Lawsuit Claims LegalZoom Is Practicing Law Without a License

Bob the Super Hamste writes "Fortune has an interesting piece about a federal class action law suit against LegalZoom claiming that its software is illegally practicing law without a license. The law suit seeks to recover money from LegalZoom for every resident in Missouri who has used LegalZoom regardless of how satisfied the users were of the service. Currently Missouri law states that an individual who paid money to a non lawyer for legal services is entitled to sue the provider for 3 times the amount paid."

Comments

Re:Haters gonna hate

[Mashiki]

Practicing law without a license? But that would make these people who wasted nearly a decade on getting their law degree redundant! Better fire off a lawsuit (good thing they're good at this kind of thing)!

Something similar actually already happened here in Canada, rather ontario between the upper canada law society and non-registered legal experts who weren't paralegals but represented people in court for things like compensation claims, and so on. The law society argued that these people were practicing without a license, in turn the government passed a law making it so that they had to be at least paralegals. And in turn fell under the upper-canada law society, meaning that they now also had to pay yearly administration fees and so on.

It really wasn't about the quality of the people who were doing this. It was their desire to get everyone who was doing legal work all under their umbrella so they could milk money from them.

Legal Templates

[Sonny Yatsen]

That's pretty dumb. As far as I know, LegalZoom isn't practicing law so much as providing people with templates for documents where they can fill in bits that they want and delete other bits they don't want. This is not the same as giving people legal advice, or engaging in an attorney-client relationship with anyone.

Besides, if this is successful, it'll have a detrimental effect to authors and publishers who publish books with legal templates (Draft your own Will books, for instance), most of which are for really simple stuff like wills or simple contracts. It's going to deny the poorest people access to making these documents because it's going to force them to seek attorneys who are often too expensive.

Re:Who wins..........

[ackthpt]

And who wins here????? You guessed it, the LAWYERS!!!!

More than any other profession, those who practice law have the ability and influence to assure their lack of competition from computer aplications.

You could write a program to scour a database of every legal decision, even include some fuzzy logic to handle grey areas - at the very least to bring them to your attention, and above all put it on plain english, not that "Lawyer Speak" you see on legal documents (which I'm quite positive are there to baffle and bamboozle the general public) and you would be driven into the dirt for having the audacity to do it.

Lawyers have in the past decried software legal aids as providing customers with less than the best service possible (thus preserving their positions), but as we see computer chess games surpass even the best human opponents you can well assume a computer could do far more research and connect far more dots than the finest legal mind ever could, in mere seconds.

The day will come when they won't have a leg to stand on, but as Science Fiction has often charged humanity will discriminate against cyber-persons, you can see the Legal Community are at the forefront.