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Womble Bond Dickinson Partner Mark Tuft will co-chair the Practising Law Institute’s program on “The Ethics and Law of NewLaw”. The Webinar program takes place Monday, Oct. 3. This will be the third year that Tuft has co-chaired this program.
Lawyers and others are experimenting as never before with new forms of law practice, new business arrangements between lawyers and others, and new vehicles for the delivery of legal services, many of which do not involve lawyers at all. Among lawyers, the innovators include solos, small firms, and big firms.
This program examines issues surrounding NewLaw – purely online delivery of legal services by lawyers through virtual law firms, especially relevant now during COVID-19 times. Online document-preparation and para-professional services, with and without lawyer involvement. Service companies that provide everything but the lawyers to a law firm. Sophisticated client-lawyer matching and legal-services bidding sites. Do-it-yourself tools provided by law firms to clients and even non-clients. Dangers lurk all around – from great variation in rules among jurisdictions to licensure restrictions to restrictions on fee-sharing, ownership of law practices and law firms by those who are not lawyers, and the unauthorized practice of law (UPL).
Participants will learn about the current landscape of NewLaw and tour the innovations and new developments in the market for legal and law-related services and their regulation. They also will take a closer look at the perils of fee-sharing with non-lawyers, the ethics of multi-jurisdictional practice, UPL and the supervision of non-lawyers, and the ethics of advertising and marketing.
