A few months ago at the Iron Tech Competition at Georgetown Law School, one of the judges asked one of the teams one the best questions I’ve ever heard and have been pondering since:

What does the system look like from the client’s side?

Yet do you have any idea of how that “client portal” that you set up works from the client’s perspective?

It’s a question that has been bugging me lately as I’ve tried to set up a searchable portal of documents or curated content for my clients and potential subscribers. On my end, I can easily view and search documents, but that’s not always the case for my clients. Sometimes, they only have access to a list of links, other times, they may not have search capabilities.  

Scott Greenfield’s first to blog about news  of a RICO by a Michigan law firm, Seikaly & Stewart against Stephen Fairley and The Rainmaker Institute. The firm alleges that the Institute created  a “bogus Internet marketing program, supposedly designed for small law firms and sole practitioners”  and duped firms (in this case, to the tune of $49k) to participate in the program through a series of fraudulent misrepresentations about the company’s ability to boost law firms’ Google rankings. [Source: Courthouse News. You can also view the actual complaint here.]

For Scott, this lawsuit highlights the kind of stuff he’s been blogging about all along: that SEO schemes just don’t work. Consequently, Scott doesn’t have much sympathy for either side:
Did Fairley lie to Seikaly & Stewart? How would anyone know, since the entirety of internet marketing schemes are based on deception and manipulation? And were Seikaly & Stewart victimized by Fairley’s unkept promises? It’s beyond ironic that a firm seeking to buy its way to prominence from a marketeer complains that it was out-deceived. It’s not that they have no cause of action, having paid a pretty sweet sum to the Rainmaker Institute and gotten bupkis in return, but that when someone seeks to game the system and got played in return, it’s just awfully hard to feel badly about the whole thing.
As for me, regardless of the outcome, I’m glad that the firm brought this lawsuit if only to shed some light on lawyer marketers.  Though unlike Scott, I believe that there are lawyers who have succeeded through strategic use of smart SEO (either homegrown juice, or working with a trusted company), on the whole, my guess is that most of these high-priced marketing/SEO or lead generation schemes don’t work. At all.  Trouble is, most lawyers are embarrassed to call these companies out for fear of looking foolish.  Worse, they’ll have been brainwashed by these companies, who have no skin in the game themselves, to believe that if a campaign doesn’t work, it’s the firm’s fault for lacking the skill to close the deal. So a firm will take the $20,000 or $50,000 loss and keep its mouth shut instead of shining a light on these charlatans.

Stephanie Kimbro writes about the  launch of a new business hubm integrated into the services offered by SunTrust, that includes businesses services like web development and legal-lite document preparation (meaning simple leases, website privacy policies and a bunch of other simple business agreements) all in one place.  I agree that it’s an interesting concept – but is this, as Steph suggests, a “sign that the future is starting to get here?” Or are we simply re-introducing models from the past?

Because once upon a time back in the 1950s, banks routinely handled estate planning, as  documented by Jerome Carlin, author of Lawyers on their Own, which is a portrait of solos in Chicago in the middle of the century. As I posted here, Carlin described that banks relied on lawyers to serve as referral sources.  From Carlin:
If you’re just out of law school you go to the trust company and you tell them your client wants them as executor, they will draft the will for you, spend days with you, they’ll even type it for you…
Banks would also tell clients that they didn’t need lawyers:

Interesting video here at Bloomberg News (in the first minute and a half) about large firms shedding trusts and estates practices to serve larger clients. But nature abhors a vacuum – and those trusts and estates clients have to go somewhere. And while those clients — presumably individuals of high worth or small businesses seeking…

My friend, co-author and cloud guru Nicole Black recently reported  on Connecticut’s new opinion  on cloud computing.   To its credit, Connecticut did not mandate obtaining client consent for use of the cloud. Rather, it suggested that lawyers consider seeking consent commensurate with the level of security required. Thus, if you’re representing Edward Snowden, you’d probably want his express consent before posting your litigation playbook in the cloud for his review. By contrast, for most cases (which don’t involve NSA surveillance), this level of caution isn’t necessary – and client consent shouldn’t be either.

Still, many lawyers are apt to “over read” the Connecticut decision as mandating client consent for cloud use in all cases or may, as a prophylactic measure, obtain advance client consent. That’s a problem – because requiring client consent for cloud computing has numerous unintended consequences.

