Presented by the CBA’s Legal Profession Assistance Conference, the Canadian Lawyers Insurance Association and the National Law Practice Management and Technology Section live via webconference. The advantages of cloud computing, virtual or online law practices and unbundling of legal services are getting a lot of press – convenience to clients, reduced overhead expenses, remote access, and enhanced access to justice are among the benefits touted. But there are also very real and practical risks, and ethical implications, for each new tool or practice implemented. As these trends infiltrate legal practice in North America, lawyers and law firm leaders need to exercise due diligence to assess the potential risks and benefits. Our panelists, Nicole Garton-Jones and David Bilinsky will provide a practical overview of these trends in law practice management. In doing so, they’ll provide you with tools to reduce the risk and identify the questions you need to ask yourself, as well as potential third party service providers, your insurers and your law society, when conducting your own risk-benefit analysis. Register here: http://www.cba.org/pd/details_en.aspx?id=na_onfeb212

1. TRENDS IN LAW PRACTICE
MANAGEMENT -
CALCULATING THE RISKS
NICOLE GARTON-JONES
DAVID J. BILINSKY

2. WHAT QUESTIONS DO
YOU WANT ANSWERED?
What:
• Issues
• Topics
• Questions
do you want
answered to make
this session a
HIT?
Speak up now!!!

3. LET’S MAKE THIS
INTERACTIVE!!!
Please don‟t
hesitate to add a
comment,
suggestion or ask a
question!
Aiming at sharing
some „out of the
box‟ ideas!
The more we share
today, the more we
all get out of the
day!

4. ON WITH THE
PRESENTATION!!
The world hates
change, yet it is
the only thing that
has brought
progress.
Charles Kettering

5. TOPICS TO BE
COVERED
1. Why focus on new
technologies?
2. What are the new
technologies?
3. What are the
opportunities and
risks of the new
technologies?

6. WHY THE FOCUS ON NEW
TECHNOLOGIES?
•The democratization of
information and forms on the
internet, client demands for more
cost effective solutions and the
increasing encroachment on the
profession by non-lawyers using
new technologies are all driving
significant changes to the legal
profession

7. WHY THE FOCUS ON NEW
TECHNOLOGIES?
•Lawyers, in addition to keeping
current with their practice areas,
increasingly must also keep up to
date with new developments in
business and technology in order to
effectively compete in a rapidly
evolving and competitive legal
marketplace

8. WHY THE FOCUS ON NEW
TECHNOLOGIES?
•Professional responsibility in the
context of new technology is often
discussed in reactive terms, for example
ensuring the preservation of
confidential and privileged information
in the use of cloud computing (which we
will cover)

9. WHY THE FOCUS ON NEW
TECHNOLOGIES?
•There is also a pro-active
professional responsibility in regards
to technology, specifically a duty to
keep abreast of innovation to ensure
that you are delivering the most cost
effective, timely and high quality legal
services possible

10. WHERE DOES INNOVATION
COME FROM?
•An idea is not a single thing.
Rather, new idea is a network on
the most elemental level – a new
network of neurons firing in synch
with each other inside your brain.
It‟s a new configuration that has
never formed before.
•How do you get your brain in
these environments where these
new networks will form?
Specifically, what is the space of
creativity?

11. WHERE DOES INNOVATION
COME FROM?
• the “slow hunch” - important
ideas take a long time to evolve
•the process is to borrow from
other people‟s hunches, combine
them with our own hunches and
then create something new
•“chance favours the connected
mind”
•To differentiate your firm and
practice from competitors,
consider trying new technologies
and tools that expose you to lots
of new and different ideas

12. THE CYCLE
•Columbia University law professor
Tim Wu weaves together stories of
information empires to examine how
disruptive technologies enter and
develop within society
•Ultimately, new companies that
champion new and superior
technologies win out
•Wu relies on Joseph Schumpeter‟s
concept of “creative destruction” and
Clayton Christensen‟s notions of
disruptive and sustaining innovations
to explain the eventual supplanting of
the old dinosaurs by robust,
entrepreneurial newcomers

13. THE CYCLE
•The cost of delay for innovation
and for consumers is often
substantial
•Think shrinking profit margins for
traditional law firms and the
access to justice crisis facing
general society
•Who will solve these problems?
Lawyers, or our non-lawyer
competitors?

