This occasional solo profile focuses on Georgia workers’ compensation lawyer, Michael Moebes, who blogs at  Georgia Workers’ Compensation Lawyer Blog. Michael is an injury lawyer with a focus on workers’ compensation practicing all over Georgia, but with a primary location is in Atlanta.  This quickie interview with Mike came to mind when I read about the recent release of a cool app, called the Compulator, which helps calculate value of workers’ comp cases.  In Mike’s words, here’s how he came up with the idea and more importantly, implemented it. For more information, you can contact Mike directly at mailto:mm@moelaw.com. Click here for additional information on how to purchase the Compulator App for your practice.

1.  Please share a little information about your app, called the Compulator:  What does it do?

It has 5 key features:  a date calculator, present value calculator, life expectancy provider (from the CDC), “net to client” settlement calculator, and a mediation tracker.  The latter feature  calculates midpoints during settlement negotiations and keeps track of each side’s moves.  This feature has been my favorite one, as clients like being able to visualize where their case is  headed (in terms of dollars) during negotiations on my iPad.

2. Why did you decide to develop this app?

I wanted to buy an app that did some of the functions outlined above, and when I could’ve find one to buy, I looked into creating my own!

3. Is the app targeted for other lawyers or clients?

It’s targeted at lawyers.  Insurance adjusters could also benefit from it, and, I suppose, a pro se client could, but it’s primarily for attorneys who represent individuals.

4.  How did you develop the app?  (did you program it yourself? Hire someone else? who came up with design and idea?

 I came up with the idea and the functions I wanted.  I have a friend who runs a marketing firm, and his company has coders who were able to help me do the actual development.  The name of the company is KeySys Consulting in Birmingham.

5.  What kinds of feedback have you received from your app?

So far, I’ve received a good bit of positive feedback.  Many lawyers seem to like the novelty of creating an app, and the workers’ comp lawyers I know who’ve downloaded the app have  indicated they enjoy using it for putting together settlement demand packages and tracking mediation moves.

6.  I noticed that there is a fee to download the app. Does the app generate revenue for your firm (you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want)

The app just came out, and it’s selling pretty consistently (a few per week after an initial spike when it first came out).  I didn’t create it to necessarily generate revenue, but I did want to recoup some of the development costs.  Mainly, I created a tool I wanted to use, and I figured it would market my firm uniquely.

7.  In addition to your own app, can you identify other apps that are a staple of your practice?

I use DropBox at mediations to refer to PDFs so that I’m not carrying around the entire file when I travel.  I’m a Mac user with the Daylite case management system, so I use that app regularly, too.  I use Ruby Receptionists for after hours call management, and I use its app for instructing the receptionists as to my whereabouts and where I want messages forwarded.  Finally, I use social media apps every day:  FaceBook, Twitter, and LinkedIn for networking.

8.  Are apps the future of legal technology in your view?

I think they will play a bigger role than they do now but don’t necessarily think they’re “the future.”  However, I think solos will continue to be the pioneers and advocates of new technology and will use them more frequently and more quickly than will the rest of the industry!

Related posts:

1. Can You Make Money from Handling Workers’ Comp?
2. IOLTA Pioneer (and Shingler) With A Killer App
3. The NY State Bar Has a Mobile App for Ethics. Why Not the ABA or Other States?

Today’s consumers are hungry for information, and as I’ve written before, an ebook generally fits the bill. Ebooks educate clients about their rights, while demonstrating your law firm’s expertise. Even if you’re an avid blogger, blogs aren’t exactly portable – so even compiling posts into a single document may buy you some added exposure.

While a plain, self-created PDF file is adequate for publishing an ebook, today’s consumers’ expect something a bit nicer. Paying for a professional to design your ebook is one option – and today’s desk-top publishing packages and free and easy to deploy fonts, via Font Squirrel also provide an easy way to enhance plain text.

