THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE

Transcription

1 Chapter 7 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE RICHARD S. GRANAT AND STEPHANIE KIMBRO I. Introduction Even as virtual law firms rapidly gain currency in the legal world, confusion persists on the term s precise meaning. More lawyers, particularly the new wave of untethered solos, are now mobile, doing without a physical office space, meeting clients at the clients location or a local Starbucks, and doing their legal work by , cell phone, and laptop computer. But unless they deliver online legal services through a secure client portal, these untethered lawyers are not engaged in virtual lawyering. By definition, practicing via the Internet, specifically, is what virtual law firms do. We now know enough about the trajectory of virtual law practice, and we can now perceive future trends clearly enough, to know that more for purchase from the ABA Webstore (shopaba.org) at by the American Bar Association. All rights reserved. This information or any portion may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association or the copyright holder.

2 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION law firms from the untethered solos to large establishment brick-andmortar firms will practice in the virtual space in coming years. It is now clear that, for several reasons, virtual law firm technology before long will mainstream within the legal profession, as the primary law practice platform inevitably shifts from office to Internet. To engage with clients, lawyers will become increasingly proficient with the online technology tools discussed below, consistent with new legal ethics norms calling on lawyers to attain technological competence. Lawyers who do not adapt will lose market share and relevance. The continuing ascension of virtual law firms will leave a profound mark on those who deliver legal services and on segments of society that receive them or need them. The economies of legal software applications will enable lawyers to make a living offering legal services to persons now priced out of the legal services market. Internet-based technology will enable law firms mostly solos and small firms that serve consumers and small businesses to offer efficient and affordable solutions relevant to a latent market for legal services. Virtual law firm technology holds the promise of a significant if not comprehensive solution to the persistent access to justice problem burdening low-income people and those of modest means. Technology will deliver legal help to the legally underserved, where traditional legal services market has failed. This chapter discusses the future of virtual law practice, with an explanation of the origin of the concept; an exploration of the different forms of virtual law practice; and an analysis of the societal forces creating a demand for the delivery of legal services online. The impact of virtual law practice on the productivity of law firms of all kinds, from solos to big law firms, is also explored, as well as the potential for virtual law firms to serve as one solution to the access to justice problem. II. What Is a Virtual Law Practice? A virtual lawyer delivers legal services online through a secure web space, normally characterized as a client portal. Without the security of client portal technology where communications are encrypted and protected, the practice is not ethically compliant. It is estimated that approximately 6 percent of solos and small law firms use a secure client 84

3 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE portal to communicate and collaborate with their clients and deliver other legal services online. Virtual law practice is still in its early stages of adoption by the legal profession. Yet given the continued rise in consumer use of companies that provide online legal services, with or without the review of a licensed lawyer, the market need for virtual law offices as an alternative to traditional legal service delivery will most likely be driven by consumer demand, and adoption by the profession will increase in the coming years. A Primer on Virtual Law Firms elawyering can be traced to the early days of the Internet, when early law firm websites such as and first appeared. In January 2000, William Paul, then president of the American Bar Association, created the ABA elawyering Task Force. President Paul s vision was that lawyers could use the power of the Internet to serve clients of moderate means priced out of the legal market. The elawyering Task Force still exists today as a program unit within the Law Practice Division of the American Bar Association. With the passage of time, the elawyering concept became associated with the concept of virtual law practice. The period from 2000 to 2009 witnessed the emergence of several virtual law firms that sought to deliver legal services online directly to clients. Unlike a simple law firm website that may only have a description of a firm s practice, biographical information about the partners and employees of the firm, and some legal information, a virtual law firm is characterized by access by the firm s clients to a password-protected and secure web space where the attorney and client may interact and legal services are consumed by the client. Some may include the delivery of online legal advice, legal review of documents received by the client from another party, discussions between the lawyer and the client, and the creation, assembly, and review of legal documents and forms. In response to inquiries from law firms about what constitutes an ethically compliant virtual law practice, the elawyering Task Force in 2009 released Suggested Minimum Requirements for Law Firms Delivering Legal Services Online. These minimum requirements help lawyers resolve questions about whether their virtual practices comply Continued 85

