Creating A Network of Community-Based Pro Se (Self-Help) Legal Information Centers by Richard S. Granat

I first thought about titling this paper "Why On-Line Mediation?" because there is still disagreement among some practitioners about the effectiveness of using traditional mediation to settle disputes.

The practice of law is experiencing extraordinary changes that will have a lasting impact on the structure of the legal profession and the ways in which lawyers approach their practices. Within the next five years, the practice of law will change even more than it has during the past five years, because of new developing information and communications technologies which will enable anyone to access any legal resource essentially for free, or at very low cost.

Utilizing new information technology to improve the delivery of legal services is impeded by obsolete ideas about law firm productivity. Analyzing the benefits of utilizing document assembly, and other specialized legal software programs in law firms requires that the analyst have a concept of productivity which generates meaningful measures that can be objectively evaluated. Most law firms today, other than contingent fee firms that earn their fees based upon a successful result for the client, measure output in terms of attorney or paralegal hours billed to the client. A typical annual objective for a lawyer is 2,200 hours of billable time; although there are stories of lawyers who bill as much as 3,000 to 3,500 hours a year. It is obvious that profitability is a function of hours billed times the hourly rate. Once the maximum number of hours have been billed per lawyer, for most firms the only way to increase a firm's profits is to increase the hourly rate.

The phrase, "The Digital Lawyer" was first coined by Professor M. Ethan Katsh in a series of articles and his book, "Law in a Digital World." Katsh has written: