With modern consumers growing to consider online delivery of services the norm, what is your firm doing to embrace and profit from this new culture, what is your client-web-strategy? We take a look at what members of the MyLawyer network can offer their clients, most specifically the new “try before you buy” technology that comes with the latest generation of Rapidocs technology.

When a potential or existing client lands on your MyLawyer website they have instant access to a full law guide that explains the area surrounding their matter, and introduces the range of documents that may be of help to them. The client is presented with clear, upfront pricing and is able to start drafting the document without having to commit so much as an email address.

The drafting process involves an intelligent online interview system where (although partially obscured and not printable) the document can be seen to evolve in real time as answers are provided and the client’s situation becomes clear. A draft can then be saved to a personalised section of your website and returned to at any point to be edited further and purchased when complete. At this point the document is passed to the firm itself for legal review, if appropriate.

So how does all this make the user feel, and what does it mean for you? Well, our feedback suggests that users remain in their comfort zone and don’t feel the pressure that may be exerted by a face-to-face interaction. Perhaps most significantly, it is the transparency of the process that enables both potential and existing clients to see the value of what is being sold and builds a degree of trust before having to make any sort of commitment whatsoever, and the overriding emotion that users feedback is one of control;

“From start to finish I felt in control: I found the right documents and read some background info which helped put my mind at rest, and being able to fully preview them before committing to purchase was a nice touch. All in all I found the process transparent and reassuring, and came out with the documentation I needed without sacrificing quality and whilst saving substantially from the price I would have paid on the high-street”

M Noar, Libra Solutions, online business services.

The modern consumer banks online, buys their insurance online, pays their bills online, and yet the market for online legal services is still relatively immature. Is it time your website became more than just an e-brochure for your legal services?, is it time it became a portal for successful web-engagement 24/7?

MyLawyer firms will be able to provide online drafting services to clients from their own website, will receive pre-drafted referrals from MyLawyer.co.uk, and will have access to Rapidocs V4 technology for in-house drafting use, making cost savings across all three channels.

“Our detailed and law-firm supported research suggests that MyLawyer members will be able to save money in 4 key ways”, explains Business Development Director, Dave Jones:

a)    Firstly, the cost of drafting a document virtually disappears if the client chooses to create the draft themselves online.

b)    Secondly, clients can engage with the firm by telephone, with less qualified (and hence cheaper to employ) specifically-trained operators using Rapidocs technology to draft the document in house.

c)    Thirdly, in-house face-to-face interviews can be performed by less qualified staff that have a lower hourly rate.

d)    Finally, even when a face-to-face interview is conducted by the fee-earner themselves, time and money are still saved as at the end of the interview the document has been automatically drafted, whereas traditionally they would need a separate ‘write up period’.

On top of these savings, admin overheads can be reduced: a proportion of the clients who engage with any firm invariably do not complete their engagement – but if these clients can be directed online for the first draft, these lost transactions do not take up valuable staff time. Additionally, electronic billing means that the need for staff to chase invoices is reduced.

The latest Rapidocs technology means firms are able to service their existing client-base much more efficiently: in fact through both online and in-house drafting we believe some firms will be able to cut their direct cost of fulfilment by as much as 50%. Even if only 30% of their existing customers engage online we still forecast a 10% rise in the overall margins of the firm. This is a staggering statistic when you consider that this model doesn’t take into account any new business generated as a result of the new online capabilities MyLawyer firms will enjoy.

Making accurate predictions of resulting new business is not easy, but by being among the first firms to truly embrace the web and hence give the modern legal consumer what they want, the sky’s the limit.
There is limited space for top-tier firms to join the MyLawyer network.

A recent news article highlighted a number of pending court cases in New Zealand where children are fighting for the right to change their names having been graced with names such as Sex Fruit, Number 16 Bus Shelter, O.Crnia and Midnight Chardonnay. Despite such a bizarre trend in the UK, changing the name of a minor is still a common occurrence, for a variety of reasons. Our change of name deed for a minor makes it easy to change the name of a child, provided that you have parental responsibility for that child and any other person who also has parental responsibility gives consent to the change of name. This document is only suitable for minors (i.e. under the age of 18 in England, Wales and Northern Ireland and under the age of 16 in Scotland) and British citizens. Children over the age of 16 will also need to give consent to the change of name by signing in both his/her new and old name.