4 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION A Primer on Virtual Law Firms Continued with the professional rules of conduct. Since every state develops and enforces its own rules for the legal profession, these requirements were advisory only. The guidelines were never submitted to the ABA House of Delegates for approval, so their authority is limited to the wisdom within the guidelines themselves, but they have affected the definition of what constitutes a virtual law practice. The core definition of a virtual law practice proposed by the elawyering Task Force in the requirements is linked to the architecture of a law firm s website. Thus: The basic structure of a law firm Web site that offers legal services online requires a secure client Web space that is accessible only with a user name and secure password. Without such a mechanism it is difficult or impossible to comply with the rules of professional conduct that deal with UPL, client confidentiality, establishing the lawyer/client relationship, and conflict of interest issues. Virtual law practice is linked to delivering legal services online. To protect the confidentiality and security of client information this requires a secure client portal accessible with a user name and password. Within the secure client portal, clients can communicate and collaborate with their lawyers online with the assurance that their transactions are secure and ethically compliant. A secure Web space that is accessible to a client is commonly known as a client portal. The term is most often applied to an electronic sharing mechanism between a law firm and its clients. The law firm provides a secure entry point that enables its clients to log into an area where they can communicate, view and download documents, collaborate on document editing, and upload private information. The portal exists only on the web and data is stored in the cloud. When data is transmitted between the secure portal and the client, it is encrypted. elawyering can only take place within a secure web space. elawyering encompasses the tasks that a lawyer does within the client portal itself. These elawyering tasks can be of many types. In an article in Law Practice Magazine for January February 2004, Marc Lauritsen, co-chair of the elawyering Task Force, 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. 86

5 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE Think of a lawyering verb interview, investigate, counsel, draft, advocate, analyze, negotiate, manage and so forth and there are corresponding electronic tools and techniques. The literature about virtual law practice often quotes lawyers as referencing themselves as virtual lawyers because they have no physical office; they meet clients at their client s office or at the local Starbucks and do their legal work by , cell phone, and laptop computer. But since these lawyers do not deliver online legal services securely, one would not consider them true virtual lawyers. This is a difference between virtual law practice and just being a mobile lawyer. We would characterize the lawyer in the previous paragraph as just being untethered a lawyer who is mobile and free from an office location. A virtual lawyer is also an untethered lawyer, but he or she is much more than that when integrating a client portal into a virtual practice model. Making this distinction is important, because when the lawyer is evaluating his or her compliance with the Rules of Professional Conduct, different ethics issues may arise from the direct delivery of legal services to clients online that would not arise from merely using online tools to conduct legal tasks. If the lawyer is delivering legal services to clients online, there may be an online form of limited-scope engagement agreement that must be properly handled securely online. The establishment of the lawyer-client relationship online through a secure client portal and use of a click-wrap agreement requires compliance with rules that a virtual practitioner must know of that go beyond the traditional establishment of the lawyer-client relationship. Therefore, being a mobile lawyer may not raise the same ethics issues or require the same level of security and attention to procedure. III. Types of Virtual Law Practice A. Law Firm Based Client Portal During the initial emergence of virtual law practice, law firms incorporated into existing websites a client portal that was accessible with a user name and password within which different legal tasks are done. The added value of creating a client portal where lawyers can work with their clients online is a way for many law firms from solo to large law firm to differentiate themselves from other firms. In this model, an independent company usually provides the client portal application to the law 87

6 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION firm as software-as-a-service. The client portal is integrated within its law firm s website, and the client signs into the client portal from the law firm s website using a user name and password. B. Virtual Practice within a Branded Network More recently, a hybrid for a virtual law practice has emerged where a third party provides a website that connects clients with law firms. The third party creates a website that is market-facing and attracts consumers who can become clients of the law firms linked to that company s website. The consumer-facing website often targets specific legal needs, such as estate planning, start-up companies, or divorce law, and, with advertising resources and excellent content, can attract consumers who can be served by the lawyers for its network. These networks are called branded networks and offer the individual law firm an efficient way to market its services through the company s website. Examples, as of mid-2014, included AttorneyFee.Com, DirectLawConnect, LawGives, LawDingo, LawZam, UpCounsel, PlainLegal, and Bridge US. What makes this a form of virtual law practice is that the lawyers work with their clients through a secure client portal, which is also set up to be ethically compliant in the sense that communications are secure and encrypted and confidentiality is preserved. IV. The Market for Consumer Legal Services The emergence of virtual law firms is just one dimension of transformative change now shaping the consumer legal services market, primarily because of the ascendancy of the Internet. Another is the recent movement of some consumers away from the lawyer-driven model of legal services delivery. A. Direct-to-Consumer Solutions Consumers and small business are largely served by solos and small law firms, which constitute 80 percent of the legal profession within the United States. During the last decade, a new category of nonlawyer, legal information websites offering direct-to-consumer, low-cost legal solutions also has emerged. Examples include LegalZoom, the most well-known 88