First, many lawyers who use the cloud offer unbundled or virtual services. These lawyers have enough time convincing consumers why they should pay a few hundred dollars to retain a virtual law firm and have a lawyer incorporate an LLC or draft a will on line instead of doing it through a non-lawyer service like Legal Zoom that may charge under one hundred bucks. But if clients not only have to pay a virtual firm more but jump through all kinds of hoops of consenting to the cloud, they’ll run screaming for Legal Zoom. I certainly would. 

In June 2013, the New York Times  DealBook reported that mega-firm, Weil Gotshal slashed seven percent of its associate ranks – sixty junior lawyers in all — and reduced annual compensation for 30 of its 300 partners (who by contract, can’t be terminated without cause).  On one level, the Weil cuts seemed like deja vu all over again; reminiscent of the massive layoffs of more than 14,000 associates across dozens of firms in 2008 and 2009.

As layoffs are again becoming nearly daily news once again, they’ve been accompanied by yet another round of commentary by industry analysts on the future of big law.  Opinions on the new round of cuts diverge wildly; many applaud the cuts as smart business move to eliminate excess capacity, others see it as further confirmation of Richard Susskind’s 2008 predictions in his book, The End of Lawyers, still others offer advice on to save big law.

Yet with all the talk about the future of law, we’ve forgotten about the present – and the disruption (the real kind, not the fancypants buzzword) that this transformation has lives right now.  What about the young associates, who took on huge debt and did everything right, but were downsized before they even had a chance to draft a brief or a contract because the bean-counters thought it was a good idea?  What about the senior partners who hailed from a generation where the law firm was a family, taking care of low earners in good times and bad – and who spent their time mentoring new generations of associates rather than hoarding work themselves?   What about the lawyers (mostly women) in their 30s, frantically cramming 50 hours of work into a “reduced” four-day schedule to spend more time with family, who didn’t have an opportunity to market on top of it? They’re lost in the conversation, nothing more than collateral damage on the road to the future.

To the extent that there’s any advice for those displaced, frankly, it’s pathetic.  Some suggest   that lawyers embrace a vagrant’s life – take the severance pay and travel the world. Others encourage working for free at legal aid organizations – a good way to gain experience, but not to learn how to build business.  The advice of so-called thought leaders is perhaps worst of all, counseling young lawyers to take non-lawyer jobs as e-discovery consultant or project managers or risk consultant without ever considering that after three years in law school, they might actually want to practice law!  Or if you have at least ten years of experience, you could work for one of the celebrated new age firms like Axiom or Clearspire — a solution that admittedly may work for more experienced lawyers but not for junior attorneys.  Others endorse today’s equivalent of the mill practice: selling forms and unbundled legal service either independently or through companies like Legal Zoom. (While commodities work is concededly a good way to pay bills in the short term, in the long run it’s no more viable than the volume practices of yore).

I am so fed up with the topic of saving biglaw capturing marquee posting, while the casualties go unignored.  That’s why I pulled this ebook, From Biglaw to Yourlaw: Why Starting a Firm Can Help You Build a Future in the Future of Law for Kindle  together (OK – my curiosity also got the better of me – and I just had to test out this self-publishing thing!)  Law may be a business, but there’s still some semblance of professionalism left – or there should be. As a lawyer, you shouldn’t be treated an afterthought, a stone kicked aside on someone else’s march to what is billed as an inevitable future.  You shouldn’t be forced to act ashamed or embarrassed about what you do as the press for non-lawyer representation increases.

(Note – I spoke too soon in my earlier post – but I had to get this off my chest!)

This past February 2013, the ABA passed this Resolution to encourage practitioners  (presumably solos and pre-paid providers, since those committees co-sponsored the resolution) to provide unbundled legal services.  No doubt, most ardent proponents of unbundled legal services are skeptical; assuming that we big, bad, turf-guarding legal rent-seekers will simply to dig in our heels and refuse to provide anything less than full-service.

Unfortunately, the matter of unbundled legal services isn’t as black and white as its proponents would claim.  I’ve searched for ways to offer unbundled services that go beyond just reviewing a contract or form, and it’s not an easy road.  I have high ethical standards to begin with, and it’s difficult for me to let go and handle a small piece of a matter while ignoring other issues. But the greater obstacle that I’ve encountered recently in trying to provide unbundled legal services in the regulatory context isn’t just me being a lawyer – but rather, opposing counsel.

Readers, sorry for a week without posting. It’s been a while since that’s happened. I’ve been busy with lots of projects on multiple fronts. I’ll be back on Monday July 8 with great posts, the recording on starting a practice that I promised two months ago and more. So hang in there and keep coming…