From Legal Services to Information Services by
Richard S. Granat, J.D.
Convergence
of Information Technologies
Profession Threatened
by New Competition
Non-Lawyer Operated Legal Information Services on the Net
Interactive
Legal Media
Re-Engineering
Again
From
One-to-One to One-to-Many
Electronic
Publishing Skills
Research on Pro
Se Litigant's
The Future is
Now
The practice of law is experiencing extraordinary changes that will
have a lasting impact on the structure of the legal profession and the ways in which
lawyers approach their practices. Within the next five years, the practice of law will
change even more than it has during the past five years, because of new developing
information and communications technologies which will enable anyone to access any legal
resource essentially for free, or at very low cost.
Convergence of Information
Technologies
There has been a gradual adoption of computer technology to automate
both law firm "back office" operations, word-processing, and " front
office" functions such as case management and automated litigation
support.
What is new about the accelerated rate of change of developments in
information technology is that there are developments which are now converging to create a
new platform for computing- a platform that is extraordinarily powerful, ease to use, and
connected to the rest of the world.
In the domain of legal practice technology it is now much easier to
create, without being a programmer, electronic diagnostic checklists and procedural forms;
data-bases with natural language and intelligent front-ends that are easy to search and
report results in a variety of formats; intelligent document assembly systems; multimedia
interactive forms that incorporate the lawyer’s expertise, audio, and video
annotation; hypertext documents that can reach out into the Net and up-date themselves
automatically; and powerful searching tools that can literally find one or two documents
or a string of words among thousands or even millions of documents.
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Profession Threatened
The convergence of these technologies provide the foundation for new
legal information services that threaten and challenge the existing configuration of law
practice. While lawyers computerize more and more of their work, the use of information
technology in the delivery of legal services is not limited to existing law practice. The
technology that is being used to automate law practice is about to escape out of the
control of lawyers, not longer a servant, but an uncontrolled force in its own
right.
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Non-Lawyer Operated Legal Information Services on the Net
We are already seeing a proliferation of non-lawyer entities on the Net
offering extensive legal information and guidance, the capacity to complete legal forms
on-line, with step-by-step instructions on how to file them. [See The People's Law Library
of Maryland].
The day when people can ask their computers an intelligent
question and get a relevant answer at low cost from the convenience of their homes is the
day that many lawyers will be looking for work.
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Interactive Legal
Multimedia
Consider the potential for interactive multimedia legal documents
delivered over the Internet as an innovative new legal information service. A lawyer
communicates legal information through legal documents, letters, memorandum, and voice. A
legal document could be considered a kind of software, particularly when it is in
electronic form and incorporates multimedia properties. Computer software also can be
considered an executable document or a form of text that causes an event to happen. Just
as software is increasingly viewed as a document, legal documents can take on the
attributes of software. Like software, a multimedia legal document can support interaction
with users, pass data to other documents, and execute actions outside of itself. A
multimedia legal document can be "smart" enough to customize itself to the
reader, based on decisions that the reader makes, is self-acting and is able to schedule
and carry out actions, based on triggers that have been programmer into the document. A
trigger represents a condition that, when fulfilled leads an executing program to take
action, such as sending a notice to the client directing the client to file a document
with a court, or publish a notice annotated with voice, video, and graphics, so that they
teach the reader as well as accomplish a legal result.
These interactive documents will include help systems with nested
levels of interactive assistance which allow the user to drill down to any level of
explanation necessary to facilitate understanding and explain the law that is incorporated
in the document.
Complex software programs such as Turbotax - the leading tax
preparation program - are an indication of the kinds of programs that will continue to
proliferate. These programs are a form of expert system that contain legal forms, explicit
instructions with hypertext capabilities, including annotations and explanations in audio
and video. This same technology will be used to increase the capacity of non-lawyers to
access law directly.
The Maricopa County Arizona court system has experimented with
multimedia kiosks during the past few years that enable citizens to generate their own
legal documents. Approximately 25,000 individuals have used these kiosks during the past
three years, and the County is now expanding the number of kiosks from 2 to 150. These
developments are not limited to stand-alone computer kiosks placed in courthouses. Already
the same technology is moving into the home, places of business, libraries, schools- any
place there is Internet access.
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Re-Engineering Again
Law firms are not immune from the re-engineering process that is
working its way through the rest of our society. Because law is largely information, law
firms should be at the forefront of organizational re-design efforts based on information
technology. Law firms have used information technology to streamline back-office processes
such as timekeeping, accounting, records management, and routine word-processing. Many
firms use automated litigation support methods, some firms use automated document assembly
programs, and there are daily stories of how lawyers are using information technology in
the court room. However much of "real" lawyer’s work, despite the
pervasiveness of computers on many lawyer’s desks, has remained relatively untouched
by information technology in the sense that there has been no fundamental redesign of the
way legal services are delivery using information technology. This is about to
change.
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From One-to-One to
One-to-Many
Lawyers still counsel clients on a one-to-one basis, negotiate and
mediate disputes in face-to-face meetings, draft legal documents, represent people in
physical courts, and by and large, search for law in law books located in law libraries.
