Industry
Groups Tackle Legal Technology Ethics, Standards
A pair of nascent industry organizations are becoming active in defining legal technology ethics and standards.
One group, the Legal Cloud Computing Association, is focused on communicating industry responses to bar association policies and courtroom rulings about how technologies such as e-discovery should be used. Another, the International Legal Technology Standards Organization, aims to define certification and standards processes for users.
Jack Newton, CEO of hosted practice management vendor Clio, co-founded LCCA in December 2010 and is a board member of ILTSO, which formed in April this year.
For legal-industry cloud computing companies, "We were running into all of the questions around security and ethics and so on from lawyers. [We] started to see that there was a need for us to act as a group" Newton said, in Vancouver, British Columbia. Now, "We feel we've got a very effective and productive association" he said.
LCCA's first action was a group response letter to the American Bar Association's Commission on Ethics. ABA acknowledged the letter in its revised proposal, he noted. Another letter, published last week, addresses to the North Carolina State Bar, which issued an opinion on using cloud-based computing services.
In addition to such responses, LCCA ensures that its member companies themselves adhere to certain values. To be considered, companies must support open, non-proprietary formats for importing and exporting data; host their services at SAS 70 Type II audited data centers, primarily offer cloud services; and transparently share their best practics for backup and security. Also, LCCA intends to become a nonprofit, Newton said.
Founding members in additon to Clio are DirectLaw, Rocket Matter, and Total Attorneys. Current membership is made up of eight companies. "I would expect our membership to grow substantially over the next year" Newton said. "We see one of our main goals as helping educate the legal market about cloud computing."
On the certification and security front, ILTSO, already a nonprofit, has drafted its first set of proposed standards, which will be updated annually, Newton said. "What ILTSO is contemplating doing in the near future is opening up a certification process. The reason it's different is that it's a set of standards in a real formulation process" unlike commercial certifications for law firms or training companies, he noted.
"For the moment, at least, ILTSO is filling a vacuum" Newton said. The group got a credibility boost with the inclusion of founding member Catherine Sanders Reach, who is director of the ABA's Legal Technology Resource Center.
Newton acknowledged that LCCA and ILTSO both face challenges. LCCA needs to ensure that it members maintain a common vision about how legal cloud computing should evolve, and also a common vision for how to reply to wider actions in the legal field, while ILTSO must try to avoid entering a standards war with other bodies, he explained.
(Published by Law Technology News - July 21, 2011)