This is going to be a short update offered on a Friday for any weekend reading needs you may be facing.
A bit back (on Back to the Future day actually) I mentioned (almost as only an aside) the pilot project that the ABA was launching in cooperation with Rocket Lawyer to offer a limited-scope representation service where consumers of legal services could seek a quick answer to a specific legal question, and a follow up, from participating lawyers for $4.95.
Yesterday, The American Lawyer (which usually has its stuff behind a firewall) put up a publicly-available piece about the ABA’s decision to walk away from the joint venture. Although just coming to light now, the American Lawyer piece indicates that the ABA dropped the Rocket Lawyer partnership in January 2016.
The fact that this fizzled out as quickly as it did could be a real indication of where lines may be drawn that simply cannot be overcome in the near future — which is a sentiment you could glean from one of the quotes from the Executive Director of the California State Bar near the end of the piece — or it may just be an anomalous event heavily influenced by other circumstances. It, of course, cannot help but be connected in terms of timing at least (as The American Lawyer piece rightly noticed) to the contentious proceedings in the ABA House of Delegates over the adoption of proposed guidelines for states to use in seeking to regulate the conduct of nontraditional legal providers.
Either way, any post-mortem on ABA Law Connect ought to be a useful opportunity to make what should be a fundamental, and non-controversial, point. The idea of any service where a lawyer makes herself available to answer a discrete question from a client, without a continuing obligation to provide further representation, is absolutely something that can be done in compliance with the ethics rules in any jurisdiction that a rule in place patterned upon ABA Model Rule 1.2(c). That rule provides:
A lawyer may limit the scope of the representation if the limitation is reasonable under the circumstances and the client gives informed consent.
The primary fly-in-the-ointment in any given proposed limited-scope situation is whether a limitation is “reasonable.” In the words that show up in Comment [7] to RPC 1.2 (albeit only with reference to a not-so-state-of-the-art method of communication):
If, for example, a client’s objective is limited to securing general information about the law the client needs in order to handle a common and typically uncomplicated legal problem, the lawyer and client may agree that the lawyer’s services will be limited to a brief telephone consultation. Such a limitation, however, would not be reasonable if the time allotted was not sufficient to yield advice upon which the client could rely.
Presumably, ABA Law Connect was set up so that its underlying agreements (whether click-wrap or otherwise) had all participants involved acknowledging that there may be some questions for which answers cannot be provided in a limited scope representation universe because they are too complicated.
The other thorny issue that can often make or break participation by a lawyer in an arrangement designed to provide a high-volume of limited-scope representations is conflicts. While the ethics rules contemplate the ability to limit the scope of a representation, the limited-scope client is still a client for purposes of RPC 1.7 and then becomes a former client for purposes of RPC 1.9.
The ABA Model Rules, already provide relief for lawyers from this conflict burden as long as they are providing these kind of “short-term limited legal services” through a “program sponsored by a nonprofit organization or court.” (ABA Model Rule 6.5.) The Rocket Lawyers of the world, however, are in the business of being for-profit endeavors and, thus, cannot offer the limited conflict of interest exposure that can be offered by the same bar associations that denounced ABA Law Connect as jeopardizing their revenue stream.