LegalZoom Takes On A State Bar That Doesn’t Want Competition
This post has been viewed 3,327 times.
In LegalZoom v. North Carolina State Bar Association, the innovative provider of affordable legal services has challenged the NC bar over its refusal to register its prepaid legal plans for individuals and small businesses. The case is based on the Sherman Antitrust Act, which forbids entities from attempting to monopolize any market.
This is the second time in a year that North Carolina has found itself accused of an antitrust violation.
* * *
These delaying tactics are not going to do lawyers much good, however. That’s the argument of University of Tennessee law school professor Benjamin Barton in his new book Glass Half Full—The Decline and Rebirth of the Legal Profession. The legal profession, he shows, is already well into a gale-force storm of creative destruction and there is much more change ahead. His chapter “LegalZoom and Death from Below” is particularly relevant.
Barton writes that LegalZoom began in 2001 and at first had virtually no impact on lawyer billings since, “anyone willing to incorporate their company or write their will on the Internet was unlikely to be able to afford a lawyer anyway.” Soon afterward, the American Bar Association proposed a restrictive definition of “the practice of law” that could have nipped LegalZoom in the bud, but the Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission objected that its definition was overly broad and anticompetitive. So the ABA backed off – and LegalZoom was free to grow.
Read original articleTags:
