Self-Help Law, Limited Legal Services : MyLawyer.com : Law That You Can Afford

Law.Com reports that the Hawaii Bar Association has petitioned the Hawaii Supreme Court to expand on its authorized practice rules in a way that would prohibit non-lawyer legal document preparers.

Bar Association President Jeffrey Sia said the "motive is not greed, but the protection of the public." Does he have any empirical evidence to back up this position -- of course not!!

When the Massachusetts Bar Association tried to pass a similar rule expanding the definition of the Unauthorized Practice of Law, the US Department of Justice and the US Federal Trade Commission sent an advisory letter to the MBA suggesting that there was no consumer benefit in the expanded rule and that it would be anti-competitive. The FTC stated that there was no justification for such a rule in the absence of substantial consumer injury would could be documented. I wonder how the FTC will respond to this latest effort by the organized bar to restrict consumer choice.

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http://www.illinoisdivorce.com is another web site that offers low cost no-fault divorce forms bundled with legal advice. Operated by the Chicago law firm of Cowell Taradash, P.C., this web site offers useful legal information on Illinois divorce issues, an offer of free consultation with an attorney by telephone, and an offer to answer simple legal questions on family law by email for free. The basic fee for an uncontested, self-help divorce is only $185.00. Although it is hard to tell from the home page, some form of document automation or web-based interview is utilized to increase efficiency and law firm productivity.

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 A new web site based in Florida: http://www.idivorce.com     offers a set of automated Florida divorce forms for free. The user scrolls through a set of friendly but numerous screens, and inserts their financial information and other information. Once completed, the forms are instantly available and can be printed out from the web browser. The generated forms are not in Adobe .PDF format, as distributed by the Florida Supreme Court, but they seem to meet all of the court requirements any way, so they should be accepted by Florida court clerks.

The interesting feature of the site is that the forms are not only automated, which requires a capital investment, but also free. Apparently the research, development, and administrative costs will be offset by advertising revenues generated by Google Ad Words and other advertising networks. I see this as a trend in the sense that as legal forms continue to become more transparent in the sense that the legal profession can no longer control legal information distribution, they become commodities and the cost of legal forms themselves goes down to zero.

It will be interesting to see if this site generates enough advertising revenues to justify expansion to other states outside of Florida. Meanwhile it will be a useful site for Florida consumers. It would be useful if the site mentioned on the home page that only Florida divorce forms are available at this time, but there additional states are planned. 

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Consumers and small business have a difficult time getting solid information on lawyers they wish to retain. There is almost no data on the competence or track record of attorneys and law firms rarely publish their hourly rates. A new web site:   www.avvo.com   plans to cure this problem by publishing both their own ratings of lawyers, together with client and consumer comments,  in a single web space. This site provides a need service in helping consumers select lawyers and law firms that meet their needs. Combining user/client generated content, together with information from other sources, this site is built on Web 2.0 concepts that will give stiff competition to other lawyer directory web sites such as www.findlaw.com and www. lawyers.com which have adopted a traditional yellow pages directory approach to lawyer listings. Adding transparency to the process of lawyer selection, will also provide competition to lawyer matching sites such as www.legalmatch.com and www. casepost.com. Avvo plans to generate revenue through advertising by monetizing the large amount of consumer traffic that will likely hit the site.

Founded by Mark Britton, an attorney for 15 years and an alumni of Expedia.com, www.avvo.com has assembled a top management team that includes, Paul Bloom, a veteran of Microsoft’s Consumer Division, and funded with $13 million in venture capital, this site promises to be a major new player in the legal web market space.  According to the company's web site the name "Avvo" is short for  short for avvocato, lawyer in Italian, and stems from a vacation that Mark Britton was on in Italy when the idea of a web site that would help consumers navigate the legal profession came to him.

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The Illinois State Bar Association is launching a major advertising campaign costing $270,000.00 a year to convince the public that lawyers are worth their fees. Perhaps the money would be better spent on training lawyers to think about what consumers really want and how to serve them more effectively.See: http://www.sj-r.com/sections/news/stories/113285.asp

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I recently ran across another virtual law firm in Texas called Texas Law on  Demand .
The law firm is a solo practice run by the Patricia McCartney. Legal forms are offered with legal advice for a fixed fee. Fixed fees are reasonable. A Texas no-fault divorce costs $349.00 and includes a 20 minute phone consultation. Other transactions includes wills, powers of attorney, leases, deeds, and Protective Orders, and LLC formation. The service is designed for pro se litigants and the plaintiff is expected to file his or her own documents. We expect to see more virtual law firms like this in the future offering "unbundled legal services" over the Internet.

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I recently ran across the web site of Legal Club of America which has an interesting model for providing legal access to consumers. For $12.00 a month a consumer  can select their own attorney from Legal Club's nationwide panel of attorneys and then the subscriber and his or her family members are eligible for the following benefits: 1)  unlimited phone consultations, during business hours, for each new legal matter; 2)  unlimited face to face consultations, during business hours, for each new legal matter; 3) attorney review of legal documents (6 page max.) per new matter; 4) plan attorneys will make phone calls on your behalf; 5) plan attorneys will write letters on your behalf; 6) you get simple wills for you and each member of your family at no additional cost; 7) if you have a claim in small claims court, you get free legal advice on how to handle it; 8)  for certain common legal transactions such as a no-fault divorce ($210.00) you pay a fixed fee; and most importantly,  9) your legal fees are capped at $75.00 which is way below the going rate.

This seems like a pretty good deal to me for $12.00 a month. This is not a pre-paid legal insurance plan. The company calls the program a "nationwide discounted legal referral service."  Apparently the company is able to induce lawyers to provide these discounted services because it is functioning as their marketing agent by sending clients to lawyers in their referral network.  From the law firm's point of view the provision of these discounted services is considered the cost of client acquisition, so this program looks like a win-win situation for both the lawyer and the consumer. The free wills for family members would be sufficient to justify the cost to the consumer over a year which is only $144.00. The company claims to have 22,000 attorneys enrolled in their legal panel nationwide and has been in business since 1993, so they must be doing something right. For a complete description of  all  of their plans, including comparable plans for small business, see: Family Plans - Legal Club of America

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I was invited to speak at a Lexis Conference on Marketing for Law Firms in Phoenix, Arizona this month, but it canceled for low attendence. In any case,  here is the Article, titled, Technology and Marketing in a New Age, that was designed to back up my PowerPoint presentation.

Download file here.

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Nolo, the nation's leading self-help law book publisher, and the publisher of the software program, WillMaker, a desk-top Windows program, has just introduced an on-line version of Willmaker that enables the user to generate a will from within the web browser. Answers can be saved on-line so the user can re-visit their documents, if discussion with other family members is necessary before completing the documents, or if the user wants to complete the on-line questionnaire in multiple sessions. This on-line version imports Nolo's excellent content from their WillMaker and is a leap forward for Nolo technologically. During the last several years several web sites have been offering on-line will services, which has provided stiff competition for Nolo's WillMaker product. See for example: Legacy Writer ; BuildaWill; and FreeWillDocs.com , published by our own affiliate company. Epoq, US. The release of this product by Nolo will provide more competition for solo practitioners and small law firms as well as provide a strong competitive offering to other self-help legal Internet publishers.

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