7 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE legal brand among consumers, although it is not a law firm, and others such as Nolo.com, U.S. Legal Forms, Inc., and SmartLegalforms, Inc., to name only a few. The legal information industry of self-help books and forms has gone online. It has the solo and small-firm segment of the legal profession squarely in its sights. A legal information solution can often substitute for the work of a lawyer. Intelligent legal documents and smart web advisors often provide a low-cost, just-good-enough solution to many legal problems without the need to incur higher legal fees. This is the new reality that the legal profession faces. The impact of these legal information websites on that segment of the legal profession, while not huge as yet, is not insignificant either. In one area alone, no-fault divorce, we estimate that online divorce sites, such as and have processed over 100,000 online divorces in If the average legal fee for an uncontested, no-fault divorce is approximately $1,500, then approximately $150 million in legal fees have been drained from lawyers practices on a nationwide basis. This is not a small amount and it will continue to increase at the expense of the legal profession. These intelligent legal information sites will become more sophisticated and incorporate more rule-based, intelligent web applications that substitute for the judgment and the labor of an attorney. Consumers will continue to look for less costly alternatives than traditional legal services, and these software-based solutions will increase with passing time. B. Why Do Consumers Look for Alternatives to Lawyers? American Bar Foundation research and other research studies on consumer perceptions of lawyers provide support for the idea that consumers will avoid using a lawyer unless they really have to. The American Bar Foundation research includes people from all economic strata in a single midwestern mid-size city. Extensive interviews probed problems but did not cast them as legal matters. Only 15 percent of those with a civil justice situation turned to an advisor for help, and only 8 percent turned to a lawyer. One out of 11 people with a legal issue 89

8 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION took that issue to a lawyer. Forty-five percent of the people said there was no need for advice. Twenty-five percent said that seeking help would make no difference. Consumers look for alternatives to lawyers because: They cannot afford $125-$150 per hour, or they perceive that they cannot afford lawyers because most lawyers use the billable hour, and consumers cannot budget for legal costs and fear unpredictable, high fees. Lawyers are inconvenient and inefficient to use. Lawyers can be slow delivering a legal service, as technologically they still lag behind other service professions. Consumers dislike hourly rates. Rather than seek legal assistance, many consumers will search for a solution that is good enough. Consumers will sub-optimize and seek the assistance of an independent legal document preparer rather than the full services of an attorney in the interest of economy, even though it may be far from the perfect solution. C. What Do Consumers Want from Lawyers? The proliferation of lawyerless legal services underscores the importance to the legal community of identifying, and responding to, what consumers want from lawyers. The dominant theme of extensive research on that question is better customer service. More particularly, consumers want: information on what their case will cost; an idea of how long their case will take; progress updates on their cases; prompt response to letters and phone calls; and prompt responses to their complaint(s). Market research also supports the conclusion that consumers want legal advice and legal services to be delivered: 90

9 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE online, by phone, and even by text; out of hours not just the traditional 9 to 5; linked with related services, such as the purchase of a home; and with unbundled and do it yourself legal services. From consumers perspective, the system for delivering legal services must be redesigned to conform to their values by creating a new value proposition. A new value proposition could involve elimination of the need to go to the lawyer s office, increasing speed of the transaction, and offering services at a flat fee. It is a waste of marketing dollars to market legal services to consumers who do not want legal services in their present form. Marketing is more than just selling or getting the word out about a law firm, or publishing a website that is more than a Yellow Pages advertisement, or radio and TV commercials that make claims about how great a law firm is. Lawyers cannot sell a product or service to a consumer if the consumer does not want to buy it. Marketing is more than promotion. Fixing the system for the delivery of common legal services requires more radical surgery if the migration of consumers toward less valued alternatives is to be halted. Solutions include: 1. Increasing the transparency of the transaction between client and lawyer by moving away from hourly pricing toward fixed pricing and/or pricing by result. The lack of transparency in lawyer pricing creates tremendous anxiety by consumers. A consumer can get a fixed price from a homebuilder to build a $1 million house (with allowances for unforeseen circumstances), but often can t get a fixed price from a lawyer for a relatively simple divorce. 2. Increasing productivity of the legal transaction and passing the savings on to the client. Consumers suspect that lawyers are using information technology to increase their productivity by automating more routine legal tasks such as document production. They resent that productivity enhancements are not passed along to the consumer in terms of lower prices. Without competition from other kinds of providers, the legal profession has no incentive to lower prices. Instead, legal fees move up. Full-service stockbrokers were affected by online 91

