With the goal of positioning his on-line legal forms company as a solution to America’s access-to-justice problem, Chas Rampenthal, General Counsel of LegalZoom, zoomed through my home state last week, with two speaking engagements. I caught his speech at a breakfast meeting at my home-town bar association, the Cleveland Metropolitan Bar Association (@clemetrobar).
A panacea
We’ve written before to remind in-house lawyers that even if you don’t sign pleadings or appear in court on behalf of your corporate employer, you are still practicing law when you give advice and participate in business transactions on your employer’s behalf. If you do so without being duly licensed, you are straying into unauthorized
H&R Block announced in January that it would offer immigration document preparation services in some of its Texas stores. The business model depended on customers going into the stores, where “trained immigration assistants” would help them use proprietary computer software to fill out the forms.
After barely getting off the ground
, though, the tax-help
Small lapses can sometimes snowball into big problems, as an in-house Pennsylvania lawyer for a large pharmaceutical company found out when she was suspended for six months for the unauthorized practice of law.
The lawyer failed to comply with her yearly continuing-legal-education requirements; as a result, she was placed on inactive status in 2009,
If your opposing counsel is from out of state and jumps the gun by filing a complaint before being admitted pro hac vice, can you get the complaint tossed? According to a recent opinion from the Seventh District Ohio Court of Appeals, the answer is “yes.” By implication, the opinion also points to some
Does a company like LegalZoom, that provides low-cost do-it-yourself legal documents, necessarily stray into the unauthorized practice of law? The ABA Journal reports here, summarizing recent salvos in the LegalZoom war.
Under LegalZoom’s business model, customers create legal documents by answering on-line questionnaires. Then, LegalZoom employees review the answers, and out comes a will,