Market
forces lawyers to stay current with legal technology
By Laura
Ernde
Staff Writer
State Bar Trustee
Michael Colantuono is a general practice lawyer who has written countless
contracts for clients. But when he needed to contract for his own homebuilding
project, he turned to an online source instead.
Colantuono
said it was faster and cheaper for his family to use Rocket Lawyer.
|
Colantuono |
The story
illustrates both the challenges and the opportunities that technology presents
to the legal profession, he said, which is one reason the Board of Trustees
chose it as the topic for the plenary session of its strategic planning session
last month.
As regulators
of the profession, it’s important for the trustees to keep up on the latest
trends.
“The world is
changing, and we have to also,” he said.
The trustees
heard from Rocket Lawyer founder and CEO Charley Moore, USC Gould School of Law
professor Gillian Hadfield and Dan Pinnington of Lawyers’ Professional
Indemnity Company (LAWPRO), an insurance company that provides malpractice
coverage to Canadian attorneys.
Trustees
Colantuono and Dan Dean moderated the session called “Unregulated Space?: An
Interplay of Technology, Legal Services and Access to Justice.”
“Technology
has transformed how we do almost everything,” including providing legal
services, Hadfield said.
Technology
can provide efficiencies in everything from internal processes at law firms to
document analysis previously done by attorneys.
|
Hadfield |
“We shouldn’t
underestimate the artificial intelligence,” Pinnington said.
Moore said
those in the profession are taking advantage of mobile apps and other tools to
help with documenting compliance, gathering evidence and signing documents.
Even more
complex legal processes such as dispute resolution are moving online, as
companies such as Modria and eBay have shown, Hadfield said.
Moore said
Rocket Lawyer, which provides legal documents and information online as well as
an online attorney directory, is living proof that innovation is possible in
the current regulatory climate.
But he said
rules restricting fee-sharing with non-attorneys can be an impediment to making
legal services more affordable.
Hadfield, who
advocates easing attorney regulations to bring down the cost of providing legal
services for the public, pointed out that most businesses work on
profit-sharing models that aren’t available to the legal profession.
Because it’s
so expensive to hire a lawyer, only 15 percent of the legal services are being
met by lawyers, Pinnington said. Those who can’t afford to hire a lawyer are
turning to non-lawyers who aren’t regulated by the bar.
Colantuono
asked the panelists what type of harm regulators should be protecting against,
given the new technologies.
Pennington
said one-third of the claims LAWPRO sees are the result of communication issues
between lawyers and clients. The two most other common issues are time and
deadline errors and inadequate investigation and discovery of facts.
“It’s not law
that’s critical. It’s basic client commitment. People and systems break down,”
he said.
Moore argued
that regulators should not take a paternalistic approach and instead rely more
on market forces to weed out the bad actors.