10 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION discount stockbrokers in price reductions. A competitive economic environment for legal services would have the same result. 3. Overcoming the inconvenience of communicating and working with a lawyer. While it is necessary to appear in a doctor s office for a physical examination, it is unnecessary to be physically present in a lawyer s office for the law firm to do its work. Yet the prevailing mode of doing business requires that the client give up half a day of work or more and travel to a lawyer s office for advice at the lawyer s convenience, not the consumer s. V. Capturing the Connected Generation The pressures to change the patterns of delivery of legal services for consumers will increase dramatically in the next few years. Whatever trends are now in place will accelerate over the coming years as the connected generation comes of age and matures into the age where they need legal services. The connected generation, often called the Millennial Generation, are those born since 1981, as of 2014 ranging in age from eighteen to thirty-three. Approximately 87 million Americans are in this age cohort. It is larger than the Baby Boom generation, and as this generation ages they will have the same legal problems and issues as any other generation. This generation has grown up on the Internet and looks to the Internet first, before checking the Yellow Pages, reaching for a telephone, or consulting with a professional face-to-face. This is a generation of digital natives with the Internet in their DNA. They shop online, play online, learn online, bank and invest online, and will expect their lawyers to also be online. The defining cultural/historical event to distinguish this cohort is that they spent their formative years in the age of the birth and rise of the Internet. The Internet Generation has no recourse to a memory of (or nostalgia for) a pre-internet history, a factor that greatly differentiates them from older generations, who had to learn to adapt to new technologies. This generation values: innovation the better way; immediacy i.e., I want it now! 92

11 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE authentication and trust often established through online methods of sharing; interactivity defining the culture; and high customization services and products that fit unique needs. Consumer behaviors emphasize: looking to the Internet first to seek information, alternatives, and options; trying before they buy; reliance on communities of interest where opinions and information can be exchanged; and interaction with a website before talking to a professional. Law Firms Designed to Serve an Internet-Savvy Generation Law firm websites that are highly interactive and can serve this generation online will dominate the legal landscape in the decades to come. The law firms moving into this next stage are what we call web-enabled law firms because of their commitment to using the power of the Internet to change the way they practice law by creating websites highly interactive with their clients. Web-based applications that early-adopter law firms are now incorporating in their law firm websites include: Web-Enabled Document Automation Within a secure client space, clients can provide data through an online questionnaire that results in document assembly through web-enabled document solutions. Enabling the client to provide the data directly into an online interview reduces the time that the attorney must spend on the interview process and results in an instantaneous generation of a draft ready for a lawyer s more detailed review. Web-enabled document assembly enlists the client s effort in providing the data used to create a customized document without initial lawyer intervention. Traditionally, document automation has been used by lawyers within Continued 93

12 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION Law Firms Designed to Serve an Internet- Savvy Generation Continued the office environment to speed up the production of documents of all kinds. Speeding up internal document assembly within the law firm is important, but does not have as dramatic a change in law firm work process as client-centered and web-enabled document automation. By moving the document automation process onto the web and enabling the client to provide data online, a major increase in lawyer and client productivity occurs. Gamification to Increase Online Client Engagement There is enormous potential to increase engagement with clients through games for legal services embedded in a law firm website. Because the psychology behind gaming supports positive engagement, games may educate the public and provide a way for the legal profession to jump into the larger online conversation around legal services. Games may push players with rewards from gameplay from a platform like Facebook to a licensed lawyer, law firm, or one of the many online branded networks providing legal services. Not only may games increase the public s empowerment and education about the law, they may also increase access to justice by providing the public with alternative ways to be connected with legal services online. From the lawyer s perspectives, games could deliver a prospective client already engaged, better educated, and prepared to purchase legal services online or extend the engagement to in-person legal representation. What is a game for legal services? Gamification is when you take a process, such as filling out an online client intake form, or all the steps needed to handle a case as a pro se litigant, and add game elements to that process to motivate people to complete it or handle it in a different way. Gamification uses game mechanics to influence behavior in the real world. This differs from a pure game. Games provide a different experience than something that has been gamified. Because games are self-motivated, they create more of a flow. Flow comes from a sense of accomplishment and is a result of heightened functioning. It occurs most when something is done for fun rather than for money, status, or obligation. This is why games are often more engaging tools than the gamification of an existing online process. In other industries, including higher education, games are being 94

