KesselmanHW1

Class 1 Homework

Good Things About Running a Virtual __Law Practice__ 1. Low overhead cost. 2. Work/Life balance. 3. Demographic __trends__ favor VLOs. 4. Power to tap the latent market by unbundling legal __services__. 5. Ability to work when away from your geographic jurisdiction.

Bad Things About Running a Virtual Law Practice 1. Remaining informed of ever evolving technology risks. 2. Third Party access to confidential client information. 3. Uncertain/Inconsistent regulatory issues/rulings. 4. Client expectation of instantaneous service. 5. Purely virtual practice is not possible for certain matters.

Definitions of Virtual Law Practice/Digital Law Practice/eLawyering

1. [|ABA Definition] "eLawyering is doing legal work - not just marketing - over the Web. Pioneering practitioners have found dramatic new ways to communicate and collaborate with clients and other lawyers, produce documents, settle disputes, interact with courts, and manage legal knowledge. ELawyering encompasses all the ways in which lawyers can do their work using the Web and associated technologies. Think of lawyering as a "verb" - interview, investigate, counsel, draft, advocate, analyze, negotiate, manage, .. - and there are corresponding Internet-based tools and technologies."

2. Digital-Lawyer.com " The phrase, "The Digital Lawyer" was first coined by Professor M. Ethan Katsh in a series of articles and his book, "Law in a Digital World." Katsh has written:

"The essential difference between the digital lawyer of the future, which may turn out to be the only kind of lawyer to thrive in the future, and today's attorney, lies only partly in [|access] to technology and in skill in using technology. Rather, the core change in the digital lawyer is an understanding of the value of information in an environment where new tools for processing and communicating information make adding value to information and using information to develop new relationships the central concern of the economic system. The digital lawyer knows that although the new media present opportunities to save time, the most novel characteristic of these technologies may be in how they operate on space and distance. The successful digital lawyer is one who knows that he or she is in the information business as much as in the legal business, and that while automation often means that "time is money" in law practice, the more important insight is that "information is money."

3. [|About.com-William Pfeifer] A growing trend among computer-savvy sole practitioners is to open a "virtual law practice" or "virtual law office" (VLO), where most communications with clients happen through a secure [|online] server system. This is sometimes confused with a "virtual office," which generally refers to renting an office mailing address without having a physical office at that location. Many VLO attorneys combine their online law practice with a virtual office address, further muddling the confusion in terminology.