Ramblings

End Of An Age?

/ Bruce Cameron

If you listen to the tech-savvy pundits, the age of the transactional lawyer will soon be coming to an end as cloud-based artificial intelligence software will soon be producing all the legal forms a person could ever want at prices so low, no lawyer could ever compete. The thing is, this is not what a law practice, especially a rural law practice, is about.

A rural law practice is not about the “product” – those forms, those missives of legalese we lawyers produce on behalf of our clients – if it were, law firm size would be measured in terms of the number of paralegals rather than the number of attorneys. I have no doubt that software can produce a form that is correct in all particulars, that clever engineers can gin-up an interface that will ask all the necessary questions to have the form comply with statutory requirements, and that this cheap, elegant, correct form will be totally unsuited to a client’s specific situation.

Practicing rural law is not about asking the necessary questions, it is about asking the right questions and understanding not only what the client wishes to accomplish, but why as well and only then moving on to the how. The oft-told stories among family law lawyers about spouses asking and getting the family home in the divorce settlement who turn around a sell the property within the year simply because they could not afford the property on a single person’s income are classic examples of understanding the what-a-client-wants part of the equation while ignoring the why; understanding the why allows the lawyer to function as councilor not just as advocate and opens up the possibility of other options that may provide a better outcome and a better service to the client. Technology will always get the “what” part, but it is unlikely to ever get the “why” part and therein lies its weakness.

A rural law practice (or most solo or small firm practices for that matter) is about service – service to clients, service to community. Technology, even the most sophisticated artificial intelligence software, can’t provide service – it simply cannot make that intuitive leap that uses both “what” and “why” to get to “how”. The lawyer who forgets that his true value lies in service not in product will not last long in rural practice. If you provide quality service and market your practice on the value you provide you need not be concerned about being replaced by CheapLegalForms.com any time soon.

Catch Up

/ Bruce Cameron / 3 Comments

A quick update on the world of rural lawyering:

I recently ran across Jennifer Gumbel’s postings on Lawyerist.com (a tip of the hat to sdrurallawyer.com for pointing out a great resource right here in my back yard). Her article on legal “ruralsourcing” (outsourcing to small towns) shows that, once again, the internet opens up opportunities for rural lawyers. The low overhead of the rural lawyer combined with the almost instantaneous communication of the internet may make the rural lawyer the next “goto” source for document review, due diligence work, and freelance legal research. In a lighter vein, Ms. Gumbel’s “Observations on Rural Stereotypes” is good for a quick laugh.

Over on Greedy Associates, Andrew Chow recently posted on “Why you shouldn’t rule out rural law“. I’m honored to have this blog quoted so prominently. Thanks Mr. Chow.

Finally, there is a great thread over on jdunderground on the wisdom of going rural. You’ll have to sift through the snarky to get to the gems, but the thread is worth a read as there is some good common sense advice lurking there.

Rural Compensation

/ Bruce Cameron

Fall is in full swing out here where the big woods meets the prairie and that means harvest is in full swing and that means that, with the exception of all things relating to football, grain yields, market prices, profits and losses are the primary topics of most casual conversations. The fall months also see an uptick in the rural lawyering business as clients look to close those little, optional matters like estate planning while the weather is still pleasant and cash comes a bit more readily to hand. Profits, losses and budgets are on a rural lawyer’s hit parade as well, for fall also brings sales reps for the phone books, the local school sports teams sponsorship opportunities, and the requests for various and sundry donations – everyone is aware of when cash is flowing through the community.

This fall, a small town lawyer passed away. I didn’t know him and were it not for the internet, I would have never heard of his passing. However, serendipity, the season, and the vagaries of a Google search led me to a small obituary in the Valley News Dispatch and got me thinking about how rural lawyers are paid. It’s true that a rural lawyer’s net income is less, perhaps substantially less than that of our big city, big firm counterparts – a fact that we hope is balanced by the fact that the cost of living is lower for those of us out here in the sticks. But does net income really sum up the totality of a rural practice’s earnings or is there something more to a rural lawyer’s compensation?

skyscrapers and smog anyone?

Now, I’ve never had the privilege of seeing a city sky line from a high-rise corner office and I must admit that my desk now sits in a window-less room in a building perched perilously close to the city limits and the ragged edges of suburbia, but when I step outside at the end of the day, I am rewarded with views like this:

It may just be me, but this always comes down as a plus in the compensation column.

But it is a couple of lines at the bottom of those few column inches spent on the passing of a lawyer that stick with me. The lines read in part: “The Valley News Dispatch will occasionally run obituary stories on notable local residents. They are news items…” In small towns, lawyers make a difference and their passing is newsworthy, not just noted by a paid listing in the back of the classifieds. Those column inches do more than simply mark the death of a small town lawyer, they’re the last installment on his compensation package.