13 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE designed as teaching tools and sources of increased online engagement. Games are an ideal conduit for sharing basic legal information and services with the public. Games can provide education in a fun way and be shared between friends and family who may also have similar legal needs. Paired up with a rewards system that encourages the player to seek online self-help resources and legal services, games may direct consumers to the appropriate online legal service provider for their legal need. Online Calculators Online web interview forms can be used to collect financial data that is the basis for a calculation and offers the client an immediate, useful legal result. This software solution provides an answer to a client without the involvement of a lawyer. It may provide estimates to prospective clients regarding matters where there is a statute that dictates a clear formula that the calculator applies. Another calculator might be developed individually by the lawyer to help a prospective client calculate the estimated cost of legal services for the lawyer s own services. Client Appointment Scheduling Clients can make appointments to see their attorney directly through the website. Client Data Intake Clients can provide data through online forms that are the basis for an office consultation. Providing the data in advance enables the lawyer to fully prepare for the office consultation and often reduces the time required for the in-house consultation. Interactive Legal Advisors Some law firms are creating interactive legal advisors. As with online document assembly, the client answers questions through an online questionnaire, but instead of a legal document being created, the intelligence engine manipulates if-then statements that generate a legal answer to the client immediately. Continued 95

14 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION Law Firms Designed to Serve an Internet- Savvy Generation Continued Online Dispute Settlement Video- and web-conferencing applications can also support forms of online dispute settlement and mediation. Additional web-enabled, interactive applications will continue to be developed by third-party vendors and provided to solos and small law firms through the virtual law firm web-based architecture. These law-based interactive applications power a law firm s legal service by reducing costs, which results in more affordable fees. VI. The Access to Justice Problem Internet-based legal technology can help solve the justice gap problem by enabling law firms, mostly solos and small law firms that serve consumers and small business, to offer efficient and affordable solutions that relate to a latent market for legal services. Surveys across the states have put the number of U.S. consumers who cannot afford a lawyer at up to 80 percent. As a recent law review article notes, The typical legal services consumer in the U.S. makes approximately $25 per hour, and is priced out of the services lawyers provide even at low attorney rates of $125 $150 an hour. Approximately half a million lawyers provide personal legal services to individuals and families. More than four out of ten new law school graduates cannot find full-time permanent employment as lawyers and have an unemployment rate nearly twice that of the nation. Unfortunately, lawyers who provide personal legal services all chase after the same top 20 percent of potential clients who can pay their hourly rates, or who have personal injury cases, or who are pursuing a claim for which the lawyer s fees can be paid under a fee-shifting statute or otherwise recovered from the defendant. Surveys show that fully 80 percent of low-income Americans with legal needs do not receive legal help because they cannot afford private lawyers and legal aid resources are inadequate. 96

15 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE The ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services also reports that [p]eople with moderate incomes don t do much better; a large majority represent themselves, get help from someone who isn t a lawyer, or do nothing when faced with a legal problem. The Legal Services Corporation (LSC) recently released a report that resulted from a Legal Tech Summit convened in 2013 to explore the many ways technology can expand access to justice. LSC President James J. Sandman, in commenting on the report, recognized the importance of online legal services in helping to resolve the access to justice problem: It charts a path to a future where, through the smart and disciplined use of technology, the legal aid community can provide some form of assistance to everyone with a significant civil legal problem and not have to turn people away with nothing. LSC s strategies for achieving this goal focus on the delivery of legal and information services over the web. The main components of the LSC strategy are similar to what we envision for private law firms as these firms migrate toward the Internet: 1. Creating in each state a unified legal portal that directs persons to the most appropriate form of legal assistance and guides self-represented litigants through the entire legal process. 2. Deploying sophisticated document assembly applications to support the creation of legal documents by service providers and by litigants themselves. 3. Taking advantage of mobile technologies to reach more persons more effectively. 4. Applying business process/analysis to all access-to-justice activities to make them as efficient as practicable. Developing expert systems to assist lawyers and other service providers to access authoritative knowledge through a computer and apply it to particular factual situations. By combining the power of software with the delivery of legal service, friction is reduced and speed of delivery is increased, and because aspects of the legal service are automated, profit margins can increase. We call these legal services software-powered legal services. By combining delivery of 97