A limited liability partnership has elements of both a partnership and a corporation, and is a unique entity in its synthesis of both collective and individual rights and responsibilities, while being a particularly flexible business structure. This document creates a limited liability partnership agreement (LLP) in accordance with the Limited Liability Partnerships Act 2000 and provides a contractual framework under which the members should conduct themselves at all times. The agreement includes provisions in relation to the key elements that define an LLP such as management, finances and member regulation. In addition, the agreement offers many optional clauses such as those in relation to insurance, maternity, paternity and adoption leave. This document is suitable for small to medium sized limited liability partnerships of no more than 20 members. Please note that this can only be used for LLPs consisting of individual members, and not companies or other LLPs.

Both of these documents are now part of the Rapidocs library, and available for our customers to access.

It is vital that landlords are aware of the correct course of action in the event that a tenant(s) needs to be evicted, as taking the law into your own hands can land them with a heavy fine or even a prison sentence. Our new service is designed to guide customers safely through the potential minefield of being a landlord in England and Wales, making sure you tick all the procedural boxes along the way.

The new services cover everything a landlord needs to legally evict a tenant and regain possession of their property: although there are many reasons to evict a tenant(s), the two most commonly used grounds are rent arrears and the accelerated possession procedure, the latter being the preferred way to remove existing tenants and replace them with new ones paying rent.

These new services can be found across Epoq’s own sites and are available to all of our clients.

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

We are delighted to announce that Minister Law Ltd are the fourth firm to join the online MyLawyer network, launching later this year. Minster will now join the other announced network members (Pannone, Hugh James and Nelsons) in being able to provide their clients with a full range of automated document-drafting services from a dedicated section of their own website, as well as receiving referrals from the consumer-facing MyLawyer.co.uk site.

“At Minster Law we pride ourselves on creating access to legal services for our customers. Our corporate values of People, Value and Growth underpin this approach, and we firmly believe that the MyLawyer network (and the wider services that Epoq are able to provide us) will help enforce our commitment to these values” comments Craig Underwood, Associate Director of Minster Law Ltd.  “As a leading law firm in the UK, we understand how daunting it can be to put your legal affairs in order - and this service demonstrates our aim to de-mystify the law, provide easy access to the legal sector and create value-for-money legal products. Our partnership with Epoq sets the standard for all law firms in the coming decades, and we are proud to be leading the way. Through the network, our customers will have access to the same specialist lawyers and advice that they would have through more traditional engagement, but at far better value and when it’s convenient for them to do so. They will also gain access to additional services that are contracted entirely through the internet.”

Interested in MyLawyer, either as a potential customer or as a network member? Why not have a look at our pre-launch homepage here to see more details…

Over half of a sample of cohabiting couples believed that “common law marriage” was a recognised legal status and would allow their partner to inheritance rights should anything happen to them. There is in fact “no such thing in court” and hasn’t been since 1753, and without an up-to-date will partners could potentially be left penniless in the event of death. On top of this, 1 in 4 children are born into unmarried households, so the implications of being legally unprotected extend beyond the couple themselves!
And it’s not just death that could threaten the right to assets; if a cohabiting couple end their relationship and one partner does not have a financial stake in the property, they may have no right to it whatsoever, irrelevant of how long they’ve lived there, and irrelevant of mutual children.
Despite a report by the Law Commission in 2006 which suggested giving cohabiters legal rights similar to married couples, nothing seems set to change and it remains paramount for cohabiting couples to protect their legal rights with appropriate documentation.
Epoq offers a range of legal documentation relevant to cohabiting couples, including:

Comprehensive pair of wills for an unmarried couple

Prenuptial/Pre-civil partnership agreement

Cohabitation agreement

It is both right and proper that the Power of Attorney process is handled rigorously and with the utmost scrutiny – that can’t be contested. But ironically, it seems that many individuals going through the process of getting authorised to act on the behalf of others are actually being failed by the authorisation process itself!

