Exporting Epoq Technology: The US Market
For small law firms in the US, increasing pricing pressure and the emergence of well funded and widely marketed non-lawyer legal document preparation services (e.g. Legalzoom) have made the need for alternative, lower cost methods of servicing existing customers and gaining new ones an acute issue.
To competitively service this market, small law firms need to find ways of reducing the cost of service, whilst simultaneously satisfying customers’ demand for on-line legal services where they can self-serve. Organisations such as insurers are also looking for ways of enhancing their products with access to self-serve legal services.
The Epoq USA legal platform is already ideally positioned to meet all these needs - but an additional challenging aspect of providing commoditized legal services in the U.S lies in creating a system and services/products that are compliant with individual local bar regulations for the Unauthorized Practice of Law (“UPL”).
UPL regulations dictate that legal advice can only be offered by an attorney registered in the same State as the client, and that an attorney may not offer legal advice in any other State. As a result, Epoq has had to ensure that all aspects of a self service solution- such as communications with customers, including the delivery systems - are fully compliant: it has been challenging to deal with individual bar regulations concerning, for example, the sharing of revenue, on-line engagement with clients and facilitating on-line payments in order to ensure that services provided on the Epoq Legal platform are compliant across the US.
For US law firms, the Epoq platform provides a simple, risk-free way of reducing the cost to serve and reaching new markets that:
- Is fully compliant with local bar UPL regulations;
- Is capable of providing a ‘virtual shop front’ that is dedicated to their firm;
- Is scalable, with selectable content modules to match the firm’s own legal expertise;
- Provides immediately available mechanisms for ecommerce and online client communication and management