practicehacker

(... still more) Predictions ...

I was going to write something clever here but … screw it. This is what I think is going to happen in 2010.

1. Big law firms lose clients due to high overhead and lack of value
2. Small law firms pick up the clients and their profitability jumps
3. Unemployed grads go solo en masse depressing all lawyer wages
4. Home and flex offices, telecommuting, and telepresence catch on
5. Inefficient lawyers lose while those with social media savvy win
6. Walled gardens like Facebook thrive at the expense of open ones
7. Lawyers will use Twitter and Facebook at last, but still suck at it
8. Lawyers.com beats Avvo by selectively going public on some level
9. Blogs v. Twitter: Kevin O’Keefe and Rex Gradeless fight to the death
10. Real-time search and social media change legal research forever

Bonus: I finally stop making stupid predictions about the future of legal tech.

Feel free to share your thoughts about the coming year in the comments section below. See you in the new year.

The Lawyer’s Guide to Collaboration Tools and Technologies:
Smart Ways to Work Together

“Law practice is, has been, and will continue to be a collaborative process”
Dennis Kennedy and Tom Mighelle

Summary: The Lawyer’s Guide offers a solid list of resources for lawyers seeking to collaborate. It is practically jargon-free as well, and frames its discussions with a look at the past before discussing more modern modes of collaboration. The book is also a great introduction to technology for lawyers of a certain age (i.e. Baby Boomers), although younger lawyers may find it to be a little too basic.

The Good: The authors of The Lawyer’s Guide display sensitivity to attorneys who came of age before the Internet was pervasive, and they do it without over-explaining or being too didactic.

The Bad: The authors do their best to treat the products attorneys have been using for decades, such as Microsoft Office programs, as collaboration tools. By today’s standards these programs are more likely to obstruct collaboration than to enable it. In the age of Twitter, Wikis, Zoho, SaaS, and Google Wave, they are part of the problem, not the solution.

The Ugly: As I read The Lawyer’s Guide I kept asking myself why the authors didn’t treat technology-enabled collaboration as a smart way to business instead of like the Rubic’s Cube of law practice (perplexing, complex, exasperating). It really isn’t that hard.

Evaluation: Keeping in mind what the books sets out to do, I give The Lawyer’s Guide a hearty endorsement and 4 hacks out of 5. In places it is a bit too basic but overall you can’t go wrong giving this book a read – either because you are a lawyer of a certain age or because you work for one.

From Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop – some good advice about how to get found online:

• Don’t Be Ordinary. Unique ideas will take you further than throwing money at marketing
• Create Good Content. Blogs, videos, podcasts, social networks, and tweets get noticed
• Optimize It. Optimize posts to be found on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Bing, Yahoo, etc.
• Promote It. Post your content as many ways as you can and email it to interested parties
• Measure Results. Act once, measure twice and keep measuring for continued success

Lawyers Jason and Geoff Anderman want to make online document automation simple. Easier said than done. Many have tried. None have succeeded.

Hotdocs is one option; as are Richard Granat’s DirectLaw and similar “virtual practice” applications such as VLO Tech. Over the years Ixio and other desktop software solutions have tried to deploy their systems to the Web with mixed results too.  But just being online isn’t the point. The question is whether an application can add value in this (over)crowded field.  Large firms have been doing this for 2 decades and can afford to make mistakes or even do things the hard way using a virtual private network (VPN). Smaller firms have done this for a good 5 years. And with the advent of DirectLaw, Advologix – which adapts Salesforce.com for lawyers – and the prevalence of SaaS, sole practitioners can now get in on the act.

So can WhichDraft get it right? Based on my interview with the founders … maybe. At least they have a better starting point than their predecessors who literally had to cover the cost of expensive legacy systems and weren’t native web-based solutions.  My advice is to try WhichDraft and voice your suggestions loudly. These guys seem smart enough to listen and give us what we want instead of making us take what they’re giving. Are you listening, Thomson West?

Prism Legal’s Ron Friendman liveblogged (a/k/a real-time blogged) Richard Susskind’s discussion of the future of the profession at ILTA 2009.  Here are the Top 10 disruptive legal technologies on the list:

Document Assembly. Has already changed markets. Providing document assembly online allows for economies of scale. Charges and hours don’t have to relate, making this technology “disruptive.

