The most widely read magazine for Canadian lawyers
Issue link: https://digital.canadianlawyermag.com/i/50802
what is essentially a virtual estates and family law firm, Heritage Law, from home. Her staff and fellow lawyers also operate remotely, sending documents to each other over the Internet and largely communicating with clients by phone and e-mail. She can meet with them in person through a deal she has with the lawyer who bought her real estate practice in exchange for use of his office space. Garton-Jones has implemented the beginnings of an e-lawyering practice by having people fill out a basic ques- tionnaire before taking them on as clients. That way, she gets much of the information she needs to create a will before interviewing them. "When they come in, the first half hour to 45 minutes of the meeting is already done," she says. "Because we're paperless, I can just save that right into their file. What would be better is if that form fed directly into a . . . HotDocs automated assembly. I haven't put that piece together yet, but that would be great." Elsewhere, however, the e-lawyering phenomenon has caught on more quickly. From his office in Florida, Richard Granat runs a busy family law practice for clients in Maryland. By having clients fill out an online question- naire and with the help of a paralegal, he can finish an uncontested divorce file in 15 minutes to half an hour. On average, he handles three files a day — at $300 per case, he's earning decent money. Granat offers other legal services outside of regular business hours. Using chat and e-mail to provide legal advice, for example, he gets $35 per question. "It's really on the lawyer's marginal time, when he's not working in prime time, so it pays for them to do it as well," he says. The whole concept of e-lawyering revolves around what Vancouver lawyer and document-assembly consul- tant Darryl Mountain calls "disruptive innovations" that gradually take over functions traditionally performed by law firms. "Within the legal industry context, a disruptive innovation is a low-end commoditization that marginal- izes the conventional law firm business model," he wrote in an article for the International Journal of Law and Information Technology. But, he notes, disruption isn't necessarily bad news for lawyers since they tap into what author Richard Susskind has termed "a latent legal market." "The way disruption normally works is it changes non-con- sumers into consumers," says Mountain, who points out that younger people who otherwise forego getting a will might choose to do so through a cheaper, flat-fee online service. In Britain, companies have already taken the e-lawyering concept to a higher level as law firms begin to offer increas- ingly complex legal services online. Richard Cohen, a lawyer who has pioneered the concept there, says his web-based firm can now handle "contentious areas of law" involving multiple documents. With landlord and tenant matters, for example, the eviction process is such that it no longer requires a hearing before a judge. The proceedings now happen through paper- work, meaning law firms can process the matters online. E-lawyers can also help guide unrepresented litigants. A lawyer offering service online will help clients prepare documents and guide them through the process for a fixed fee without going on the record, says Cohen. A big factor behind the concept in Britain is a legal reform movement that has opened the profession to outside enti- ties. Changes to the Legal Services Act, for example, mean non-lawyers will soon be able to take ownership in law firms. Only lawyers will be able to manage them, but the separation of ownership and management has already led banks and insurance companies to get into areas of law currently not restricted to the profession. Once the ownership changes take full effect, Cohen predicts outside investors such as financial institutions will get into the legal business wholeheart- edly. "If you change the structure, it will attract investment. Investment will drive costs down and give the consumer a better deal," says Cohen, who notes that under traditional partnership models, law firms have struggled to raise the capital necessary to finance technological advances. So far, the changes mean Britons are getting service from places such as call centres staffed by paralegals working under the direction of lawyers. At the same time, Cohen's firm, Epoq Group Ltd., recently launched MyLawyer, an Internet-based platform that enables other law firms to offer e-lawyering services on their own web sites. In the United States, Granat offers a similar product, DirectLaw, which allows firms to provide online services in areas such as family and estates law. They pay a subscription fee to access the technology. For the most part, the firms that have signed on to DirectLaw have been small ones run by people Granat calls "early adopters." And typically, most of them have been younger. But here in Canada, at least one large firm, Gowling Lafleur Henderson LLP, has adopted some aspects of e-law- yering by taking certain repetitive, standardized practices and making the information available to clients online. In Hamilton, Ont., Gowlings partner Mark Tamminga helped build a database that has almost completely automated his firm's mortgage enforcement practice. The work, which is heavily focused on specific tasks on certain dates, is "easily captured in a database and easily built with document assembly," he notes. "Once you've captured it in a database — especially if it's a Microsoft SQL database like we have here — you can spin that to the web easily. That allows your clients to have a look at what's going on with their files without their having to call you about all the files that they're wondering about." The system has worked so well that the firm is extending it to areas such as workers' compensa- tion cases in Ontario and small-business loans. "For us, it def- initely speeds up the process, gives the client confidence, and gives the clients answers to their own questions because they maintain their own monitoring system," says Tamminga. So far, the firm hasn't moved into online document assem- bly, which would allow clients to input information over the web to perform some legal tasks automatically. "Online docu- ment assembly is not easy," says Tamminga. "To create those systems, build the appropriate security, and have the data live www. C ANADIAN Law ye rmag.com M ARCH 2009 37