Future of Law Fridays: Lawyers and Legal Tech – Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Just like oil and water, lawyers and legal technologists don’t mix well. Too many lawyers remain dismissive of self-help and online solutions even if that’s all a client can afford, smugly chuckling to themselves – “hey, that’s more business for me when I have to straighten out the mess they’ve made.” On the other side of the coin, too many technologists and tech-wannabees assume that lawyers who criticize their sometimes shoddy products must be are obviously terrified of technology .
The truth, of course, lies somewhere in between. But as the fearmongers and futurists become more polarized, enormous gaps in our legal system continue to go unaddressed.
Here’s a simple case in point. Today, the New York Times reports that many financial institutions refuse to honor lawfully created and duly witnessed and notarized powers of attorney, and instead insist that account owners sign the institution’s form. As the article notes, this is often “very unwelcome news.” After all, the reason that the power of attorney is being exercised to begin with is because the account owners are no longer competent to handle their affairs and as such, are equally incompetent to execute a new power of attorney.
Sadly, I know of this problem first-hand. When my husband fell ill two years ago and could no longer handle our finances, I needed to consolidate our numerous accounts in one place so that I could manage them. Yet when I went to one bank to transfer money from an account in my husband’s name to a joint account, and presented a fully compliant POA on a form that the state itself provides, the teller informed me that I’d have to wait a week while the bank’s counsel reviewed the request. After a loud tirade (where I pulled both the lawyer and the brain cancer card) along with threats to report the bank to the Attorney General’s office for refusing to abide by state law, I managed to reduce the wait time for review to 24-hours. However, most consumers don’t have the same “I know the law and I’m not afraid to use it” advantage.
But I digress. My point is that between online DIY forms and full-service trust and estate law firm, there’s a huge gap between planning and practice. Whether a POA is prepared by LegalZoom or Robert Shapiro himself, it’s a worthless document if a bank won’t honor the POA because it’s not on the bank’s preferred form. Yet nearly every day, a new online form generator is launched to spit out POAs and other estate documents and every day, lawyers offer costly estate planning services that don’t explain to clients what to do once they have the documents in hand. What a waste.
So what’s the solution? Well, making lawyers more like Legal Zoom, as some futurists wish, won’t solve the problem and instead, will only result in preparation of even more useless POAs. On the other hand, advising consumers to hire lawyers to help sort out the mess by cajoling banks to accept the POA, or sue if they won’t isn’t a solution either but rather, a significant expense to address a systemic problem that just shouldn’t be happening to begin with.
Still, those aren’t the only solutions. For example, blockchain technology offers some promise; as described here , block chain technology can be used to verify the existence of a power attorney, after which, the blockchain timestamp can be used to prove that a document (like a POA) is the same unaltered document that was presented to the blockchain at a prior point in time. Alternatively, lawyers and multi-million dollar companies like Legal Zoom could collaborate to draft legislation or lobby for new laws that would prohibit financial institutions from declining duly executed POAs.
Legal fear mongers and legal futurists have one thing in common: each group believes that it has all the answers. Meanwhile, as each sector attempts to defend and expand its turf – lawyers, by trying to shut down online services and technologists by recycling stupid ideas that didn’t work before and aren’t likely to succeed now — we are missing out on opportunities solve real problems and if not disrupt, then truly transform our legal system.
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