If Con is the Opposite of Pro...

Yesterday I promised a discussion of some of my concerns about setting up a VLO. Here's a quick bullet list of a few of the major ones; we'll explore them in more detail after the jump:

• Resistance to a change in the practice of law among my very traditional client base
• Resistance to unbundled legal services among local attorneys and judges
• Low viability of a multi-state law practice from a rural community

Prior to reading Kimbro's book, I had some concerns about the security and confidentiality of online or digital communications as well. Through what I learned in VLP and the information regarding internet communications that I've been able to glean through some quick and dirty research online, those concerns have been (for the most part) addressed. At the end of this post, I'll tell about the technology solutions I plan to use.

The first major concern that I have is whether my client base will be receptive to a virtual law office as their primary means of communicating with their lawyer. Living in rural America is a different experience from living in urban America in terms of both quality of life and cultural norms. Orange City, the town where my office is located, is a very traditional community. Here's two examples:

1. We have a Dutch heritage festival every year that affects so much of our daily lives that  the buildings downtown must have a traditional Dutch "front" year-round. It's a really great event on the third weekend of May - Tulip Festival - that you should come check out sometime, but it's evidence of the prevalent mindset of the local citizens: traditional.
2. Sioux County, Iowa votes over 90% Republican in every major election. While Iowa is frequently known to be a "blue state," this little corner is completely conservative. Even when people decide to change the way they do things, that change tends to be minor or even superficial, e.g. nine churches from the same denomination out of more than 25 churches in an area where the total population is below 15,000.

Both of these items are evidence, to me, of a local culture that is resistant to changing long-established practices. Throw in a legal community that has been "doing law" in the same ways for the last 40 years, and I see the potential for a VLO to fall on its face right out of the gate.

The local legal community is filled with attorneys who have years of practice under their belt - a treasure trove of legal experience that benefits their clients and the young attorneys for whom they are mentors. These attorneys have decades of involvement in the community that people admire and seek after in their legal counselors. That by itself has been the primary challenge for establishing my solo practice. But it poses an additional concern as I consider entering the VLO landscape. The "best practices" established by these attorneys have become almost a code of conduct for the younger members of their firms. I won't get into specifics, but I have experienced first-hand the resistance of some attorneys to even venture into digitizing their closed client files.

I fear that the local judges will exhibit this same bias toward a new approach to practicing law. There is no law stating that a person must hire an attorney to represent him in court. It is possible, though, that a judge might contact the attorney who prepares a petition for an otherwise pro se litigant and refuses to accept that petition if the attorney does not enter her appearance on the litigant's behalf. Furthermore, other attorneys might take the approach of overwhelming a pro se defendant with excessive discovery requests or by unnecessarily complicating the litigation process in a way that makes it impossible for that person to make his defense without hiring an attorney (which he cannot afford).

My last major concern is that potential clients will find my VLO through a web search and choose not to hire me upon finding out that I am located in a town of 6,000 people. Even though there is nothing inherently different between my practice in Northwest Iowa and a practice in Saint Louis, Missouri, I worry that a potential farmer client from Missouri will choose a Saint Louis attorney even though I might have more experience handling matters for farm-based clients.

As you could probably tell from yesterday's posts, I've weighed these concerns against the benefits of a VLO and am leaning toward starting a VLO in spite of the potential barriers. That doesn't mean, though, that I'm ignoring the concerns. I plan to ply a couple of local attorneys and the Sioux County Clerk of Court with coffee and pastries in exchange for their opinions of unbundled legal services. I haven't come across any Iowa ethics rules to prevent unbundling, but an adverse local community could be a significant stumbling block to the success of my VLO. Stay tuned for a post or two in the near future on that front.

I promised at the outset that I would mention some of the technology solutions I found that soothed my concerns about the security of online communications. One major element is the use of hardware firewalls both at the office and at home. You can even purchase firewalls that plug into the USB port on your laptop for when you're at the coffee shop, securing your hardware against outside invasion. Another security solution is the use of secure HTTP. Websites that start with "https://" are secured against hackers through encryption. A common example of site that uses secure HTTP is a bank website offering online banking. You can create a website that utilizes secure HTTP where your clients interact with the VLO.

There are lots of other solutions for ensuring security of your clients' data in the cloud. VLP devotes a fair number of pages to discussing security best practices, but that's the subject of a future post.