16 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION human legal services with automated legal services and delivering these services over the Internet, economies of scale can be achieved that are not possible within a traditional person-to-person law practice. To reach and address a huge potential unserved market for legal services, lawyers must learn how to power their services with virtual software technologies that result in reduced fees that expand the market for legal services. By definition, these services must be delivered within a client portal to be secure and to be ethically compliant. The concept of the virtual law practice is a component and application that is essential to reduction of the cost and the price of legal services. VII. The Future of Virtual Law Practice: A Prediction Before too long, almost every law firm will be able to work with its clients online, and its clients will expect it to have this capacity. Whether the law firm of the future incorporates virtual law firm technology into its own website, becomes a member of a branded legal network, or both, we realize this technology will eventually mainstream within the legal profession. The predictions of legal futurists such as Richard Susskind are finally being taken seriously by American law firms. Established firms, however, are only slowly adapting to the new legal marketplace, especially those with traditional partnership models and hierarchical business structures. In that respect, traditional firms are comparable to traditional industries and companies that have struggled to adapt to changes in their marketplace. This difficulty might best be explained by a phenomenon called innovator s dilemma, described by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen in his book, The Innovator s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Press 1997). Christensen s book explains why disruptive technology is less common than sustaining technology and how innovation in business models comes from outside of a company rather than from within it. Applying this to law firms, rather than spending some portion of their budget on innovation and technology, firms will be more inclined to continue to invest in sustaining technology (and business methods) that have always paid off in the past. Even as the marketplace changes and a better model appears, getting a law firm to invest in making the change will be a 98

17 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE challenge because the economic incentive to change will not be apparent in the beginning of the investment in the disruptive technology or business model. As Christensen notes in his book, however, firms that can invest some amount in developing disruptive innovation will survive and lead the profession through major changes in the marketplace. Virtual law practice will no longer be something for early adopters, but will merge into the platform for the delivery of legal services. Every law firm, with some narrow exceptions, will become a virtual law firm. Jordon Furlong, a law practice management consultant and legal futurist, has observed that the platform for the delivery of legal services will be the Internet, and increasingly the mobile Internet. The physical office will still be a locus for the delivery of legal services, but its function will change, with the Internet becoming dominant. When a platform changes, those who are in are out, unless they adapt. The future belongs to law firms that learn how to use Internet technology to offer legal services to clients in the way those clients expect legal services to be delivered. For the majority of clients, that will mean online and mobile delivery of legal services. Lawyers must learn how to engage effectively with consumers online through online tools, including many of those discussed above. A conversation exists online around legal services and the law. Lawyers who cannot share and contribute to this online conversation and engage with consumers on their grounds will not survive as the marketplace continues to change. Law firms that do not adapt to this reality by learning to deliver legal services online will lose market share to lawyers and law firms that are more nimble and adaptable. Legal technology design will also play a large role in virtual law practice as lawyers learn the importance of user design and user interface (UI/ UX) as it applies to lawyer websites, mobile legal applications, and online delivery. The process by which consumers have worked with lawyers to have their legal needs met has not yet been designed from the perspective of the consumer and how the consumer interacts with other professionals online and obtains legal services. Lawyers must increase online engagement with clients through online interfaces both internal and external to the law firm. Why? Consumers will expect and seek it out this level of engagement. Technology companies that produce mobile devices and 99