But increasingly folks are reading books on mobile devices like ipads or phones. So to get the most out of an ebook, you may want to convert it into a flipbook or app. Recently, I experimented with InstantFlipBook.com to convert my trade association’s road map for the marine renewables industry into a an online flip book. The instant flip book tool was free and allowed me to do the conversion online, almost instantly. But I found other products that you can download to your desktop to complete the conversion – and I also saw that a Fiverr contractor will convert your ebook into an
app for Android for five bucks. Given the minimal time and low investment to convert your ebook to a flip book or app, isn’t it worth a try?

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Back when I started my law firm, one of my first “paying” matters was an appeal of a Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) decision to the D.C. Circuit. I put the term “paying” in quotes because I only collected about $1500 for the matter; my former firm kept the $1000 retainer since I’d brought the case in about two months before my departure. The matter turned out to involve far, far more time than I’d ever anticipated. Even though I’d worked on the rehearing below and was familiar with the substantive issues, I still needed to research the applicable standard-of-review (not an easy task, relying on digests and annotated codes because I couldn’t afford LEXIS) and comply with the D.C. Circuit’s then-unfamiliar procedures (today, I can almost do it in my sleep). And of top of all that, I had to compile, Bate-stamp and reproduce a relatively modest 250 page Joint Appendix, which took at least an entire day. All told, between inexperience and lack of tools, that brief probably took me nearly a month to complete.

Of course, even back then, I assumed that my skills and writing speed would eventually improve. But I never fully conceived of the possible efficiencies that technology would bring, nor did I fully recognize how far we’d come until today. Brought into a matter relatively late in the process, I drafted a 45-page brief, 7-page motion and compiled a 600-page Appendix in three days, and even had time to elicit feedback from the clients along the way. Sure, I didn’t do it all by hand or on my own: my virtual assistant, operating under equal stress, electronically bate-stamped the Appendix and created a table of contents for it in record time. Meanwhile, I collected documents — electronic Google maps and photos and earlier filed comments — from my multi-member group on Dropbox, shifted seamlessly between LEXIS (energy library), Google Scholar and Fastcase, cut and pasted and uploaded case snippets to separate notes on Evernote (which rocked!) where I could review them on my ipad and then assemble my brief section by section. And with five minutes to spare til the deadline, I electronically filed.

Experienced or not, there is simply no way that I could have pulled this off when I started my practice, or even ten years ago. What’s more, there’s no way that I could have priced the project affordably, or that much of the substantive evidence in the case could have been developed without tools like Google Maps, digital cameras, online court and agency databases and Google. When I handle a case like this, I feel exhausted, yes (it’s a lot to do in 3 days), but even after all this time in practice, I still marvel at how far we’ve come and at how much we can do with technology as a leveler.

It’s this promise of technology that makes me so frustrated at these schemes that focus on bringing law to the masses faster and cheaper but not any better. Or that makes me disinclined to cheer or RT a tweet reporting on how law students are learning how to open up online LegalZooms when they can barely draft a document on their own. Why are we using technology to settle for mediocrity when we can use it to aspire to exceptionalism?

Granted, not everyone needs a 45 page brief and 600 page appendix. But I’d bet that if given a choice, most consumers would prefer the Cadillac brief to the jalopy if the price paid for value received wasn’t all that different. Moreover, it’s often those lawyers who have mastered the basics who can eyeball an incorporation document and explain how it can be fixed in a couple minutes, or who can look at a transcript from a criminal trial and identify 20 errors in 20 minutes. The ability to get to the root of a problem quickly is what makes a lawyer a value add and not just a scrivener in providing unbundled or basic legal services. Yet so much of the focus in the discussion of technology and law firms is about the form and the platform and not the skills. Even the great Richard Susskind conceives of an impenetrable wall between “bespoke legal services” and law for the masses. My point is that it doesn’t have to be that way.

Shouldn’t we at least strive to use technology to improve the quality, rather than increase the quantity of legal services provided? At the very least, if we shoot for the moon, the worst that can happen is that we land among the stars. After all, if we can draft the 45 page brief and compile the 600 page appendix in 3 days, assisting clients with smaller matters is a cakewalk.

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Right now, there’s a conversation on Solosez.net about favorite uses for Fiverr, a site that bills itself as “the world’s largest marketplace for small services, starting at $5. Turns out, many solos are using Fiverr, with good success, for blog banners, photo retouching and other small projects. I’ve also seen services for business card design, logos and a handwritten signature (a colleague of mine created an e-signature for me years ago and it’s extremely handy).

Initially, I wondered about whether those using Fiverr can earn anything worthwhile, apparently, some folks generate a few thousand dollars in cash by doing simple tasks on volume. Think about it – if you’re skilled enough to cut a video opening in 10 minutes and can churn out six in an hour, that’s $30, which honestly, is more than document reviewers earn these days. Plus, a couple of people on Solosez added that they’ve hired their Fiverr contractors for projects at higher rates, so it does offer a way to get in front of a prospect quickly without completely working on spec.

Of course, there are also get-what-you-pay for drawbacks to Fiverr. There’s at least one report of a provider who embedded malware in a site, plus there are lots of participants who offer SEO services of questionable repute that lawyers would do best to avoid.

In full disclosure, I have been intrigued by, but have not used Fiverr – and most likely, I probably wouldn’t if I were interested in top quality work. Still, for the cost of a Lincoln (how symbolic, since he was a solo!), solos can have a little fun and maybe get something useful in the process.

Have you used Fiverr? Share your opinion in the comment section.

Related posts:

1. Musings from the Other End of the Pleading
2. If You Just Started a Law Firm, Hire A Summer Associate
3. That’s My Signature, and I Never Get Tired of Seeing It

In both the first, and now second edition of Solo by Choice , I recommend the solo option as a way to “own, not loan” one’s talents. Yet the choice between ownership versus loan-ership isn’t unique to law practice.  It’s also one that lawyers increasingly confront in an era of crowdsourcing, a practice which at its most basic has users loan talen in exchange for “exposure.”

Crowdsourcing isn’t always a negative when the user reaps real value from participation.  Google, after all, is the great-grandaddy of crowdsourcing, giving away a robust search engine or free phone numbers (through Google Voice ) to gather user data.  Likewise, some social media platforms – LinkedIn, Justia, JDSupra and Avvo – don’t charge for the cost of participation and offer users a clean, professional web presence and some SEO juice. That’s a reasonably fair trade.

But other sites require more commitment. Sites like Quora rely on user contribution of knowledge, while sites like Huffington Post and 99Designs built entire business models on free labor by journalists or graphic designers.

So – should you give away content like guest posts or legal advice — at crowdsourced sites in exchange for exposure?  O keep it to yourself and build your own presence, even though it may not have as much visibility?  Although once, these two choices once posed a real dilemma for solo and small firms, with the declining cost of technology, it’s now feasible for solo and small firms, either independently or in collaboration with others to build a robust platform that will deliver clients as effectively as any crowdsourced or pay-per-click solution.

That’s the lesson of attorney Raj Abhyanker, recounted in this a former solo who’s grown his trademark practice to a firm of eight full time employees in three years by creating Trademarkia, an online search engine stocked with free information from the US Patent and Trademark Office, that helps small business owners run easy trademark searches. As described in the NYT’s You’re the Boss Blog, Trademarkia drives visitors who seeking legal assistance with trademarks to Abhyanker’s law firm, and in addition, offers other fee-based services such as domain registration, logo design and automated alerts to notify trademark holders when similar marks are filed. Though Trademarkia’s traffic, roughly 500,000 a month isn’t as high as the million captured by more general sites like Legal Zoom or Rocket Lawyer, that doesn’t matter since it attracts a more targeted audience, i.e., visitors interested in trademarks, who are more likely to convert to clients.

