Legal Zoom Gives the Bar a Toothy Grin and a $10.5M Complaint
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LegalZoom and the North Carolina Bar have been waging a fairly quiet battle for quite some time over the Bar’s claim that LegalZoom’s fill-in-the-blank, online template legal services qualified as the unauthorized practice of law. As the organization that licenses and disciplines attorneys statewide, the Bar has repeatedly investigated LegalZoom for violating its prohibition on the unauthorized practice of law. After clearing LegalZoom of such charges in 2003, the Bar launched another investigation in 2007 and issued a cease-and-desist letter to LegalZoom in 2008 claiming it was operating illegally in the state. Seeing a kinship between the efforts of the Dental Board and the state Bar in their attempt at squelching non-professional competition, LegalZoom fanned the flame of the raging tooth whitening war in hopes of achieving an outcome that would serve as favorable precedent in its own crusade against the state Bar.
LegalZoom filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court in the tooth whitening case attacking the risks professional licensing boards─packed with active, vested members of the same profession─pose to the free market. “What constitutes the UPL [unauthorized practice of law] is notoriously poorly defined, often treated on a case-by-case basis, leaving state bars with broad discretion to choose targets for enforcement,” claimed LegalZoom in its brief to the Supreme Court. LegalZoom’s position must have resonated with Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, because SCOTUS found the Dental Board’s efforts to squelch the non-dentist tooth whiteners qualified as unlawful anticompetitive activity. Cheers must have erupted at the LegalZoom headquarters when the opinion was released, because LegalZoom promptly filed an antitrust action against the North Carolina State Bar to the tune of $10.5 million, claiming the Bar’s refusal to register LegalZoom’s prepaid legal services in the state similarly constituted an anticompetitive and unfair trade practice.
– See more at: www.natlawreview.com/article/legal-zoom-gives-bar-toothy-grin-and-105m-complaint#sthash.joYCtnQc.dpuf
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