Always on Connectivity. Lawyers can, and are expected to, be on call 24/7.  Deal with it.

Electronic Legal Marketplace. Your value in the  a frictionless marketplace. Clients can select legal services in the electronic marketplace and even choose to go with non-lawyer alternatives.

E-Learning. Law schools have long been falling down on the job. The Internet can revive learning with realistic simulations.

Online Legal Guidance. Interactive advice systems in the “latent legal market” (see Suskind, The Future of Lawyers). Sounds like self-guided document automation.

Legal Open-Sourcing. A la Wikipedia. Crowd-sourcing communities of interested individuals can result in better answers than throwing the problem to a single individual.  Consumers more likely to talk to friend with similar problems than a lawyer.

Closed Legal Communities. See Legal Onramp. Clients and In House Counsel can pool legal information and check a common knowledge-base before consulting pricey outside counsel.

Workflow and Project Management. High volume, low value work can be made into off-the-rack solutions; making certain lawyers into de facto project managers. Project management requires significant training, but lawyers aren’t getting any. This is a disruptive trend because it highlights the fact that as efficiency increases, billable hours decrease.

Embedded Legal Knowledge. In the future legal knowledge will be built into compliance systems making the contributions of highly-trained counsel less necessary except for unusual assignments.

Online Dispute Resolution. Dispute resolution as a service. Services like CyberSettle versus time spent in Court or in the arbitration system.

The Upshot: Easy document assembly, 90-day free trial, a tad pricey at $395/license.

The Interview: Roy Lasris, publisher of document-assembly program Pathagoras, showed me how the program worked with our existing documents and installation of Word 2007 (as well as older versions of Word and Wordperfect). The application is practically invisible except when called upon. Setup takes about 20 minutes, and 10 minutes after that most users can be turning existing documents into forms that are auto-filled using information entered only once such as client or party names and addresses, matter names and numbers, etc.

The Evaluation: Pathagoras has got the goods. Document automation could scarcely get easier and you already own wordprocessing software so this is addition is no-brainer. Of course I prefer a less chunky interface and more of that smooth web-native look, but in all likelihood this is all you’d need. Plus you can easily (I mean, easily) load up your existing office documents and get them humming. As for price – I prefer free, and this isn’t free. So it’s a cost-benefit analysis, and not a difficult one at that.

The Critique: Sure the product works well and is simple, but I’m the practicehacker so I can be picky. What would benefit Pathagoras and add more value would be a collaborative space where users can share tips and information, a list of free and premium templates, and pay-as-you-go pricing instead of that one-shot payment. That’s the business model you want, Roy.

The Recommendation: For practice areas like bankruptcy, divorce, estate planning, real estate, and other document intensive areas, the  program sells itself.  For more involved practices a more comprehensive solution may be needed but I would still recommend giving Pathagoras a try and pushing it to its limits before you pay more  for another system. You might be surprised how flexible this system can be.

The Rating: 4 hacks (out of 5)

Feedback:  If you’ve used Pathagoras or have an opinion about it, sound off in the comments or contact me atmhedayat@mha-law.com.

Making Pacer User Friendly

Friday I stumbled on Recap and was impressed.  How impressed? I downloaded it immediately and signed the online petition to make federal case-law available for free. Yeah – that impressed. Recap seems to have impressed some others as well; it has even enlisted top-shelf talent like the lawyer-activist-millionaires over at Justia (you might be more familiar with their last project, Findlaw).

How it works: Recap saves every document you view on PACER, adds meta-tags and other features, makes the item easier to find, and posts it to a central locale.  The next time a user goes to PACER and wants that document, if it’s already been “liberated” then the user can download it free of charge.

Granted, you end up paying the 8 cents per page, which means that someone else gets a free ride, but the idea is that someone else could be doing the same and so on.  Of course the fact that Recap exists begs the question of why we Americans must pay to view the fruits of our own justice system. Westlaw and Lexis figured out that answer a long time ago.

To use Recap you must use Firefox, the open-source alternative to Internet Explorer. But I suggest you download Firefox even if you don’t download Recap. It’s just a better browser.

Feedback:  If you’ve used Recap or have an opinion sound off in our comment section or contact me, Hacker in Chief, at mhedayat@mha-law.com