Just last month, we wrote about a North Carolina draft proposal that would ease the way via its ethics rules for Avvo and other on-line legal services to operate there. Now, after a joint opinion from three New Jersey Supreme Court committees, the Garden State has turned thumbs down on such law platforms, citing issues
LegalZoom GC sees self-help model as legal-services solution; others see problems
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
LegalZoom: Unauthorized practice? Or new legal services model?
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,