Originally published by Mark I. Unger.
On the flight from Austin, I’m already running into techie-peeps all around. LawPay is a major sponsor this year and two out of the ten are on the flight. Happened to look across the shuttle aisle from airport parking lot to catch one of these folks sporting his very cool LawPay vest. And it’s game on. I’m sitting with another vendor to my left and across the aisle a solo who escaped from big law and legal tech wonk, both going to their first American Bar Association TechShow. Oh, how their world is about to change.
Change is the one thing that comes at these events. We’re currently experiencing (or being bombarded with) more options for law practice management, e-discovery, client communication, document management, automation, artificial intelligence, and general legal tech that is morphing these categories in new and different ways, adding not just layers of tech on top of each other, but crossing into the functionality of other systems, in an effort to gain market share.
In the case of the ABA TechShow, change comes in the form of tracks and topics. Many of the traditional speaker-guard is back, as well as many new lawyer presenters, including as many vendor presenters that can get in and an infusion of law school types as TechShow goes younger and law schools increasingly add practice management technology to their curriculums in some way. This is highlighted by the addition of a technology component to the definition of competence in certain states’ rules, following the ABA’s telegraph back in 2012. See ABA Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Comment 8 to Model Rule 1.1. There are now 36 states that have added some form of this technology language to their definition of competence, including Texas as of February 26, 2019. For a full list of the states having implemented this, see Robert Ambrogi’s ongoing tally found at https://www.lawsitesblog.com/tech-competence.
This sea of change has also taken the form of many new startups, a number of which pitched in the Start-Up Alley competition leading off the TechShow on Wednesday, February 27, which was hosted by Ambrogi and sponsored by Clio. Among these are several that have looked to integrate with practice management systems, further adding to the change and morphing of system on system to make law practice more automated, seamless, and hopefully more efficient. This is an example of how convergence and integration have continued to ramp up efforts to make legal practice more profitable at a time when there is even further disruption in the legal space.
Among the companies pitching are Your Firm App, a company started by small-firm family law attorney Chris Smith in Oklahoma, that offers personalized apps for law firms and app-based portals for client communication and other functionality. While this app didn’t win the Start-Up Alley competition (as winner was chosen by voting of the audience in attendance), it is now offering a ton of functionality including its client facing solution. These include features such as mobile messaging, mobile bill pay (with integration with LawPay, Clio, and PracticePanther), calendaring, document sharing, and also document signing.
While many of the practice management systems have apps, this system appears to have a deeper functionality and promise for the attorney-client experience.
In addition, automation (perhaps more aptly more automatic document assembly) seems to be one of the hot topics (following AI, much of which is building on the automation trend that has been coming for several years now; See If This Then That, Zapier, and others).
HelpSelf Legal (now called Documate) claims to automate document production, turning forms into ready-fileable documents, in the areas of family violence, debt collection, clear marijuana convictions (it’s listed), guardianship, and child support, with the addition of the ability to have “Instant Client-Facing Apps, and publish intake interviews that populate necessary documents. It also touts the ability to provide flat fee document services on your site,” and thus further promotes both this automation trend along with increased secure client communication. During the Startup-Alley pitch, the emphasis was on the ability to help attorneys service those who may be the victims of family violence and are not only the least able to defend themselves but also the least able to afford legal representation. According to the founder, their product was able to help attorneys file over 2,000 more applications in California legal aid environment than prior year.
OurChildInfo.com, originally created by another family law attorney, is a startup that claims to be unique (non-deletable messaging and tracking system for parents of children). The big current players in this market are OurFamilyWizard.com, which provides an app for both parents and functionality for attorneys to view/download records, etc., and AppClose. OurChildInfo claims uniqueness as they only charge one parent ($7.50/mo.) and the other parent is free, though AppClose offers a “freemium” model and makes money via portion of payments received from one payer to another along the lines of “fintech”-type startups PayPal, Venmo, and others. They claim further uniqueness in that a parent can’t delete, back date or alter data and can print out a log file with date and time stamped log file.
Chicago-based War Room, another interestingly named startup, has been around since 2012 and claims to be unique in that it is the first web-based deposition review software. While many have used the tested apps for iPad—TrialPad, TranscriptPad and DocReviewPad (*iPad users only), this web-based depo review may appeal to some and I’d be interested to see if people, especially those collaborating on depo review will latch onto this technology. It does boast similar technology to add tags (i.e. issue codes) to depositions then produce reports that would show where in multiple depositions a particular fact was shown to be true.
Start-Up Alley Pitch Results:
The Biggest vote getters—
DocStyle was an excellent surprise, boasting the ability to take a PDF and convert to Word using an algorithm 6 years in development to maintain (recreate) the formatting of the original document and make it editable. This product was launched February 27 here at this pitch contest and follows another offering of a metadata removal product that competes with others but seems very user friendly. It allows for single or batch metadata removal and also has an Outlook plugin that will automatically strip the metadata and convert it to PDF for sending. It is somewhat customizable in that it has an ignore button but that button can also be turned off by administrators to prevent the human factor from creeping in.
The Winner:
The pitch garnering the most number of votes was JurisByte, another attorney startup, based on the premise of clients-demanding-text communication with attorneys. This product, definitely in its infancy, boasts the ability to create secure text messages using existing mobile devices, and protecting the telephone numbers of attorneys (and ostensibly clients). It will also create a daily mail report showing all texts so that these communications can be stored in client file/folder for documentation purposes. They have no integrations but claim to have these coming. I know of one other product (zipwhip) that is sold as business text messaging for clients and has the ability to use landlines and also has many and multiple integrations such as Clio, Salesforce, Zoho, and others via Zapier. When asked about comparison and other functionality as compared to some of the practice management apps integrating with app solutions, they were definitely thinking of those integrations. The unique feature here seems to be the ability for an attorney to use existing cell phones to text messages with clients, then get a report to then be able to bill for those communications. As always, look for many changes and additions with this and all other solutions every six months. The more things change, the more they…well change. It’s a brave new world out here.
Mark I. Ungeris a family lawyer, mediator, and consultant in San Antonio, primarily focused on family law. He is the founding member of the Unger Law Firm and is highly involved in the integration of technology and the law. Find him on Twitter @miunger or online at www.unger-law.com.
Curated by Texas Bar Today. Follow us on Twitter @texasbartoday.
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