Yesterday I did a blog post Virtual Law Offices are Becoming a Real-World Alternative that outlined the case for virtual law practices. The same day, Sharon Nelson and John W. Simek posted an article called The Virtual Lawyer Stampede that is worthwhile reading as well.  But today I want to point you to an article "This Isn't Your Father's Law Firm"–But Maybe It Should Be whose author, Victor J. Medina, believes that virtual law practices (and unbundled legal services generally) stand for some of the worst possible things to happen to our profession.

The interesting thing is that, having spent a good amount of time as an "old school" lawyer myself, I don't disagree with a lot of what he has to say. You really should read his article. His primary point can be found in this quote from the article: "A lawyer’s value is not just in the deliverables or the court appearance that he or she makes, but in the ability to think through a problem, to counsel a client, or to strategize alongside a client for the client's benefit." He goes on to add that long-term relationships with clients where they are encouraged to have annual reviews at modest fees are good for the lawyer and client. I don't know of any good lawyer who would disagree that attorney-client relationships are critical and most important in our profession.

He also notes his long-term clients may expect to get a better deal on some services than a walk-in client. That seems totally appropriate to me on several levels, including the fact that the long-term, frequently reviewed client will be easier to work with. I made the comment to some new friends in New Mexico recently that rather than cutting a fee for a business formation to be competitive, why not add more value? Don't just set up the business formation paperwork, but give them a handbook on how to run a business in your state, a calendar of all important dates for filing dates during the next two years and tell them they can have an appointment with you twice during the next year for up to one hour of advice for only $20 each time. Offer to do their minutes or other annual documents for a modest annual fee. Maybe you can develop what looked like a one-time transaction into a long term relationship that will be better for you both.

But I do disagree with Mr. Medina's implication that a virtual lawyer cannot develop a client relationship over the Internet. Our great-grandparents would have probably said you couldn't develop relationships over the telephone and yet, every lawyer likely spends more time with clients on the phone than in person today. Future generations may read a text message from their lawyer, chuckle and think "my lawyer's pretty funny" without it ever occurring to the client that they have never met face to face. Mr. Medina and I will probably always believe in that face to face contact. But we cannot forecast what the new generation, nurtured on text messages and never having known a world without the Internet will think. Perhaps the lawyer they spend less time with is the best for them as they set their schedules. Perhaps that will be a loss for lawyer and client.

Personally I tend to think that video conferencing is the game changer in this. Seeing the lawyer's expressions as they listen to you and talk to you will be more "personal" than a phone call. We anticipate that better monitors, faster Internet connections, more phones that video conference and more webcams in homes will improve this. And it is already about as easy to send them a document online as to slide it across your desk.

The most important lesson for young lawyers is that there are now many choices available on how you want to serve your clients. But you cannot do everything–at least not all at the same time. Do what is comfortable for you and good for your clients. The rest should work out fine.

Virtual law practices (or virtual law offices) might mean different things to different people. For today's discussion, I am talking about a lawyer who decides to practice without a physical office by using the Internet to attract and serve clients. I know a traditional law firm might decide to add a virtual practice component and some law firms have many or all who are virtual lawyers and do not work in the same location. But for today let's talk about the lawyer who decides that he or she can function without a physical office to meet and greet clients and avoid the overhead associated with maintaining that location.

I direct your attention to two resources on this topic: Jay Fleischman has a great new blog post "Being a Virtual Lawyer is all Mindset, not Technology" and in this month's podcast, the 33rd Edition of The Digital Edge: Lawyers and Technology, Sharon Nelson and I take on the topic Virtual Lawyering Goes Mainstream.

There are many reasons a lawyer might want to have a virtual law practice. A lawyer might have family responsibilities caring for children or (increasingly these day) ailing parents that keep one from practicing law full time and require flexibility in scheduling. A part time lawyer may have real trouble supporting a bricks and mortar practice overhead. A lawyer may have moved out of the state in which the lawyer is licensed for a few years, but intends to return and wants to do some legal work and keep current on the law. A veteran lawyer might want to slow down and focus on a few areas or a few clients he or she really enjoys. A lawyer might find that market forces have reduced what clients are willing to pay for certain types of services and the lawyers need to reduce the fees the lawyer charges without reducing net income.  A lawyer might want to travel more without retiring. A young lawyer wanting to open a law practice might not have the start-up capital and might be concerned about incurring more debt on top of their student loans to do so.

A lawyer also might have time committed to another endeavor or vocation. If a lawyer really enjoys officiating sporting events several nights  a week, a 9 – 5 job might be too much. A virtual law practice might be great for a lawyer in training for the Olympics or who is also a professional skateboarder. 

