertise in their dealings.  Her point is undeniable, though her solutions to the problem, one of which is opening the practice of law to all comers, is likely to cause far more problems than it cures.

Enter the legal forms for lay-people business, like Rocket Lawyer and its better known competitor, Legal Zoom, offering inexpensive paperwork which shifts the burden to purchasers to figure out what documents they need, how to properly use them and suffer the consequences on their own.  The  WSJ Law Blog notes that Legal Zoom, cash machine for former O.J. lawyer Bob Shapiro, is the target of a class action.

The case claims that LegalZoom, which sells do-it-yourself wills, leases and other documents online, is illegally practicing law in the state of Missouri.

Last week, Missouri federal judge Nanette K. Laughrey partially rejected LegalZoom’s motion for summary judgment and set the case for trial on August 22.

In a statement issued yesterday, LegalZoom said that if the plaintiffs win at trial, it could dramatically impact the  availability of self-help legal books and forms in Missouri.

Dramatically?  Isn’t that the point, to shut down document mills that make good money off photocopies and take no responsibility for the well-intended folks who are trying to figure out whether the form will means their children will eat after they pass or their life-savings will escheat to the state?  Try asking your fertile octogenarian about cy pres.

David Butsch, plaintiffs lawyer in the class action contends:

“The state licensure of attorneys was established to protect the public from those untrained and uneducated in the practice of law,” Butsch said. The preparation of wills and other legal documents “may seem simple to a layman, but they aren’t,” he added. “There are consequences of signing a will . . .and those consequences can be great and they can’t be properly communicated by a company over the internet.”

True, but:

Aren’t online legal documents, however crude, preferable to having folks go without any form of legal guidance? In response, Butsch noted that there is now a glut of legal talent in the market, with many law graduates unable to find full-time employment. That fact, he said, has made customized legal help from practicing lawyers increasingly affordable. “I know quite a few lawyers who offer a quality legal service at very good rates,” he said.

A terribly lame response, both because it’s not necessarily the case, and even if lawyers are a dime a dozen at the moment, there’s nothing to suggest things will remain that way.  He may know “quite a few lawyers,” but what Butsch knows is no more meaningful than anybody else’s self-serving, unverified anecdotes, and hardly a basis for a class action.

The problem, the unaffordability of competent legal representation combined with the vague definition of what constitutes the practice of law, has opened society up to a bunch of putative solutions that are every bit as dangerous and troubling as the problem.  “Pick your poison” isn’t really a viable method of addressing the problem.

I’ve long argued that we need to do better than offering the public the opportunity to pick from only bad choices when it comes to the availability of legal services.  In the meantime, however, I have no plans on playing a pawn in someone else’s marketing scheme for a product I consider to be potentially ruinous to the public.   Whether it’s the unlawful practice of law, or just a really dangerous idea, remains to be seen, but it’s not something to which I’ll let my reputation.