18 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION applications focus a significant portion of the design of their products and services on user experience. These companies look at the user s journey through the user interface they have developed and make sure that it is not only intuitive, but that working on the device or using the service instills brand recognition and loyalty in the user. Based on our understanding of the level of engagement needed for online delivery, law firms engaging in virtual law practice must also learn about user-centered design. User-centered design requires establishing empathy for the users the law firm s clients. This includes an understanding of what their needs and desires are and looks at how the clients would search for a law firm, browse the law firm website, decide to work with the law firm, and so on through the entire process. To discover empathy for prospective and existing clients, the law firm must do some ethnographic work. This means speaking to clients and potential future clients about what they want and what their experiences are with related legal services. This user-centric focus, used by many companies to design products and services, is found in design methodology, a concept taught at Stanford University s Design School (d.school) and at IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm based in Palo Alto, California, among other prominent design and business institutions. Lawyers designing new forms of legal service delivery may also consider methods such as gamification to increase online engagement with clients. Gamification is the use of game mechanics in non-game applications. Gamification occurs when you take a process, such as filling out an online client intake form, or all the steps needed to handle a case as a pro se litigant, and add game elements to that process to motivate the people involved to complete the tasks in a different way. Game mechanics or the elements of a game include levels, rewards, exploration, progressions, feedback, storylines, quests, challenges, and achievements, among others techniques. Several years ago, gamification made its way into the workflow of companies. A report by Gartner Inc., an international IT research and advisory company, showed that 70 percent of Global 2000 organizations would have at least one application that was gamified, and predicted that 25 percent of workplace processes redesigned would have a form of gamification designed into them by Other professions, including 100

19 THE FUTURE OF VIRTUAL LAW PRACTICE the medical profession, have already added gamification to user-centric design to increase engagement with patients and are seeing positive results. Through concepts such as design methodology and gamification, innovative lawyers will be reevaluating the process for delivering legal services to consumers online and making business and website design decisions based on user data and experiences from case studies rather than on the models of traditional law firm structures. The potential for these redesigns in the law firm business model may lead to new technology platforms for secure online delivery. VIII. Conclusion The Internet as a platform for the delivery of legal services will empower lawyers to reach a latent market for legal services in ways heretofore not possible. Powered by software legal applications, lawyers can offer fixedfee legal services at an affordable price to those who could not afford legal fees. Software-powered legal services delivered over the Internet will provide the pathway for the legal profession to reinvent itself, retain its identity as a learned profession that serves society, and provide a decent living for its members. Sources/Reading Stephanie Kimbro, Limited Scope Legal Services: Unbundling and the Self-Help Client (2012). Stephanie Kimbro, Online Legal Services for the Client-Centric Law Firm (2013). Stephanie Kimbro, The Consumer Law Revolution: The Lawyer s Guide to the Online Legal Marketplace (2013). Stephanie Kimbro, Virtual Law Practice: How to Deliver Legal Services Online (2011) (second edition 2015). Mitch Kowalski, Avoiding Extinction: Reimagining Legal Services for the 21st Century (2012). Richard Susskind, Tomorrow s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future (Oxford Univ. Press 2013). 101

20 THE RELEVANT LAWYER: REIMAGINING THE FUTURE OF THE LEGAL PROFESSION ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services Unbundling Resource Center, / legalservices /delivery /delunbund.html (last visited Jan. 26, 2015). Jordan Furlong, The Evolution of the Legal Services Market: Stage 1, Law 21 (Nov. 5, 2012), /2012 /11 /the-evolution-ofthe-legal-services-market-stage-1 /. Jordan Furlong, The Evolution of the Legal Services Market: Stage 2, Law 21 (Nov. 6, 2012), /2012 /11 /the-evolution-ofthe-legal-services-market-stage-2 /. Jordan Furlong, The Evolution of the Legal Services Market: Stage 3, Law 21 (Nov. 7, 2012), /2012 /11 /the-evolution-ofthe-legal-services-market-stage-3 /. Jordan Furlong, The Evolution of the Legal Services Market: Stage 4, Law 21 (Nov. 8, 2012), /2012 /11 /the-evolution-ofthe-legal-services-market-stage-4 /. Jordan Furlong, The Evolution of the Legal Services Market: Stage 5, Law 21 (Nov. 9, 2012), /2012 /11 /the-evolution-ofthe-legal-services-market-stage-5 /. Richard S. Granat is co-director of the Center for Law Practice Technology, Florida Coastal School of Law. Stephanie Kimbro, MA, JD, is a Fellow at Stanford Law School and co-director of the Center for Law Practice Technology, Florida Coastal School of Law. 102