But while this practice could be good for the lawyer, the really important thing is that a virtual lawyer might also fit some client's needs and desires very well these days. Many potential clients are already doing a lot of their business and work online. Some clients have a difficult time getting off from work to meet with a lawyer from 9-5 and if the husband and wife both need to meet with the lawyer, it can be almost impossible. Besides if you offer the client the ability not to lose pay by missing work to meet with you, you are offering them an arguably more attractive service.

So the virtual lawyer might spend Thursday morning at the gym, have a lunch with friends or colleagues, run a couple of errands and then settle in for a late afternoon and evening session of video conference appointments with clients in their homes via Skype. You might not want to do that every night, but you wouldn't have to. Parents could spent the time when kids are in school or doing their homework doing legal work. For many, just avoiding a long commute would add several hours to their weekly schedule.

More and more, people are using the Internet for all sorts of reasons. Meeting with your lawyer online will seem no different than talking to your lawyer on the phone to many. If the workload is too much, there are those who serve lawyers as virtual assistants. Now certainly there are some situations where this may not work. It is hard to see a busy litigator who makes regular court appearances almost every day going virtual and if your work requires a staff of paralegals and assistants, that might be hard to manage virtually.

The virtual lawyer will probably have to make very smart decisions about limiting the practice areas and assignments they will accept. A virtual lawyer might have to accept that there is a ceiling to how much money could be made this way. (However, if one is paying 60% or more in overhead, the lawyer might also find a virtual practice with fewer clients still equals more money.)

Listen to the Virtual Lawyering podcast and read Jay Fleischman's outline of the tools he uses in his practice. There's a lot more to setting up a virtual law practice than we have covered here, including a far different marketing plan. But, give consumers a choice and you may find that they will choose a real, live "virtual" lawyer in their state instead of some national so-called document preparer who wants to charge them twice as much for no advice and a poorer result.

Most lawyers are all about business and wouldn't bother to take the time to insert photos along with the other contact information in their Outlook Contacts. Some, like me, might insert a few photos of loved ones into a very few contacts.

But recently I have been inserting more photos into my Outlook Contacts to increase my efficiency. I know that sounds absurd. But it is true. I synchronize with Outlook to generate the contacts in my smart phone.  All of the information is imported to my iPhone, including the photo of the person. When I get a call from someone in my contacts, their name is displayed on my iPhone as well as their photo. I noticed that when i received a call from a family member, it was easier to quickly recognize it was them because their photo appeared on the phone display. So I don't have to read their name on the incoming call notification.

A smart application of this is when you have two contacts with the same or similar names. Adding their photos lets you easily identify which one is calling your mobile phone. Suppose you have a new and important client that you have only met in person once. Adding their photo to your Outlook Contact entry for them means that every time you get an e-mail from them (in Outlook 2007 or later) a thumbnail of their photo appears on the e-mail. After several weeks of being exposed to that, you won't have to worry about picking them out of a crowd when meeting them at a public event. You can find photos of many lawyers just by searching Google images for their name and city/state. With friends and colleagues (but never clients) you can even entertain yourself by inserting a cartoon character or other image to become their private avatar in your contacts.

If your contacts are lacking in information, I will pass along a tip that I have heard (and given) at many lawyer conferences. Give Copy2Contact a try. (This product used to be known as Anagram.) This software lets you highlight contact information from any document, e-mail or other digital file with text and insert the information in an Outlook Contact entry. It is surprisingly accurate. It also works with Palm Desktop and some other contact managers. You can try it for free on your PC or Blackberry for 14 days to see how you like it and, at the moment, the iPhone version is free. It won't add those photos, but it is a handy tool for all the text.

The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project released a study on mobile use of the Internet, noting that now 6 in 10 Americans are mobile Internet users. The primary finding was that 59% of American adults now go online wirelessly using either a laptop or cell phone, an increase over the 51% of Americans who did so at a similar point in 2009. If you don't want to read the whole study at the link above, PC World has a nice summary here. Soon, the majority of Internet access will be via mobile devices and law firms should be already beginning to look at how to make their firm web sites more "mobile friendly." This re-enforces my belief that your next cell phone shouldn't be just a phone.

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You must have been living in cave with no media connections the last few months if you didn't know that the new crop of smart phones have some impressive features. At the beginning of the year when I became eligible to upgrade to an iPhone, I jumped to buy the iPhone 3GS; even though I knew a new one would be out this summer. I love my iPhone.