14. THE END OF LAWYERS?
•Richard Susskind poses a
challenge for legal readers to
identify the capabilities that they
possess that cannot, crudely, be
replaced by advanced systems or
by less costly workers supported
by technology or standard
processes, or by lay people armed
with online self-help tools

15. THE END OF LAWYERS?
•four main pressures that lawyers
now face: to charge less, to work
differently, to embrace technology
and to deregulate
•Susskind predicts that many
traditional law jobs will be eroded
or changed by two forces: a
market pull towards
commoditization and a pervasive
development and uptake of
information technology

16. THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
•Independent of concerns of
profitability and business survival,
it is also important to note that
innovations in practice
management and specifically legal
technology are not peripheral to
the fundamentals of legal thought
and practice
• Rather, commentators have
harkened back to Marshal
McLuhan‟s aphorism that “the
medium is the message” and have
noted that changes in the structure
and delivery of legal information
are also changing the legal mind

17. THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE
•Legal practice is increasingly
more about editing existing
electronic precedents, managing
e-discovery and mining for
information held in private and
public knowledge management
systems
•Add the ever presence of social
media, and the assault on
traditional legal thought and
reflection is magnified

18. 2. WHAT ARE THE NEW
TECHNOLOGIES?
Today, we are going to focus on:
•Cloud Computing (SaaS, Storage
Clouds, IaaS)
•Virtual law practice, including
unbundling of legal services
•Social Networking

19. THE CLOUD

20. TYPES OF CLOUDS

21. TYPES OF CLOUDS
“Traditional”
Hosted by 3rd party
Accessible via the
Internet

22. TYPES OF CLOUDS
Internally hosted
Appear to be on the
cloud
Remain at all times
within the control
of the enterprise
“Virtual Cloud”
Microsoft
Sharepoint enabled

23. TYPES OF CLOUDS
Blend of „public‟ and „private‟ applications
Typical for most organizations

24. TYPE OF CLOUD
SERVICES
Software as a Service (SaaS):
• Gmail or Clio or RocketMatter
Storage Cloud:
• Dropbox or SpiderOak
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS):
• Rackspace, i-worx

25. SAAS: PROTECTING
CLIENT DATA ONLINE
•lawyers must ensure that
client information is
protected in the hands of
the technology provider or
the hosting company the
firm chooses

26. SAAS: PROTECTING
CLIENT DATA ONLINE
•Companies providing practice
management technology will host
application data either in their own
servers or will have a relationship
(usually a lease) with a third party
provider that owns the data centre
where it houses the data on its
servers
•If the provider offers geo-
redundancy, then the law office data
will be housed in two different data
centres in different geographic
locations

27. SAAS: PROTECTING CLIENT
DATA ONLINE CON’T
•Research the technology
provider and understand the
terms of service agreement
•Understand the relationship
and review any agreement
covering data access and
confidentiality that may exist
between the service provider
and the hosting company

28. SAAS: PROTECTING CLIENT
DATA ONLINE CON’T
•Understand: data return and retention
policies, transferring data and
compatibility issues for restoring
data, backups, export features and
offline versions of the software, third
party hosting, server locations and geo-
redundancy, international laws that may
apply if the services are located in
another country, response time of the
provider and tech
support, confidentiality of law office data
(including who has access, procedures
for government and civil search and
seizure actions, procedures for potential
breach of confidentiality) and the
provider‟s industry reputation and
infrastructure to support growth

29. SAAS: PROTECTING CLIENT DATA
ONLINE FURTHER READING
•Black, Nicole, Cloud Computing for Lawyers, ABA/LPM, January
2012
•Law Society of British Columbia, Report of the Cloud Computing
Working Group, July 15, 2011

30. ETHICS OF PRACTICING
ON THE CLOUD
Cloud is moving ahead of the
ethics curve
ABA Ethics 20/20 Commission
“Impact of Internet technology
on the delivery of legal services,
both globally and within the
United States”
Law Society of BC Cloud
Computing Working Group Final
Report - hailed as a leading
thoughtful document

31. LSBC CLOUD REPORT
GUIDELINES
Lawyers must ensure:
• Confidentiality and privilege are
protected
• Ascertain where the data will be
stored
• Ownership of data does not pass
What happens if:
• Cloud provider goes out of service?
• Circumstances under which a cloud
provider cuts off access?
• Access to source code/software?

32. LSBC CLOUD GUIDELINES
Does the Cloud provider:
• Support e-discovery and forensic
investigations?
• Sell or commoditize the data?
• Releases independent audits of their
security?

33. LSBC CLOUD GUIDELINES
Compare:
• Cloud service with existing
services
• Determine if cloud is appropriate
Document all this due diligence!
• May be important if something
goes Wrong

34. LSBC CLOUD
GUIDELINES
Ask Yourself:
• How easy can you migrate the data to
a different provider?
• Who has access to the data?
• Under what circumstances do they
gain access?
• What are the archive times for the
provider? Do they match the LSBC
requirements?
• Is data „deleted‟ or „erased‟?
• What are your remedies if they breach
the SLA, privacy policy, terms of
service, security policy?

35. WHAT IS A VIRTUAL
LAW FIRM?
1. A law firm where legal services
are delivered to clients entirely
online through a secure web-
based portal;
2. A law firm with a centralized
administration, management
and brand but the lawyers work
remotely (at client
sites, home, satellite offices
etc.)

36. PRACTICING ENTIRELY ONLINE:
EXAMPLES
Online Firms:
https://www.kimbrolaw.com/
http://www.marylandfamilylawyer.com/divorce.asp
http://www.heritagelawonline.com/ - shut down in 2011
Vendors of Online Platforms:
http://www.vlotech.com/
http://www.directlaw.com/

37. CENTRALIZED IT, MANAGEMENT &
BRAND BUT REMOTE LAWYERS:
EXAMPLES
http://www.fsblegal.com/
http://www.virtuallawpartners.com/
http://www.rimonlaw.com/
http://www.valkyrielaw.com/index.html

38. UPL RISKS IN ELAWYERING/VIRTUAL
LAW FIRMS
•When using online methods of
elawyering, a lawyer must ensure that
geographic boundaries are monitored
to avoid the risk of unauthorized
practice of law in a particular
jurisdiction
•The firm website and online
advertising should clearly define the
scope of the firm‟s practices and
contain disclaimers explaining the
reach of the firm and how technology
will be used to deliver legal services
online

39. USING TECH TO UNBUNDLE
LEGAL SERVICES
•Unbundling or limited scope
representation is a growing trend in
the delivery of legal services as new
technologies for online practice
management make unbundling
easier for traditional firms
•Entire web-based practices can be
created providing only unbundled
legal services online
•Document assembly and
automation programs may be used
to streamline the creation of legal
documents for review by the lawyer

40. UNBUNDLED LEGAL SERVICES
BEST PRACTICES
Lawyers should understand the
following:
•How to draft a limited scope agreement,
how to define the scope of unbundled
services online, using document
assembly and automation programs,
how to deliver clear guidance and
instructions to the client on how to
complete their matter, how to use fixed
fee or value billing, how to integrate
unbundled services into a full service
firm by offering existing clients
additional services online and other
best practices

41. UNBUNDLED LEGAL
SERVICES READING LIST
Kimbro, Stephanie, Limited Scope
Legal Services: Unbundling and
the Self-Help Client, ABA/LPM 2012
Kimbro, Stephanie, Serving the
DIY Client: A Guide to Unbundling
Legal Services for the Private
Practioner (April 2012) – e-book

42. INTERNET SECURITY
•Lawyers need to understand basic
Internet security in order to
responsibly communicate with
clients and collaborate with others
online (for e.g,, how a hacker
accesses unsecured data from a
public hotspot and how to safely
work on a wireless network)
•Know best practices for securing
hardware and mobile devices as
well as safe practices for using web-
based or cloud computing
applications to protect clients‟
confidential information

43. INTERNET SECURITY
•Things to know: encryption, secure
socket layer (SSL) and https, wireless
networks, remote access to firm
computers, mobile device security,
security of cloud-based services, VPNs,
security risks on public computers and
networks, the most common online
security breaches and computer
vulnerabilities, enabling encryption
hardware and software firewalls,
password protections and disposing of
hardware when upgrading