Rest in peace Mr. Ambrose and thank you.

The Four Tech Groups – Balance in Your Tech Diet

/ Bruce Cameron

Sham Harga had run a successful eatery for many years by always smiling, never extending credit, and realizing that most of his customers wanted meals properly balanced between the four food groups: sugar, starch, grease, and burnt crunchy bits — Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms

In the spirit of Sham Harga, one runs a successful law practice by always smiling, never extending credit and having your tech properly balanced between the four tech groups: security, redundancy, utility, and cost. These are dynamic forces often in opposition with each other. If I want my systems to be perfectly secure, I must sacrifice utility (for others not to access my tech, I must also limit how I may access my tech) and invest in cost (firewalls, DMZ’s, encrypted communication, and 24/7 monitoring come with large price tags). Should I wish perfect utility – unlimited access, 24/7/365 availability – I must sacrifice security and invest in redundancy and cost. But there is a point where all four forces lie in balance – costs comfortably within our budget, security contained comfortably between extreme paranoia and laxness, and systems that are sufficiently redundant so that they can attend to the tasks required of them now and for the reasonably foreseeable future with only minor, rectifiable hiccups.

While there are undoubtedly precise mechanisms that will spit out one’s ROI when investing $X in amount Y of security or amount Z of redundancy, this point of balance is more than a simple evaluation of a couple of the forces in isolation. This is more a matter of personal intuition for what we are evaluating is a fluid system and the balance we achieve today may not be the right balance tomorrow. It is a bit like yoga – today I find my balance in child’s pose and even though I might find it in mountain or tree tomorrow, right now a simple solution addresses my needs and that is all that matters for the moment; let tomorrow bring a new balance with it when tomorrow comes.

Yet being in tech balance is more than simply being able to find the right balance between the four tech groups – there is finding balance while engulfed in the ever-present white noise of our interconnected tech; of finding those small moments of quiet midst the cacophony of social networks, list-serves, RSS feeds, blogs, and e-mail if for no other reason than to find some time to actually do some paying work. I find that when the din becomes too much and the well-considered advice of the efficiency experts no longer lifts me above the noise I take a retreat from my tech for a few days – deliberately disconnecting from the cacophony of interconnectedness – choosing instead to regress to more primal state of tech. One in which afternoon naps are more likely to be interrupted by the dulcet tones of a landline than the strident chirp of a cellphone and where word processing is a product of ink on paper rather than electrons on phosphor.

Admittedly, putting one’s tech on hiatus is not easy (a small town’s lack of reliable connectivity goes a long way in helping me ignore tech’s siren song) but I find that doing so reminds me to have a more deliberate, purposeful relationship with my tech; that my tech is there to facilitate my mission, not dictate it. Seems everything needs to be rebooted ever now and then.

Retro or Different

/ Bruce Cameron / 2 Comments

It’s pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness. — Jerry Garcia

Different seems to be the watchword for today’s new breed of lawyers; these rising stars with their different philosophies on billing, on marketing, and on the practice of law in general. We are seeing the birth of a legal counterculture, marked not by long-hair and tie-dyed T-shirts but by iPads, smartphones, and SaaS clouds. Out here in small town America, the trappings of old, republican, conservative law die hard (there is still the expectation of brick and mortar offices, three-piece suits, and varnished oak desks) and one has to sneak different into one’s practice slowly.

It is not that clients aren’t receptive to different, it is just that they really don’t care about it. Clients are interested in outcomes; more specifically, they are interested in paying you for solutions to their particular problem – they don’t care about the process or what technology you use to expedite your research, they just want the solution to be palatable. For the rural lawyer, technology’s role is not as practice differentiator (well, there may be a few referral sources that will be impressed by a law firm’s use of technology to implement a stream-lined, systems-based approach to handling client matters, but the average client won’t care if you have a new smartphone or a 5 year old flip phone); technology’s role is to simply improve your efficiency and reduce your costs.

In my one-man-band solo practice, technology is what keeps me sane. It allows me to have a human voice answer my phone and direct calls to me and it allows me to spend 30 minutes dictating a contract rather than 2 hours typing all without the overhead of having to employ actual staff. Technology allows me to run a paperless office secure in the knowledge that between my RAID arrays and backup software my business data will always be readily accessible. Tickler systems keep me on task, and e-mail filters help me manage information distraction.

The only thing different about my technology is that it’s not different – no cutting edge open source software, no public SaaS clouds, no smartphones or tablets. The only new piece of technology I could really use is a typewriter (I’m really fed up with filling out the 3-part Certificate of Real Estate Value by hand). Perhaps retro will be the new different.