Soon after (before the release of iPhone 4) I wrote: Your Next Cell Phone Should be More than Just a Phone.

My intended target audience was the number of lawyers who tell me "I only want my phone to be a phone." That may have be OK at one time, but  the current generation of mobile phone now provide so many tools for the busy lawyer including e-mail, synchronization with the lawyer's calendar, maps and directions, a camera and apps to do almost everything one can imagine.

But the article expanded as I included links to apps for various mobile phones and some discussion of iPhone security. Two of my colleagues (and really good friends) pan the iPhone for lawyers due to their security concerns, but it still seems to be the most popular smart phone purchase for lawyers in small-to-medium sized law firms. Larger firms still tend to go with Blackberries as the firm IT departments feel they are better for security and there are better tools for the IT staff to manage the phones.

I've included a brief iPhone security checklist with my article. It is a bit tongue in cheek in parts and I'm sure we'll see rebuttals soon. But if you do have client data of any consequence on your iPhone, you should consider the automatic data wipe option and maybe a subscription to MobileMe. Most importantly– don't lose your iPhone.

Now do both of us a favor and send this link to your colleagues who mock your phone that you use as more than just a phone.

Here are additional recent selections of interesting mobile phone reading.

From PC World: iPhone 4 vs. Droid X: A Head-to-Head Comparison

From eWeek.com: 10 Apple iPhone First Impressions: Innovation, Glaring Flaws

From Computerworld: 5 ways Apple's iOS 4 'breathes new life' into iPhone

From PC World: Apple iPhone 4 vs. The Rest of the Smartphone Pack (includes comparison chart)

From The New York Times: New iPhone Arrives; Rivals, Beware By David Pogue

From The New York Times iPhone 4 Q&A By David Pogue

I wasn't the only one who noted the CBS story on copiers holding much data this week. Steve Miller also blogged about it on The LawBill Blog

I note his conclusion:

  • "Today we sent an email blast to each of our law firm clients recommending that
    they contact their copier leasing company and request a written copy of the
    procedures which will be followed to scrub the hard drives on their current
    copiers when the lease expires. If there is no procedure, we are recommending
    that they send a letter indicating that the firm will not release the copier at
    the end of the lease unless the internal hard drive is scrubbed, on-site, before
    it leaves the law office." id.

I like this approach, even those it may lead to a legal dispute with the copier leasing company. Looking at this like a lawyer, there may be a claim for a defective product lurking in there. A device that stores much confidential information, unknown to the user, even though there's no real business need to collect the data. Then when the unsuspecting user discovers confidential data has been stored, the copier company's response is to ask the user for a lot of extra money to fix the problem. And, of course, you have to look at the difference in potential liability for holding onto a leased copier too long vs the risk in compromising all of the firm's various clients' confidential information. Hmmm……

People can turn on you. But you may not have thought that your old copier would turn into an informant against you. But, why not? You've kicked it to the curb, told it to get out of your life, replaced it with a new cuter model and now it is incarcerated in a warehouse with a lot of other copiers, some with unsavory pasts. It's pretty easy to see how a copier could turn into a jailhouse snitch and rat you out!

OK, now that I have your attention, check out the following video from a CBS News report on hidden confidential information contained on easily-purchased used copiers. You may not be so quick to photocopy sensitive information next time, especially at opposing counsel's office. I received several e-mails suggesting that I post on this topic. Like many of you, I assumed copier hard drives were periodically wiped and am especially put off at the suggestion by the copier salesperson that an extra $500 will fix that for you.

I was at the Missouri Bar's Solo and Small Firm Conference last week. They had an incredible turnout with around 1050 registered attendees. I believe it has more attendees than their annual meeting. It is clearly the largest of all of the state bar solo and small firm conferences.

I spoke for seven presentations or panels. They kept me busy. Based on the MoBar's request, I did a new program on client selection and whether one should represent relatives that i will be probably doing again in the future. I also did programs on Billing Strategies in a Changing Economy, Best Laid Marketing Plan: How to Use Technology to Deliver Blue Ribbon Personal Service to Your Clients and Avoiding Technology Disasters.

I joined with the American Bar Association's Catherine Sanders Reach for a program titled "Practicing in the Cloud: Pros and Cons of SaaS, Online Document Repository and Virtual Law Practice." These related topics really focus on some cutting-edge issues impacting the legal profession.  I think we are going to see many law firms hosting separate online document repositories for each of their clients. That will mean no more sending documents by e-mail. The lawyer will send an e-mail saying "New Document X is available in your individual client document repository." This is generally much more secure than an e-mail attachment and, when the client misplaces a document, they don't have to contact the lawyer and get billed, they just log in and print another copy.

