Online Lawyering in the 4G Age

One of the most welcome trends of the digital age has been the reduction of the amount of paper it takes to accomplish all sorts of things. Banking, record keeping, and buying and selling items have become vastly easier due to our ability to do more and more things online and through mobile broadband services. However, one area that still seems to lag behind in digitization is the legal profession. While many Internet entrepreneurs have tried to computerize the legal profession and make it more accessible to laymen, there have arisen serious concerns about today's online lawyering.

Companies such as LegalZoom allow people to prepare wills and other "basic" legal documents on their own, and there are now some law firms, especially in the field of immigration law, that operate entirely online. Essentially, the practice of law consists of the analysis of statutes, regulations, court rulings, and common law principles. The job of a lawyer is generally to show how the existing guidance applies to the specific facts of a case and therefore commands the specific result demanded by the client.

The idea behind computerizing the practice of law is the theory that much of the work of lawyers is routine in nature. Lawyers have gained a bad reputation among the public at large for being unresponsive and difficult to work with, and like in the case of auto mechanics, there is the fear that an attorney will take advantage of a client's ignorance of his field to charge for services that are ultimately unnecessary. Thus, many people would prefer to avoid the use of lawyers for matters that are considered routine. For an uncomplicated will, or a "no-fault" divorce, for example, these online law firms and legal services providers argue that the parties to a proceeding are more than capable of using the standard pleadings developed by these online companies to resolve their matters "pro se," or by themselves.

The problem of not using lawyers to provide legal services is that there is simply no objective way to tell if a matter is "too complex" to be handled by the average person. For many people, the advantage of using a lawyer, even in simple cases, is the fact that lawyers are bound by their state's Rules of Professional Responsibility to take ultimate responsibility for their cases. When one takes one's legal matters into their own hands, in the end they have nobody to blame but themselves. In the case of online legal services providers, one has to read the terms of agreement carefully to see what kind of responsibility that company will have for the outcome of one's legal proceeding. As another adage in the legal profession goes, "A lawyer who represents himself has a fool for a client." Furthermore, many law firms have integrated tools easily accessible through wireless Internet services to help people with their cases, thus mitigating some of the traditional disadvantages of working with a law firm.

In cities across California and the United states, it is easy to find a mobile broadband service that can meet your legal needs, such as through a Sacramento CLEAR WIRELESS INTERNET online offer. It's as easy as going to the CLEARWIRELESSINTERNET.NET web site.