Relatively speaking, it didn’t cost much to get Trademarkia up and running – just $25,000. Considering that some small law firms spend that much annually on online advertising, that’s not all that much. Moreover, solos needn’t develop this type of site alone. Even if five solos had kicked in $5000 each, they’d have collected 1/5 of the whopping $5 million in legal fees that Abhyanker says the site helped to generate for his firm.

Bear in mind that it’s not just solos who are generating their own lead machines. Perkins Coie is the latest entrant to the freebies for start ups party, with its slick Start Up Percolator, offering a suite of free tools, including online Delaware incorporation formation. Again, something like this may be out of an individual solo’s budget, but feasible if accomplished through cooperation.

So rather than dream of the day that you can pay between $72 and $107 for leads, or that you have enough time to offer free advice to start ups on someone else’s site why not generate your own lead machine like Raj Abhyanker? Not only does owning beat loaning, it also beats be-moaning your plight as well.

Related posts:

1. Don’t Ignore Your Core: Lessons from the Demise of Slideshare.net
2. Real Life Marketing and Client Service Lessons, Courtesy of Jet Blue
3. Marketing Lessons from Las Vegas

As my friend Matt Homann has said, the best and most interesting part of a conference happens outside of the conference. And even at ABA Tech Show, with some of the most high quality, substantive programming of any conference, Matt’s observation still holds true, with the personal connections taking place outside of the classroom sessions and making TechShow all that much rewarding and enjoyable.

Of course, at a place like TechShow, even many of the personal conversations and off-the-record comments aren’t limited to idle chit-chat, but touch on big picture issues like the promise of technology and the future of law and challenges of moving forward. Those are the topics where three of my outside Tech Show programming “best of’s” come into play:

1. Best idea: One of the best ideas I’ve heard in a long time came in the form of a question from an unidentified participant during the Bilinsky/Adkins session on new virtual business models for law firms. As Dave Bilinsky itemized the litany of potential ethics considerations that the bars have only just started to address, this participant asked “What about a challenge to the Bar rules on the basis that the obstacles to virtual practice violate the Americans With Disabilities Act? The questioner went on to describe at least some of the lawyers who favor, and clients who patronize virtual law practices do so because online services are easier to deliver and access for those with disabilities. (As an aside, after my post on NJ’s Bonafide Office Requirement, I received an email from a disabled attorney who had written a letter to the NJ Powers that Be, describing his own personal reliance on a virtual model). Though I’ve been knocking my head against the wall to change some of the outdated bar rules, the ADA isn’t something I’d ever thought of. Pure genius!

2. Best document generating tool At dinner on Friday night, I sat next to one of my favorite TechShow/blogosphere buddies, Ken Adams. Though you’d probably never guess from Ken’s precise, measured writing style and flair (in contrast to my rantings), we actually have several common pet peeves including low quality forms and templates. But in contrast to me (all complaint, little action), Ken has actually put his money and skills where his mouth is and developed an automated, superior NDA that is now available FREE by registering here. I urge you to take a look at what Ken has developed and take advantage of it to get a sense of what high quality document automation can be like (see my previous post here on my review of Ken’s NDA product.

3.Best Observation I had a few conversations with Scott Stanley, CEO of Associated Legal Blogs a service that offers short feeds from all legal blogs all in one place. After the 60 Apps in 60 Minutes session, Scott remarked on the benefits of apps that take one function and do it really well, as opposed to platforms that incorporate multiple functions in a lackluster way. After Scott shared the insight, the lightbulbs went off in my head, explaining why niche practice, particularly solo niche practices have gained so much ground lately: because of the app-ification of the way we do business. Because of apps, consumers no longer expect or desire a product that does everything OK, if they can find an app that does one thing that rocks. So too with niche practice where smaller clients find a lawyer for their precise problem. Likewise, the app-ification of law has replaced the “one stop shopping model,” as even large firms are increasingly willing to bundle up a bunch of smaller niche practices for their needs instead of sending all their business to one large firm.

Of course, just as a developer may design several apps, solos aren’t limited to one practice niche either. In many ways, my own practice model is a bundle of apps itself – eminent domain, FERC practice, social media in regulated industries and appeals – with the common thread of solving problems of first impression and last resort. But my practice, like others similarly structured works because like apps, discrete, niche areas are easy to set up, inexpensive to market since the target audience is limited, and so well suited to client needs that clients become loyal and supportive fans.

The app-ification of law practice. How about that my futuristic friends?

Needless to say, there were plenty of other bests at TechShow beyond these three – these are just the ones most relevant to my beat at MyShingle. Though if you came away with similar best of’s, I welcome them in the comment section below. In the meantime, if you’d prefer a big picture view of TechShow 2012, take a look at posts by Nicole Black (Legal Technology and Innovation at Its Finest) and InsideLegal’s TechShow 2012: What Went Down, and if you want a quick run down on Jim Calloway’s outstanding keynote on the Future of Law: Dark Clouds or Silver Linings, see Connie Crosby’s excellent summary or Dave Bilinsky’s cautionary words. By the way, tomorrow, I’ll be posting on where I found the future of law last month – surprisingly, much as I enjoyed TechShow, it wasn’t there. Stay tuned….

Related posts:

1. ABA TechShow – Technolawyer Summary of My Panel, Technology for the StartUp
2. Some Quick Tech Tidbits
3. Hope to Meet You At ABA Tech Show

Cloud Computing for Lawyers, by Nicole Black (my co-author for Social Media for Lawyers) is an extraordinary book. Not just for the exhaustive and well-researched content, which I’ll discuss in more detail below. Rather, what’s so significant about Cloud Computing for Lawyers is that Niki acknowledges the cloud for what it is: a universal trend impacting all business and not just lawyers specifically.

Cloud computing starts not with the law, or law-related issues, but the facts. Such as, that the cloud is a growing technology, gaining traction exponentially due to the pace of growth of Internet processors versus hardware. That many of today’s innovations that we rely on so seamlessly – Hotmail or Google Docs or Dropbox are all cloud-based. And that multiple other industries, from the government to medical profession to Fortune 500 businesses are integrating the cloud to slash costs and improve functionality.

As businesses adapt to the cloud, and as a new generation of school children are born and bred on cloud products (my daughters are far more adept with Google Docs than Word and have each had Gmail accounts since they were eight), they come to expect the same skills of the lawyers who serve them. In short, the cloud isn’t some out-there, nutty idea concocted by legal futurists, but it’s real and it’s here now.

Which means that lawyers need to understand it. No, we don’t have to understand the programming aspects and the code that goes into designing cloud products – and Niki makes clear at the outset that this isn’t a book about technical nuts and bolts of the cloud, but rather, a practical guide focused on what lawyers need to know.  So in the opening chapters, Niki defines cloud computing and assesses both the pros and cons of relying on the cloud for a law practice (the book is quite even handed in that regard).  Thereafter, the remainder of the book is divided into two large chunks;  the second section which deals with ethics and security issues governing cloud and the third describes cloud products for lawyers and how to go about choosing the ones that are right for one’s practice.

So, on to part II. My buddy Larry Port of Rocket Matter believes that the ethics chapter of the book, authored by Steph Kimbro makes the book worth the price of admission and I don’t disagree there. But with all due respect to Stephanie’s stellar and undoubtedly critical work in unravelling the ethics issues, for me, what’s far more important for lawyers to understand about the cloud than the legal ethics are the straight up laws – privacy and data security and protection laws, both in the US and overseas. (As an aside, I’ve long believed that the applying legal ethics to cloud issues is at best a stretch, a last gasp effort by the bars to hang on to some relevance in a fast changing world. But let’s face it – if a lawyer holds client data and there’s a security breach that he fails to disclose, resulting in millions of dollars of losses to a client, do you really think that the client will be content to file a grievance or seek relief under data breach statutes? Thought so). Niki discusses the relevance of each of these statutes and how they might apply to lawyers’ use of cloud computing in various circumstances.  I cannot over-emphasize how important this is because no longer do lawyers have the luxury of just ethics compliance; we have real world data security and protection obligations as well.  For me, it’s these chapters that make the book worth the price of admission.