Catherine and I also did a Tips program during the last set of sessions before the closing luncheon Saturday. Everyone loves a tips program and we smiled as the bar staff had to bring in extra chairs when we were getting ready to start. Thanks to the MoBar SSF planning committee for inviting me to speak again and to Linda Oligschlaeger and the rest of the bar staff for being such wonderful hosts.

Oklahoma lawyers should remember that Catherine Sanders Reach will be joining us at the Oklahoma Bar Association Solo and Small Firm Conference next week with her great tips, PDF training and other great educational programs. Check out the OBA SSF website for more info.

I'm a PMA, which stands for Practice Management Advisor. Many state bar associations and law societies have one (or more) full time person on staff to help members with practice management and technology issues. You can see if your bar association has this type of program by visiting www.abanet.org/practicemanagementadvisors. It seems that the PMA's are doing a little self-promotion this month.

Jared Correia is the law practice management advisor with the Massachusetts Law Office Management Assistance Program. He's written a blog post today titled Outside Counsel: Because You Can’t Spell ‘Practice Management Advice’ Without P-M-A. It's a short post (for Jared) and only has one word ("metasubstantive") that makes you want to consult a dictionary.

But there's more! Courtney Kennaday and I wrote our latest "Sites for Sore Eyes" Column for the June 2010 GPSolo magazine on the Practice Management Advisors Online. We take a quick tour of many PMA web sites. The point of the article (and this post) is that many of these hard-working PMA's use the Internet to share expertise and tips with their members as well as all other lawyers. Check out a few tips from the PMA's this week.

AT&T generated a lot of buzz when it announced Wednesday that it is instituting a new pricing model virtually immediately. By Monday, June 7, one will not be able to purchase the unlimited data plan for $30 per month or for any price. Many iPhone users were shocked. But imagine the shock of the 3G iPad users who just bought their iPads in the last weeks based on the advertised data plan. For the "indefinite" future, AT&T will allow existing users to keep their unlimited data plans. I've already talked to two people who are rushing off to get an iPhone 3GS from Walmart for $97 this weekend. They are available elsewhere for $99. Their theory is to grab the unlimited plan now and they can always downgrade later. They had been waiting for the release of the new iPhone later this summer, but the 3GS is a pretty good phone and they can upgrade to the new phone later.

This article summarizes most commonly asked questions. I do not dispute that many will pay less under the new arrangement. Many do not use their data plans frequently. But for my money, I'd rather have unlimited for $30 and never have to check my data use, than pay $25 for 2GB and $10 for each additional gigabyte each month. Most lawyers should be learning more about things they can do with their smart phone instead of worrying if they will get the $10.00 penalty.

I do think AT&T does want to lower the minimum monthly fee for an iPhone to expand their market. But the PR push that they are allowing tethering (see link for explanation) is only technically true. If they wanted to allow tethering AT&T could have just let it happen with the soon-to-be released iPhone which enables tethering. That would have been a great deal — $30 monthly for unlimited data plan on my iPhone and a wireless modem for my laptop. Instead, insiders say that AT&T is making a huge investment to block the ability to tether under their current unlimited plans. To legally tether,  you have to downgrade to the $25 2GB plan and then pay an extra $20 per month for the ability to tether, even if you don't use it that month. If you do tether, any data you use goes against your 2GB limit. Laptops will use the GB's more quickly than the phones. I predict many additional charges for those who do tether. Now if you are staying several days in a hotel that charges $14 per night for Internet access, it may be a good deal. But generally it is a rip-off.

As noted there have been lots of reactions. Some rush to buy new phones before Monday. Others vow to quit as soon as they can. Personally I think the capabilities of the iPad and soon-to-be-released iPhone scared AT&T.The iPad can be used just like a computer and might be used online just as much. If the new iPhone will allow tethering and, as many think, will allow hand-held video conferencing, then data usage could increase. I don't believe that one's current data plan use fairly predicts what one's future use will be.

AT&T had better be careful. Most AT&T users are not happy with their service. (I've had 5 dropped calls this week. How about you?) If a competitor offers an unlimited data plan allowing tethering, there could be a rush of defections. Of course the rush of big data users might bring the same complaints about dropped calls and weak signals to the new carrier.

Overall this is not a huge deal for most users. Many will pay less and $10 here and there won't destroy the lives of most.

But you have to ask yourself, when and how will AT&T suddenly decide to change the rules next time?