We are still at the beginning of a transitional period where "law" is still an
enterprise based on print technology. When we have reached this end of this transition
period all "law" will be in digital format and there will arise a new class of
legal service suppliers who will fashion new kinds of services and products that will be
enabled the transformation of law from "text' to "bits."
The more intermediary a job or business is, the more vulnerable it is
to "disintermediation." The lawyer is the classic intermediary. Minimize the
traditional configuration of lawyer-dominated legal services, and the cost of legal
services can be reduced dramatically. Involving the client as a "co-producer" of
legal services by having the client do some of the legal work herself is another form of
disintermediation. Emerging information technology now makes it possible for lawyers to
change the way they provide services to clients from the "one-to-one" advisory
model to the "one-to-many" publishing model. By providing clients with a variety
of information aids, it is possible to effectively involve the client as a co-producer of
legal services, dramatically reducing costs and shifting control of the management of the
transaction from the lawyer to the client. Interactive legal multimedia can be a powerful
tool for creating new client relationships, cementing existing client relationships, and
delivering enhanced legal services.
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Electronic Publishing Skills
To their existing set of skills, lawyers will have to acquire
electronic publishing skills. Lawyers have referred to their firms as "paper"
factories. This metaphor will cease to be relevant as firms switch over to electronic
document production and transmission. By electronic publishing we mean more than word
processing. Understanding modern electronic publishing technology means knowing how to use
these technologies to manage the shift from delivering legal services on a one-to-one
basis to a one-to-many basis that teach clients about the law as well as provide services
to them. It means having the capacity to produce multimedia legal documents and file or
deliver them electronically any where in the world. Legal document’s produced in this
manner will inform their users as well as automatically adapt to changing circumstances,
and notify the user that they need to call a lawyer for legal advice. Consider the
possibility of a law firm producing an employment guidance manual for its clients,
customized for each client, that provides day to day guidance to human resource managers
engaged in day-to-day decision-making. The manual covers most routine situations with
complex situations identified in advance that require that the human resource manager call
counsel before taking any action that is likely to cause liabilities. The firm is paid for
the production of the manual as well as the advice provided and is obligated to keep the
manual up-to-date and current. In an electronic environment, legal documents may have less
permanence than in a print culture, with built-in triggers that modify the documents terms
based on changed circumstances that both parties have agreed to in advance. A child
support provision in a Marital Separation agreement, and a partnership agreement, are two
documents that immediately come to mind.
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Research On Pro Se
Litigants
One hallmark of the new information economy is the movement to define
business in terms of customers’ changing needs. In a study of pro se litigants
in domestic relations cases in the State of Maryland, that the University of Maryland
School of Law recently completed, seventy-four percent (74%) of people in the study sample
who represented themselves reported, that that they were satisfied with the result and
they would do so again. Fifty-four (54%) percent reported that they decided to represent
themselves because they thought that a lawyer would be too expensive, and an additional
eighteen percent (18%) reported that they represented themselves because they did not
think that the problem was sufficiently complicated that a lawyer’s services were
required. The legal problems in the study sample ranged from uncontested divorce, child
support, child custody, modification of child support, visitation, and name change. There
was no variation in response when the data in the study sample was controlled by type of
case, income level, or educational level. In other words, the reported response was
uniform across the entire study sample.This data should be a warning bell to the legal
profession the way lawyers perceive that they should be delivering legal services is out
of touch with the way clients want to be served. Given an alternative, customers will
rush to other alternatives rather than pay what they perceive to be the excessive fees
that are now required to negotiate through the present legal system.
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The
Future is Now
While much of today's lawyer's work is advisory and consultative, on a
one-to-one basis, as access to the Internet expands, some law firms will emerge as a new
kind of hybrid organization, part publisher, part legal advice supplier, part legal
engineers. These firms will creates new legal information services and products that will
customize themselves to the needs of each individual client. Richard Susskind, a
practitioner in London and a developer of legal expert systems, has written in The
Future of Law: Facing the Challenges of Information Technology (Oxford Press, 1996) at
288:
Susskind also warns lawyers who persist in practicing law as if
thery were still living in a print society. He writes:
There are many legal professions, not one. The lawyer that serves the
large corporate client has a practice this is far different than the practice of the solo
or small firm practitioner that services individuals and families. Nevertheless the trends
toward disintermediation, client-centered service and self-help will continue to
accelerate because of the power of information technology to enable access to the law in
ways that a non-lawyer (whether a middle-manager in a corporation setting, a small
business owner, or a spouse suing for child support) can comprehend and use effectively in
a widening spectrum of situations and cases. The recent unemployment statistics among
recent graduates of law schools and the difficulty of achieving partnership in many firms
suggests that there is some force causing displacement. This force is the capacity of
emerging information technology to empower users as co-producers of legal services and the
resulting impact on the market for legal services. It is inevitable that a certain
percentage of today's legal profession will need to re-align their skills with the demands
of the new information economy if they wish to continue to make a living.
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