Part III of the book identifies a variety of cloud-based tools applications and the purposes for which they can be used, including practice management, back up, collaboration and e-discovery. There’s a helpful chart comparing legal-specific practice management tools (I wish there’d been discussion of non-legal ones as well but there’s just too much to cover) and examples from practicing lawyers about the suite of tools that they use. In testament to how quickly this area is changing, the book does not have much discussion on cloud-based document automation or forms, which seem to have leapt onto the scene in the past three to six months (I know that some of the virtual law office portals have document preparation, but I’m talking more about document automation as a standalone product). Also helpful for lawyers are checklists for choosing a cloud-based vendor and a sample contract from Clio, another cloud based provider.

My only criticism about the book relates to the structure. Personally, I’d much rather have read about the suite of tools available before learning about the ethics and laws that attorneys must abide in using cloud-based tools. Not a big deal – I just skipped ahead to the fun stuff!

Bottom line – Cloud Computing for Lawyers is a critical read for all lawyers, because all lawyers deal with the cloud one way or another – and if they don’t, their clients do. Lawyers will be faced with a host of different products and need to know how to choose those that are reliable versus those that may compromise client data. With this book, lawyers are well armed for a bright future where the sun shines because of the cloud.

Related posts:

1. Legal Ethics of Cloud Computing
2. Reminder: ABA Ethics 2020 Briefing 11/4/10 Plus, Another Great Argument for the Cloud…by a Bar LPM Advisor
3. North Carolina Wants Your Comments on Cloud Based Practice Management Tools.

I’m looking forward to the 2012 ABA Tech Show where I’ll be covering various sessions relevant to solos, including cloud choices for solos and how solos can build a virtual team. If you have any other sessions that you’d like me to summarize on Friday or Saturday (I’ve got a conflict Thursday), please let me know.

Meanwhile, if you are curious about the web and tech tools that solos are currently using, check out this comprehensive chart — and please, add your own tech choices via this form. If you want to get a sense of how lawyers are plugging and playing technology, check out these Solo Lawyer Tech Bios.

Finally, I’m happy to report that the MyShingle Virtual Business Card Fishbowl Drop is a great success so far with 68 cards collected. Given the great response, the contest date is extended through April 5 – and you can continue to upload your cards here.

Related posts:

1. Hope to Meet You At ABA Tech Show
2. More Resources on Virtual Assistants
3. Law Firm Tech Bio: Tina Marie Hilton; Conover, NC Virtual Assistant

Initially, I was excited when I saw this headline, Meet the startups that are giving everyone affordable access to justice. Great, I thought — an article that finally recognizes what solos — who are, after all, start-up lawyers – are doing to ensure that meaningful access to justice isn’t reserved for deep-pockets. But after a sentence or two, I realized, to my dismay, that the piece merely echoed the growing chorus singing the praises of techno-enabled websites that deliver DIY or cut-rate legal services.

But do these legal start ups really serve the underserved? To be sure, there’s a need for affordable legal services, which are priced at the upper end of even most middle class budgets. And the problem is far worse for the poor, where there are more than 6400 open cases for every lawyer willing to handle one pro bono, says the article.

Still, how many of these cases can be resolved by forms or automation? An ABA survey of judges released a year ago found that pro se litigants suffer most in courtroom proceedings because of lack of training and courtroom experience. How-to guides may be useful for a small claims case, where procedures are relaxed — but they won’thelp pro se’s more effectively cross examine an adverse party or ensure that evidence makes it into the record in a formal proceeding.