44. INTERNET SECURITY
FURTHER READING
Legal Technology Resource Centre.
Resources on Wireless Networking
and Security. American Bar
Association, Web.
Securing Your Clients‟ Data While on
the Road, David Ries and Reid Trautz
http://apps.americanbar.org/lpm/lpt/arti
cles/tch10081.shtml
Cyberspace Under Siege: Law firms
are likely targets for attacks seeking to
steal information off computer
systems, Ed Finkel
http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/
article/cyberspace_under_siege/

45. SOCIAL NETWORKING
•Microblogging - Twitter
•Social Networking - Facebook,
LinkedIn, Legal OnRamp, Martindate
Hubbell Connected
•Videos – YouTube, Vimeo
•Slides & document sharing: SlideShare,
Docstoc, JD-Supra
• Location sharing – FourSquare
•Review & rating sites: Avvo, Yelp

46. SOCIAL NETWORKING
RISKS
•Drawing the line between
personal and professional
networking in online social
environments is difficult because
the applications were created
with the purpose of sharing with
as many people as possible
•User error: imprudent posts,
breaching client confidentiality,
“friending” a judge

47. SOCIAL NETWORKING
RISKS
•At each step, the user must consider
who has access to and control of the
account info he or she is providing to the
social media application
•Applications change privacy and
account options and the user will need to
monitor his or settings regularly, as well
as the content posted
•Be wary of third party applications; may
be third party applications running on
social networking websites that request
access to user information and contact
databases

48. SOCIAL NETWORING
FURTHER READING
• Nicole Black and Carolyn Elefant,
Social Media for Lawyers: The Next
Frontier, American Bar Association,
2010
• Steve Bennett, Ethics of Lawyer Social
Networking, 73 Alb. L. Rev. 113 (2009)
• Adrian Dayton, Social Media for
Lawyers: Twitter Edition, Ark Group,
2009

49. MS SHAREPOINT
All about team collaboration
• “War rooms” containing: shared
documents, tasks, calendars, to-do‟s, integrated with
Office 2010 and enabled by remote access etc…

50. PBWORKS

51. PBWORKS
Secure, encrypted
collaborative workspaces
Inside and outside the firm
Case management, client
extranets, knowledgebases,
deal rooms, document hosting
and more…
*Wish* it had the
online/offline “Box” capability
of Dropbox

52. PBWORKS
Craft a separate workspace for
every file
Upload documents, assign and
track tasks, have chats and
conferences and share
documents
Customizable security settings
Craft dealrooms and share
documents without email

54. SPIDEROAK
Mac, Windows or Linux
“free online backup, synchronization,
sharing, remote access, and storage.”
„zero knowledge‟
You create your password on your own
computer
no trace of your original password is ever
uploaded to SpiderOak

55. SPIDEROAK
SpiderOak cannot know even the names
of your files and folders. All that
SpiderOak can see: sequentially
numbered containers of encrypted data.
You alone have responsibility for
remembering your password!

56. SPIDEROAK VS DROPBOX
Dropbox Spideroak
price: price:
• 2GB free • 2GB free
• 50GB $9.95/mth • 100GB increments
• 100GB $19.95/mth $10/mth or $100/yr
easy to use more powerful
Security Security
• staff: see file names • staff: see #'d
• reset password containers
online • can't reset password
online

57. CLOUD SUPPORT QUESTIONS:
Are the servers in
Canada?
Review SLA with Cloud
provider
Review Privacy statement
Review Security audits

58. CLOUD QUESTIONS
Uptime record (reliability)?
Availability (support)?
Proprietary software?
Bandwidth (capacity)?
Reporting (feedback)?
Capacity?
Security:
• By user, employee & in-transit

59. BACKUP AND DISASTER
RECOVERY
Help desk hours
Emergency contact list and
procedures to recover data
Backups and recovery
• Recovery Point and Time to
Restore
LSBC or other regulatory
compliance
What is/are your
role/duties?

60. COMMENTS AND
QUESTIONS

61. QUESTIONS?
Nicole Garton-Jones
• Heritage Law
• nicole@bcheritagelaw.com
• 778 786 0615
• http://twitter.com/NGartonJones
• www.bcheritagelaw.com
Dave Bilinsky
• Practice Management Advisor
• Law Society of British Columbia
• daveb@lsbc.org
• 604 605 5331
• http://twitter.com/ david_bilinsky
• www.thoughtfullaw.com