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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."
What do you call a bus full of lawyers going off a cliff?
A comedy.
What if there's an empty seat?
A tragedy!
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
No kidding - the twits filing the suit admits they weren't harmed by the service and just wants to reclaim their fees x3. This definitely qualifies as a top ten all time frivolous class action suit.
Actually I'd guess it's more a move by lawyers in Missouri to drive LZ out of the state by making it to expensive to do business there. For many attorneys, simple legal documents are there bread and butter and if people start using low-cost DIY sites the attorneys stand to lose money or will be forced to lower prices.
Attorneys have been good at fighting any move to introduce competition - years ago they fought over advertising and even now limit what can be said. They created the idea that law school, instead of the old apprentice system where you read the law under an experienced attorney, was needed to be admitted to the bar (although some states still allow you to take the bar without going to law school under certain circumstances).
Of course, what they are doing is not unique to the legal profession. I just wish engineers had been clever enough to figure out a way to do the same thing so that "Engineer" could only be used by a "real" engineer. Yes, there are P.E.s but in most engineering jobs a P.E. is just a fancy title, not a job requirement.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The precedent is this:
in 1978 the Missouri Supreme Court ... reviewed a case in which Missouri bar authorities sought to punish the sellers of a divorce kit that consisted of nothing but blank legal forms and instruction booklets for filling them out. The court ruled that merely marketing such materials did not amount to practicing law absent "personal advice as to legal remedies or the consequences of flowing therefrom."
A booklet instructing you how to fill out legal forms is not legal advice, according to that ruling. Neither then is software that instructs you on how to fill in the blanks on a computerized legal form.