In fact, many past efforts to automate the wheels of justice have had disastrous results. Automated debt collection cases have clogged courtrooms with unfounded lawsuits while robosigners and bare-bones foreclosure teams caused much of the housing meltdown to begin with. Technology unchecked isn’t much better than unchecked lawyers.

Meanwhile, services like Shpoonkle, that force lawyers into bidding wars, or capping legal fees at $89 for traffic ticket defense or $275 for a divorce aren’t all that much better. Granted, these services will get clients a warm body, which for truly simple matters may be all they need. But again, how much of a defense can a lawyer put on in a misdemeanor case that heats up when he’s only bid $500 to handle it?

The trouble with many of these legal start ups is that they address the wrong problem. That’s because they begin with the assumption that the high cost of legal services is due to lawyers’ aversion to technology or greed. For example, one of the company founders quoted in the article talks about how lawyers spend 50 percent of their time copying and rearranging citations which grossly inflates their rates. Um, maybe that’s the case at some of the nation’s largest law firms, but most solo or small firm lawyers I know don’t do much photocopying since they run largely paperless shops – and rely on Shepardizing or lower cost law clerks or paralegals to cite check.  Contending that lawyers don’t make use of technology is not only insulting, but just plain ignorant.

Likewise, the article quotes an average billing rate of $284/hour which doesn’t say much either. Sure, $284 isn’t pocket change, but if a lawyer can resolve a matter in a couple of hours, the rate isn’t exorbitant. In fact, Legal Zoom isn’t much cheaper. Take a look at the $99 incorporation package. Many lawyers –even those without support staff — could easily bang out three Legal Zoom incorporations (total = $300) in an hour and wouldn’t even require a 7-10 day turn-around. The reason that many lawyers don’t is because they also spend time to understand clients’ goals and assist in selection of a business entity. Truth be told, if clients don’t want to pay for full service, many lawyers will direct them to incorporation forms available online or give them necessary forms for free .

Of course, most of these tech start ups don’t realize any of this since they’re completely out of touch with how solo and small firm lawyers operate and what types of services would allow us to charge less or better help our client.  That’s not surprising either, because if you take a look at many of these companies’ founders or board members, you’ll see that they’re comprised of Silicon Valley techies and big law expatriates who don’t have a clue as to many of the mundane factors that drive the cost of legal services.

Like inefficient courts, where lawyers are often stuck waiting three hours for a case call and can’t work on any other matters in the process for fear of offending their client or the judge. (Solution: incorporate teleconferences or web for simple status calls or make wireless and work rooms readily available where lawyers can follow proceedings without sitting on a bench in the court) Or courts that don’t have e-filing and require lawyers to dispatch a messenger and make multiple copies every time they have to make a filing. And don’t even get me started on the cost of deposition and trial transcripts. Although video and voice recognition technology could eliminate the need for in-person reporters and the exorbitant $5.00/page cost per page, most courts won’t accept anything other than an official, reporter-prepared transcript – which can add thousands of dollars to civil suits and appeals. Then, there’s the cost of expert witnesses and investigators, which also take another chunk of change out of a case.

None of the tech start ups do much to address these costs. In fact, by spending so much time braying about the high cost of legal services and pitting lawyers against each other to lowball fees, the tech start ups make the problem of access to justice even worse. After all, a lawyer who’s getting $2000 for a murder trial isn’t likely to blow $1000 on an investigator or an expert witness. Rather, he’ll dispense with those services to the detriment of his client.

Moreover, tech companies incorrectly assume that technology is always the answer. Maybe so — but tech ain’t always free either. E-discovery search tools are far more powerful than combing through documents one page at a time — but many are really pricy and out of small lawyers’ price range. Other services with value-adds like legal briefs or expert write-ups that large firms can afford cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars a year. True, there are forms and products available for solo and small firm lawyers, but truth be told, much of what I’ve seen so far (with the notable exception of Ken Adams’ NDA and a few others — please chime in if you’re one of them) are, quite frankly, garbage and insulting to solo lawyers and our clients. It’s no wonder that many lawyers have to resort to drafting contracts from scratch when the majority of available templates are completely subpar.

