Executive Director’s Message by Karen A. Gould The Future of Law Practice Competition has never been fi ercer than it is now in the practice of law. LegalZoom (LegalZoom.com) provides consumers with the opportu-nity to prepare legal documents online. LegalZoom has been in business since 2003 in the United States and has ex-panded its operations into the United Kingdom. Avvo Legal Services (Avvo. com) offers limited-scope, fi xed-fee legal representation. In Florida, a law fi rm is using the Internet to provide free legal forms, case-tracking tools, and advice from attorneys and unbun-dled legal services. It is being marketed as “Legalyou.com,” see it online at http://bit.ly/2udYFMT. Nonprofi t law fi rms are forming to provide legal services on a slid-ing-fee scale basis to clients who do not qualify for legal aid. With the development of super computers like Watson’s “son” ROSS doing legal research faster and better than attor-neys, even big law fi rms may start to feel threatened, although some have licensed ROSS to do research: http:// wapo.st/2u8N9To. A recent study pre-dicted that 115,000 legal jobs would be automated in twenty years. The United States has approximately 900,000 law-yers practicing at present. There will always be a need for lawyers, particularly trial lawyers and highly valued advisors. The develop-ments cited above, however, speak to a profound change in the way con-sumers access and use legal services. Can the regulatory bars throughout the nation stop the trend by enforcing their UPL rules and taking anticom-petitive measures? The unauthorized practice of law is prohibited in Virginia and throughout the United States. Is artifi cial intelligence used to research case law, such as ROSS Intelligence, the unauthorized practice of law? Just as nonlicensed individuals with law de-grees or paralegals provide assistance as researchers to law fi rms, ROSS may also provide assistance to law fi rms in doing research. The caveat is that the research must be done under the supervision of a licensed attorney. See Virginia UPL Opinion No. 161. As for anticompetitive mea-sures, the case of N.C. State Board of Dental Examiners v. Federal Trade Commission , 574 U.S. ___, 135 S. Ct. 1101 (2015), is instructive. The United States Supreme Court ruled 6–3 in that case that a state licensing board composed primarily of active market participants has state action immu-nity from antitrust law only when it is actively supervised by the state. Because of concerns that active market participants will exercise anticompet-itive regulation, clear articulation of state policy and active supervision is required to achieve antitrust immuni-ty. 135 S. Ct. 1112. Is there a problem with setting up a not-for-profi t law fi rm in Virginia with nonlawyers on the board of di-rectors? Rule of Professional Conduct 5.4(c) does not prohibit such an ar-rangement, so long as the nonlawyers do not “direct or regulate the lawyer’s professional judgment in rendering such legal services.” What about the self-help forms provided by LegalZoom? Surely, allowing the public to complete a will using self-help forms violates good sense, if not sound legal principles? LegalZoom continues to fl ourish and sell its services throughout the fi fty states. Marketing self-help forms does not violate any UPL provisions in Virginia (Virginia UPL Opinion 207). No bar complaints have been fi led against LegalZoom or its employees, to the best of our knowledge. The Standing Committee on Legal Ethics has recently considered the issue of fee sharing with a nonlawyer, where the fee is paid up front to the online attorney-client matching service and held by it until the services have been completed, and put the issue on hold for further study. As Ethics Committee Chair Eric Page commented at the June 2017 Executive Committee meet-ing, the issue is not going away. Additional concerns abound with the rise of cyberattacks and ransom-ware taking lawyer’s data hostage. http://cnnmon.ie/2s1CoxF. Law fi rms are targets of these attacks because clients’ data is valuable. Literally, the only way one of these attacks can be prevented is not being on the Internet at all (no e-mail; no Internet access). In this day and time, that is not possi-ble. Lawyers and law fi rms should have a current operating system on all com-puters and phones with all updates ap-plied. All data needs to be backed up to an external drive that is not connected to the Internet, which means you will need two external drives so you are 10 VIRGINIA LAWYER | August 2017 | Vol. 66 www.vsb.org