Self-Help Law, Limited Legal Services : MyLawyer.com : Law That You Can Afford

Consumers and small business have a difficult time getting solid information on lawyers they wish to retain. There is almost no data on the competence or track record of attorneys and law firms rarely publish their hourly rates. A new web site:   www.avvo.com   plans to cure this problem by publishing both their own ratings of lawyers, together with client and consumer comments,  in a single web space. This site provides a need service in helping consumers select lawyers and law firms that meet their needs. Combining user/client generated content, together with information from other sources, this site is built on Web 2.0 concepts that will give stiff competition to other lawyer directory web sites such as www.findlaw.com and www. lawyers.com which have adopted a traditional yellow pages directory approach to lawyer listings. Adding transparency to the process of lawyer selection, will also provide competition to lawyer matching sites such as www.legalmatch.com and www. casepost.com. Avvo plans to generate revenue through advertising by monetizing the large amount of consumer traffic that will likely hit the site.

Founded by Mark Britton, an attorney for 15 years and an alumni of Expedia.com, www.avvo.com has assembled a top management team that includes, Paul Bloom, a veteran of Microsoft’s Consumer Division, and funded with $13 million in venture capital, this site promises to be a major new player in the legal web market space.  According to the company's web site the name "Avvo" is short for  short for avvocato, lawyer in Italian, and stems from a vacation that Mark Britton was on in Italy when the idea of a web site that would help consumers navigate the legal profession came to him.

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The Illinois State Bar Association is launching a major advertising campaign costing $270,000.00 a year to convince the public that lawyers are worth their fees. Perhaps the money would be better spent on training lawyers to think about what consumers really want and how to serve them more effectively.See: http://www.sj-r.com/sections/news/stories/113285.asp

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I recently ran across another virtual law firm in Texas called Texas Law on  Demand .
The law firm is a solo practice run by the Patricia McCartney. Legal forms are offered with legal advice for a fixed fee. Fixed fees are reasonable. A Texas no-fault divorce costs $349.00 and includes a 20 minute phone consultation. Other transactions includes wills, powers of attorney, leases, deeds, and Protective Orders, and LLC formation. The service is designed for pro se litigants and the plaintiff is expected to file his or her own documents. We expect to see more virtual law firms like this in the future offering "unbundled legal services" over the Internet.

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I recently ran across the web site of Legal Club of America which has an interesting model for providing legal access to consumers. For $12.00 a month a consumer  can select their own attorney from Legal Club's nationwide panel of attorneys and then the subscriber and his or her family members are eligible for the following benefits: 1)  unlimited phone consultations, during business hours, for each new legal matter; 2)  unlimited face to face consultations, during business hours, for each new legal matter; 3) attorney review of legal documents (6 page max.) per new matter; 4) plan attorneys will make phone calls on your behalf; 5) plan attorneys will write letters on your behalf; 6) you get simple wills for you and each member of your family at no additional cost; 7) if you have a claim in small claims court, you get free legal advice on how to handle it; 8)  for certain common legal transactions such as a no-fault divorce ($210.00) you pay a fixed fee; and most importantly,  9) your legal fees are capped at $75.00 which is way below the going rate.

This seems like a pretty good deal to me for $12.00 a month. This is not a pre-paid legal insurance plan. The company calls the program a "nationwide discounted legal referral service."  Apparently the company is able to induce lawyers to provide these discounted services because it is functioning as their marketing agent by sending clients to lawyers in their referral network.  From the law firm's point of view the provision of these discounted services is considered the cost of client acquisition, so this program looks like a win-win situation for both the lawyer and the consumer. The free wills for family members would be sufficient to justify the cost to the consumer over a year which is only $144.00. The company claims to have 22,000 attorneys enrolled in their legal panel nationwide and has been in business since 1993, so they must be doing something right. For a complete description of  all  of their plans, including comparable plans for small business, see: Family Plans - Legal Club of America

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I was invited to speak at a Lexis Conference on Marketing for Law Firms in Phoenix, Arizona this month, but it canceled for low attendence. In any case,  here is the Article, titled, Technology and Marketing in a New Age, that was designed to back up my PowerPoint presentation.

Download file here.

