A debate has broken out among the aficionados of cutting edge law office technology. Naturally, no one told me, though by mere happenstance, I found out via Carolyn Elefant’s terrific and bold post at My Shingle.
Currently, there’s a cross-blog debate raging over the sustainability of the virtual law practice, with Jay Fleishman, Susan Cartier Liebel, Richard Granat and David Bilinsky all weighing in. Take a look at all of the posts to see the wide array of opinions on virtual legal services.
As for me, I’ve always had reservations about the viability of a purely unbundled, forms-based virtual law practice as a stand-alone business model (as opposed to a component of full service firm) primarily because I can’t make the numbers work. When a lawyer’s business portfolio consists of one-off, low cost matters at $300 or $500 a pop, then the only way to make real money is on volume. And building a volume practice, whether in the brick-and-mortar world or online requires a serious time or financial investment in marketing – either through paid ads, or persistent blogging, social media use and self-promotion.
There’s no shame in providing competent legal services inexpensively to those in need. There plenty of shame in walking the Boulevard in hot pants to attract your potential clientele, and even more shame in doing such volume that you can’t provide competent, no less excellent, representation. That’s right, even high volume lawyers have to be lawyers. I know, it sucks. Tough nuggies.
The virtual law office concept plays into the hands of what many lawyers desperately want and need, less because of any desire to help moderate income folks have access to the law than to accommodate the work/life desires of the lawyer. How else can you justify sitting at your kitchen table in Phoenix while charging a client in Des Moines? With the television on cartoon network.
This isn’t to say that all lawyers who advocate for virtual law practice, which seems to invariably come hand in hand with the dreaded unbundled services, are only concerned with how it benefits their life-style, but those, like Stephanie Kimbro, who have led the charge put in a whole lot of effort to keep the concept on the up and up. Others can’t be bothered with Kimbro’s attention to detail, concern with ethics and integrity.
One might expect this debate to be a bit, oh, one-sided given that the players (at least until Carolyn joined in) all have a horse in the race. Not so. Much to my surprise, Jay Fleischman, the Brooklyn wildman, calls it out. He has an office. He has staff. And when he can, he works from home, where technology allows him to do and to be the same lawyer as he is in the office. Except when he doesn’t need to sit with clients, he’s not in the office.
When you look at what I’ve got going, it’s not a virtual law firm.
According to the ABA, the virtual lawyer has “found dramatic new ways to communicate and collaborate with clients and other lawyers, produce documents, settle disputes, interact with courts, and manage legal knowledge. ELawyering encompasses all the ways in which lawyers can do their work using the Web and associated technologies.”
That’s not me. I use technology as a tool, much as attorneys before me used fax machines, copies, and typewriters. But it’s just that – a toolkit.
The ABA Elawyering Task Force tells us that, “[t]o be successful in the coming era, lawyers will need to know how to practice over the Web, manage client relationships in cyberspace, and ethically offer “unbundled” services.”
Bullshit.
Me too. Jay’s point is that “people hire people, not machines.” Lawyers aren’t fungible. Neither are clients. The “law as a commodity” crowd will disagree with me, informing me that much law is indeed easy and fungible, and the internet form-sellers, the fill-in-the-blanks solutions, are the future.
Now that Legal Zoom has thrown in a lawyer consult for $10 extra, the tiny gap between “any idiot can do it” and there’s a hundred ways to screw up a will that people don’t know about may vanish. Unless the advice is as pro forma as the form, in which case there will be thousands of really unhappy heirs in a few years.
As criminal defense lawyers know, there’s nothing that will take the place of looking into the eyes of a client to know what’s going on below the surface. No email will serve as substitute for our understanding of what our client needs, how one choice will impact his toddler while another will lead us to adopt a strategy that will put him on the next plane to Bolivia. Or SuperMax. Or home.
Carolyn raises other reasons why those who confuse technology as the soul of law rather than a tool of law are wrong, confidentiality and accountability. To the extent that we’re talking about the automation of law that so many of our futurist DIY proponents take for granted, with glossy adjectives warning of certain death without Elawyering, these concerns are missing from their vocabulary.
Those who, like me, continue to warn that the adoration of technology, the uncritical embrace of every new “concept” in the practice of law, will at best produce a profession that aspires to mediocrity, and at worst leave a public denied competent legal help, are tossed off as Luddites, raging against the machine.
Bullshit.
I love technology. Well, not fax machines. And I hated wet paper copiers in the early 80s, but otherwise, I love tech. It’s made my practice significantly more effective in many ways. It’s had issues, like the 47 page rider attached to every real estate contract where a single page used to suffice, or the old form motion where the lawyer changed the names without bothering to notice that a bunch of facts were different.
But these aren’t problems with technology, but the lawyers who use it. Technology doesn’t rule our representation, but provides a means to enhance it. We still have complete control over the delete button, as well as the button that makes the flashing light on our telephones go solid.
We are responsible for the benefit or damage technology can do. The people we are responsible to are called clients, and clients are living breathing human beings who, to some greater or lesser extent, have their own issues, questions, problems and needs. There is no lawyer who should claim to represent a client when he’s never looked into his eyes. At the end of the day, we represent people. No machine changes that.
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Excellent article, Scott. I will say that many people who now argue against an all virtual office, were the same ones arguing that Virtual was the new law (yourself excluded). I’ve been practicing for 5 years, and when I first began my solo (now small) firm, I watched many of the commentators referenced, discuss ad nauseum, the pros of a completely virtual practice, and now it seems the tides have turned. I’ll even go one step further and say there is, with very limited exceptions, no place for a virtual lawyer. No place for Skype consultations or off site receptionists. I think its critical we realize that we can keep our overhead low without resorting to doing Bankruptcy consultations from our living rooms (as amazing as that sounds). It cheapens us. It doesn’t necessarily make us more “efficient”. A client can cry in my office because she’s losing her home, and she’ll feel better at the end of the consult. She wont feel the same if we’re doing this via video conference, even if it means it’s easier for me. My referrals come, not from email blasts, but as a result of personal letters I send from my office, with real paper. My perspective as a young attorney, in the short time that I’ve been practicing, is that the human element, which comes with operating our of an office with staff, is what drives a lot of business my way. I didn’t always feel this way before. But I was absolutely wrong.
Scott – In addition to being Luddites, those who view new developments with a critical eye are also accused of trying to protect our turf.
Daniel – I’ve never believed that a stand-alone virtual office made sense for lawyers, unless they’re retired or raising a family and want to be able to have predictable work that can be done on flexible schedule to keep their foot in the door. So long as they render this service responsibly, I think that clients of lesser means are better served having a lawyer involved, even if just to eyeball a form-generated document than not having lawyer at all. But a stand alone, unbundled virtual law practice is, to my mind, simply a 21st century version of the oft-derided volume practice, only with even lower fees.
I’m concerned about excusing lawyers “raising a family” from the obligations that apply to other lawyers. Retired lawyers are different, but what does the lawyer’s personal circumstances have to do with the duties toward clients? This seems to be a somewhat emotional acknowledgement of the difficulties of women lawyers in raising children, which I understand strikes a sympathetic note, but they are still lawyes, their clients still deserve excellent representation and their circumstances should play no more role than for any other lawyer.
Being a professional means putting the client first. That applies to all lawyers, with or without children.