I run the first completely virtual law office in North Carolina. I'm a solo practitioner and I run a general practice firm. My virtual law office was created by Virtual Law Office Technology, LLC and is a hosted, SaaS (software as a service) application. I've practiced this way for two years now with success.

My clients appreciate the convenience and so far not meeting face-to-face has not been a problem. I provide the same legal services online as I would in person, perhaps even better because I have the opportunity to pause, think and type and delete before communicating with a client. Each client has his or her own homepage where they are updated regularly on their cases, and they can pay online, among other online functions that increase efficiency and convenience.

I think this model would also work well in a 30 person firm and could be combined with a physical law office to really use the best of both worlds. There will always be clients and attorneys who want to meet face-to-face but there are others who are actually more comfortable handling transactions online (like they are will their banking and investing). I'm excited to see what the concept will bring to the legal profession.

Architecture and Communication among Product Development Engineers by Thomas J. Allen, Cal. Mgt. Rev., Vol. 49, Winter 2007 at 25-27,

This article summarizes some quantitative measures and qualitative observations regarding the effect of architecture on technical communication. It shows how the probability that two engineers or scientists in an organization will communicate declines rapidly with the distance between their work locations. It also addresses several objections to these observations and examines the relationships among different media, (i.e., face-to-face, telephone, electronic mail) and how each is affected by separation. Finally, it discusses some examples of architectural strategies for managing communication.

There may be debate that lawyers and engineers exhibit fundamentally different character traits (though having spent a significant amount of my professional time with patent agents and lawyers, any differences I noted are not significant), the extrapolated conclusion is that the farther lawyers’ offices are from each other, even just a few feet, the less they communicate with each other. Once lawyers are more than about 50 metres apart, this study would indicate that their interactions and sharing of knowledge declines considerably, but falls no more. Law Management guru Rees Morrison adds:

“Moreover, evidence from studies indicates that “vertical separation always has a more severe effect than an equivalent amount of horizontal separation" (at 33). It's bad enough to have your lawyers scattered at a distance, but to place them on different floors of a building really dooms their communication (See my post of July 31, 2005 on the general counsel having a remote office.).” http://lawdepartmentmanagement.typepad.com/law_department_management/structure/index.html

And those pesky law books? I'll just house them in my basement and look things up for everyone when Google doesn't have the answer. At a small fee. ;-)

You think I'm joking, don't you?