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Nolo, the nation's leading self-help law book publisher, and the publisher of the software program, WillMaker, a desk-top Windows program, has just introduced an on-line version of Willmaker that enables the user to generate a will from within the web browser. Answers can be saved on-line so the user can re-visit their documents, if discussion with other family members is necessary before completing the documents, or if the user wants to complete the on-line questionnaire in multiple sessions. This on-line version imports Nolo's excellent content from their WillMaker and is a leap forward for Nolo technologically. During the last several years several web sites have been offering on-line will services, which has provided stiff competition for Nolo's WillMaker product. See for example: Legacy Writer ; BuildaWill; and FreeWillDocs.com , published by our own affiliate company. Epoq, US. The release of this product by Nolo will provide more competition for solo practitioners and small law firms as well as provide a strong competitive offering to other self-help legal Internet publishers.

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The “unbundled law” law movement is expanding.  "Unbundled" or "limited legal services" is a form of legal service delivery where lawyers represent clients for provide a limited and discrete service for a fixed fee. This is a good alternative for consumers who cannot afford to pay a law firm to handle every aspect of their case, which can be costly.

When a law firm delivers a limited legal service, the client does part of the work, and the law firm does part of the work. For example, in an contested divorce case, the law firm will prepare all of the forms and provide legal advice, but the client attends the divorce hearing, which is often just a formality, without the benefit of counsel. By eliminating counsel at the hearing, the client saves the additional cost of paying for the lawyer’s time to attend the hearing, and the usual waiting time that precedes the hearing itself. This can result in a significant cost saving.

For additional information on this trend see; UnBundled Law  and the American Bar Association's Pro Se/Unbundling Resource Center, published by the ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services.

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We the People is a chain of legal document preparation retail stores that offer preparation of simple legal documents for a flat fee. No legal advice is provided as each store is operated by a non-lawyer. A consumer completes a paper questionnaire with facts about their individual situation. From this information, a centralized document processing center creates a customized legal document often using specialized legal software programs. The chain has been filling a need because it is expanding rapidly and reportedly generates approximately $24,000,000 a year in sales volume at retail. For many consumers, this chain provides a needed service at a cost which is much less than the cost of traditional legal fees. However, the consumer receives no legal advice and purchasing from a We the People store is not at all like using a traditional attorney.

The chain was recently acquired by Dollar Financial Group, one of the largest networks of check-cashing stores in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Dollar is a $400 million public company that trades on the over the counter market, so it has access to capital and sophisticated management resources. DFG's plan is to expand the We the People chain from 138 stores to hundreds of stores nationwide. It is not yet clear whether they will be successful in this expansion effort.

In prior years, some state bar associations have attacked individual We the People stores for violating state UPL statutes by providing legal advice directly to consumers. Many, but not all, of these conflicts have been settled since the Dollar acquisition.  Dollar has assured state bar associations that store owners will not cross the line and give legal advice.

The fees that We the People charge are higher than similar services offered over the Internet . (We the People typically charges $399.00 for a no-fault divorce compared to $199.00, the going rate from many on-line web sites. See for example: LegalZoom. ). However, for those consumers who want to deal with a person face-to-face, or for consumers who don’t have easy access to the Internet, We the People is a lower cost alternative than traditional legal services.

Many lawyers complain about We the People, but fail to understand that for consumers any solution to their legal problem, is better than a solution that they can’t afford. Consumers are willing to get a “good enough” solution,  rather than have no solution at all.  Moreover, many lawyers will say that they are not interested in serving clients who can’t pay their legal fees, so why does the legal profession continue to try to regulate out of existence non-lawyer document preparation services that serve consumer needs?

Disclosure: We operate, through an affiliated organization, web sites that offer on-line non-lawyer document preparation services. [See for example: The Name Change Law Center  and The Divorce Law Information Center.

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The Irish Competition Authority (the equivalent of our Federal Trade Commission) says the market for legal services is permeated with unnecessary and disproportionate restrictions on competition and is in need of substantial reform. In a report published this week, the Irish Competition Authority recommends  new comprehensive legislation to address the lack of competition in the legal services industry in Ireland. The legislation would establish an independent Legal Services Commission with responsibility for regulating the legal profession and the market for legal services.  This new Commission would be independent, transparent and accountable, involving a wider group of stake holders that the current model of self-regulation. The Competition Authority says that all who have studied the legal profession have reached a similar conclusion -- that the legal profession needs to move towards a modern, transparent and accountable system. 

Perhaps the American legal profession could learn something from this report. Very few state bar associations have adopted recommended reforms to make the legal profession more accountable to the consumer. The US legal profession still operates like a closed guild subordinating the interests of the consumer, over the interests of the profession. It's time for a change. For a summary of this report, click here.

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