From what I can tell, many of the newest generation of tech start ups aren’t using technology to improve the quality of legal services or lower the costs. Instead, they’re focused on bashing what lawyers do and trivializing the legal problems of the middle class and poor. These start ups aren’t trying to make good lawyers more widely accessible, or to help middling lawyers gain the tools to become better. Instead, they’re all about convincing the public why bottom feeders and robots and forms are good enough to serve the legal needs of the “common folk” when those same services won’t do for complex or important matters like multi-billion dollar mergers or a anti-trust actions. Ultimately, the tech start up companies widen the gap between haves and have nots by suggesting that it’s OK for a large portion of society to do without lawyers at all.

Don’t get me wrong — technology can go a long way in improving the quality of legal services that we lawyers deliver to clients. For that, I need look no further than my practice, where I’ve been able to use out of the box tech like Adobe Acrobat and Google Maps and Box.net not just to handle, but to win cases against multi-million dollar companies that just five years ago would have been unthinkably expensive. But solving the problem of access to justice isn’t as simple as getting rid of, or deregulating all the lawyers or robotizing the practice of law. It also requires systemic changes like eliminating the administrivia that mean that a case may cost several thousand dollars even before a lawyer comes on board, and allowing lawyers to unbundle services in some instances without fear of malpractice and getting rid of the solo tax which can increase costs for solos as well.

If legal technology start ups are really serious about access to justice and not just access to venture capital, then maybe they ought to start by talking to law firm start-ups; the solo and small firm lawyers who have a view from the trenches on why legal services cost so much what it takes to make equal access to justice a reality for all.

Related posts:

1. Great News for Law Firm Start Ups: 80 Percent of Dotcoms Survived!
2. Get in On the Ground Floor With Clients By Providing The Ground Floor
3. Making Real Money At A Virtual Firm

Update (1/26/12, 11 am) Here’s Scott’s post, Un-Optimization, which was also referenced by Kevin. Read the post yourself, but as I interpret it, Scott argues you can’t have it both ways: if you write what you believe in or what is controversial, you take a chance that you will offend or drive others away. If you blog to voice an opinion, that risk won’t bother you, but if you are blogging to market, the risk will be too great. That, as I understand is why Scott believes blogging to opine and blogging to market are incompatible but READ HIS POST!! I am not sure that the continuum is as black and white as this (which goes back to Jamison’s point) but that is because if my principles were important enough, I’d voice my opinion without compromise (that’s why I’m stuck in the Rakofsky lawsuit). On the other hand, if the issue didn’t matter so much to me and would offend, I suppose I would back away. What a lawyer’s line. Anyway, this issue has been beaten to death but if you want to jump in for another round, feel free.

Every so often, the familiar conversation crops up in the blogosphere over why we ought to blog?  My buddy Kevin O’Keefe sells blogs, so of course, he’s bullish about their importance to the legal profession.  Except, if you’ve ever met Kevin, you know that this isn’t just a sales pitch; he actually believes this stuff.

Other bloggers believe this stuff too.  As Kevin notes,  Scott Greenfield blogs to let people know he was here [update: see comment above]; Jamison Koehler blogs to share his love of the law and desire to engage other bloggers, but he’s also frank in noting that there’s a residual marketing benefit that he derives from his efforts.

I’ll admit, that I don’t get as agitated by others by flawging (except if there’s ghostwriting involved, I consider deceptive. But blogging for the sake of SEO only may not be wrong, but it’s a waste of a medium that empowers individual lawyers to do great things.

Take a look at a companion post I wrote long ago about why I blog. What’s your reason?

Related posts:

1. Blogging for the Long Haul
2. Five Things Lawyers and Bloggers Can Learn from Scott Greenfield
3. It’s All About Your About Page