The ABA Commission on Ethics 20/20 recently held a hearing on whether ethics rules need to be adjusted to accommodate new technologies and ways of delivering legal information and services: Your ABA: February 2010 | Clients prefer Web-based legal options, find non-lawyer vendors fill the bill.

At the hearing, Richard Granat of DirectLaw estimated that various new self-help sites have drained $75 million out of lawyers’ practices annually.

This is not the only industry to be impacted by the tendency of today’s information consumers to want to find information and, to the extent possible, execute transactions of various kinds entirely online.  The business of serving that growing self-help market is a threat to the legal services industry and an opportunity for legal publishers – and for new entrants to the legal information industry.

Robb Shecter, a second-year law student at Lewis & Clark Law School, needed a decent online version of the Oregon Revised Statutes.  So he built one.

The availability of the Oregon statutes for this venture was secured after Carl Malamud of Public.Resource.Org and Tim Stanley of Justia lobbied the Oregon legislature to stop asserting a copyright in the Oregon Revised Statues, which had prevented third party publishers from creating their own versions of the statues without steep licensing fees.  They presented a number of legal and policy arguments for the change.  Last June, the Oregon Legislative Counsel Committee agreed to no longer assert its copyright interest in the statutes.

This is a model of what’s happening in open access to legal and regulatory information online. it’s no longer enough that information be freely available at a government web site; the really interesting innovations come when public bodies release their information in low-level formats that allow third parties to manipulate it into innovative new products.  That a second-year law student can whip together a better version of the state laws than the state itself – in his spare time – says volumes about the possibilities and level of change that open access will bring to primary law publishing.

Susannah Fox of the Pew Internet & American Life Project writes about the “participatory class.” The concept comes out of Pew’s research around changing patterns of political engagement, but also applies to health care, as a new generation of active patients pushes the envelope of how medicine is practiced and medical services consumed.

The legal services industry will see the same kind of impacts as the healthcare industry.  Watch for “participatory clients” to change legal practice just as participatory patients change medicine:

This participatory class is reading blogs, listening to podcasts, updating their social network profile, watching videos, and posting comments. Technology is not an end, but a means to accelerate the pace of discovery, widen social networks, and sharpen the questions someone might ask when they do get to talk to a health professional.

This participatory class won’t have as much impact on the high end of the legal industry that serves large corporations and organizations, but will definitely transform the small and solo firms that serve individuals and small businesses.

Heard at the ABA Techshow a couple of weeks ago: Chatted separately with Larry Port of RocketMatter and Conrad Saam of AVVO about their respective companies.  Both innovating, trying out things new to the legal profession. Asked both of them if the saw a difference in the way younger vs. older lawyers perceive and adapt to their offerings.

Both said no, lots of older attorneys get the new ways – whether its jumping on new ways to deliver software as a service, or adapting to new, open, riskier law firm marketing practices.