A recent sampling exercise by the Office of the Public Guardian (OPG) revealed the surprising statistic that 60% of the LPAs submitted to them last year were erroneous and required further correspondence with the sender before they could be approved. Furthermore, half of these flawed documents required re-submission and hence payment of a new fee, an entirely unnecessary waste of the firm’s time and finances.

Creating an LPA for a client involves a 52-page application form, ascertaining which sections are relevant to the case in particular. Completing this form in accordance with the guideline can take, on average, 3-4 hours, at which point the completed document is sent to the OPG - but in 6 out of 10 cases, it’s later returned with errors, (some of which can terminate the process entirely). More time is then spent correcting or resubmitting the document at additional cost before it can be accepted and is of any use to the client.

This is grossly inefficient, and a classic example of how Epoq’s automated legal document services can improve productivity - members of the MyLawyer network will be able to offer LPA services to their clients while minimising these kind of inefficiencies. A MyLawyer firm will be able to create the document automatically as they are guided intelligently through the ‘interview’ process, selectively obtaining the necessary information. The process will take a fraction of the time taken by a conventional construction, and by cutting out human error will significantly reduce the chance of a costly, time-wasting rejection from the OPG. Better still, the firm can instruct their client to ‘interview’ themselves online, meaning that the only legwork will be checking the draft automated by the client themselves.

The MyLawyer firm is able to cut out wasted time and expensive errors and increase their potential margins as a result of a smoother service-delivery. The client saves time, money and effort. A classic example of the merits of automation…

For the second year running, a firm of solicitors has labelled July ‘Make a Will Month’, and as part of the media coverage surrounding this, a shocking statistic (shocking not because it’s almost certainly true, but because the figure does not seem to change year-on-year) is being bandied about (for example  BBC Radio 2, The Chris Evans Show, 01/07/08,) that suggests that two-thirds of people die without making a Will, leaving a good proportion of their assets at the mercy of Her Majesty’s Treasury. It’s surely no coincidence that in the same month, the second series of the BBC show ‘Heir Hunters’ is being broadcast, which follows the efforts of a team of probate detectives who attempt to track down previously unknown family members who may have left unassigned assets.

There is an underlying theme here: A Will is clearly an essential document for anyone who cares about their descendants, yet evidently they are not being created in the majority of circumstances. Why is this?

The Radio programme went on to cite the two key reasons normally provided by the British public for not making a Will as the expense of using solicitors and the time and hassle associated with visiting them. This comes as no surprise to us; these are the two compelling factors that underpin the design of services like MyLawyer and Desktop Lawyer, and explain the demand for them. Chris Evans, the programme presenter, suggested that people could potentially use DIY Wills purchased from high street retailers such as WHSmith, and the solicitor interviewed on-air for the piece suggested that this kind of product was over simplistic. That may well be the case in some circumstances, but not in all – and of course Epoq’s MyLawyer and Desktop Lawyer services offer a range of options for professional legal review, which can take that first draft of a Will and have it tailored for each customers unique circumstances.

What is clear, particularly in difficult financial circumstances, is that the need for people to create a Will has never been greater. As you might expect from a company whose products serve this market, Epoq fully support the “Make a Will Month” campaign – and would suggest that whatever level of financial planning you choose to undertake, it’s better than doing nothing….

The article explained how the launch of MyLawyer will put pressure on high-street firms as they aim to adapt to changes in the legal market - the Gazette piece quotes Richard Cohen, our joint CEO: “…perhaps the largest unexpected threat to high street Solicitors may come from inside the profession itself. Those firms who are unable to or have not yet considered the ramifications of a changing market may end up facing a second, possibly greater challenge than that exerted by the major financial institutions. High street Solicitors stand to lose market share to other law firms that are embracing the competitive advantage of technology and the distribution of the internet.”

You can see the full press release here.

We believe MYL is the future of legal transaction: smart, open, accessible, online – and yet backed with top quality legal expertise and the ability for direct contact with lawyers if required. We’ll be keeping you up to date with progress here as we head towards the launch of MyLawyer later in the year, but in the meantime you can register your interest by going to mylawyer.co.uk and completing the online signup.