The legal profession has always been a little bit of a private club. There are no special jackets or secret handshakes that come with bar membership, but the process of becoming a lawyer does put an individual into a distinct group of professionals with specific privileges and duties under the law.

What may be more noticeable culturally is that practicing creates quirks in lawyers that can make the profession seem like a giant high-school clique. Attributes that designate a seat at the lawyer's lunch table include the constant sharing of bar-examination horror stories, a general dress code of dark woolens, and the perpetual use of phrases and jargon ("foreseeability," "meritorious") that can hardly be called colloquial.

With their own separate vocabulary and formal ways, it is not hard to see why some people view many or most lawyers as living in an ivory tower. Often, the public perception of lawyers is that they bill at exorbitant rates to do things that nonlawyers cannot and do not want to understand. But the Internet may be helping to change that perception, for both potential clients and attorneys themselves.

The great equalizer?

Over the past few months this column has focused almost entirely on how practicing attorneys can make use of technology in order to keep themselves informed and harness new clients. However, lawyers need to be ever-cognizant of the other side of the coin - clients have access to nearly all of the same Internet resources licensed attorneys do.

Although very few nonlawyers do research on traditional databases such as LexisNexis and Westlaw, Internet search engines, blogs and sites like Wikipedia provide definitions and information for just about any legal word, phrase or situation the average citizen wants to enter.

By no means does this imply that the Internet can replace living, breathing lawyers or bricks-and-mortar law schools and libraries. But as a point of interest it should be noted that the nation has at least one fully online law school in Kaplan University. In 2007, Concord Law School, which had been operating an online law program for the past decade, merged with the Kaplan Higher Education Program to form the country's first full law-school curriculum offered over the Internet. It remains unaccredited by the American Bar Association; nevertheless, four of its graduates were sworn to appear before the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008.

For the most part, the strict regulations each state places on the practice of law minimize the effect of what nonlawyers can actually do with the resources available on the Web. Regardless, lawyers should appreciate the fact that more legal information than ever before is available to the general public. People are going to be far-better-informed consumers of legal services, changing the dynamic of lawyer/client interactions.

The informed client

Professor Mark Obbie of Syracuse University's S.I. Newhouse School of Public Information runs the school's Carnegie Legal Reporting Program. He came to academia after years of working at the intersection of the law and technology, including time as president of a pioneer program called Counsel Connect in the late 1990s. An early effort to connect lawyers and clients online, Counsel Connect prophesied the synergy of Internet resources that are now commonplace, something Obbie says has become even more important in the last decade.

"The Internet's big effect is on the consumer's ability to search for legal information. There's more than ever available," he says.

"That's both good and bad," Obbie continues. "Good because a more informed client is - generally speaking - a better client, because they may actually hire the right kind of lawyer and may have more realistic expectations about what they're in for. It's bad if they don't or can't discriminate between authoritative information and junk information. It's not at all hard to set up a blog and start spouting off. Many do it about the law. Many don't know what they're talking about. So a client looking for information about a particular issue may stumble across a smart blog on the topic by an expert. Or not. That means a lawyer will have to undo some damaging misunderstandings before making progress with that client."

As anyone who has ever tried to self-diagnose an illness via the Internet knows, the information you find may be factually accurate, but the untrained eye lacks the ability to discern how to evaluate a situation. Exhibiting all the symptoms of a rare tropical disease does not mean you have it. The same is true of self-diagnosing legal issues and determining the best course of action.

How does a lawyer make sure that current and potential clients are receiving quality legal information instead of a hack blogger's half-baked analysis of a topic?

Give it to them.

"Smart lawyers will learn to provide information - yes, free - as a way of informing people and hooking them as clients," concludes Obbie.

JD Supra

One enterprising effort to both recruit clients and inform them of legal practices in a more substantive way is the newly launched JDSupra Web site, www.jdsupra.com.

The service asks lawyers to break out their greatest hits - documents, briefs, articles, etc. - that they have written over the years and upload them onto JD Supra. Along with each document loaded, the site provides a profile with professional information about the attorney/writer. A potential client looking for a lawyer to represent him or her in a specific matter can type in a keyword such as "employment" or "environmental law" and will be led to sample documents on the topic, as well as the profiles of the attorneys who wrote each one.

The site is intended to offer clients an opportunity to choose a lawyer based on the actual work the person they hire will likely produce. On the flip side, it allows attorneys to sell themselves based on what they actually do, so they don't have to rely solely on commercials or big-firm name recognition.

In no way are the documents provided meant to serve as a "how to" for people with legal quandaries, lest anyone worry about the "assisting in the unlicensed practice of law" portion of the ethics rules. Instead, they are meant to facilitate a good client/attorney fit and provide the client with real-world information about what kind of arguments and outcomes a case may produce.

The searchability of the site makes it appealing to a wide range of clients, but the basic idea of providing examples of legal documents is an effort easily employed by law firms on their own Web sites as they negotiate the ever-changing attorney/client relationship in the Internet age.

While the practice of law is better left to those licensed to do so, sharing information invites more people to the table and demystifies what lawyers are able to do, hopefully leading to greater communication and more fruitful attorney/client relationships.

Lawyer and freelance writer Caroline Bala Brancatella is an associate at Jaeckle Fleischmann & Mugel LLP. She can be reached at cbrancatella@jaeckle.com.