Volume 19, Number 8
December 2002
Web Conferencing
Enhancing Client Communications
By James Keane
Imagine your best client is traveling and you need to finish a
time-critical contract with parties and lawyers in different
locations. You've finished your review and marked up a whole set
of changes, but the client has to make some choices and add
language clarifying the deal.
Document delivery is not an option, but there's always a fax or
e-mail, right? You go over the client's changes, mark your edits,
and again send the revised document to the client, then to the
other parties and their lawyers. One more set of changes, then,
finally, one more document out the door.
There has to be a better way….
A number of law firms are now using an innovative new tool, web
conferencing (or data conferencing) to mark up a single, online
master copy of documents just as though you and your client were
sitting across a desk from each other. In an educational panel on
virtual client meetings in San Francisco last April, two
California law firms reported an increased use of web
conferencing among their lawyers.
One of them, Heller Ermine, has 20 prepaid "seats" on a service
called WebEx, which entitles them to hold an unlimited number of
web meetings for a fixed monthly fee of $100 per seat. The
"retail" rate for one hour of conferencing is $25 per
participant, plus $10 for teleconference charges.
The Los Angeles firm Paul Hastings reported similar increased use
of Latitude, a web conferencing product that is installed like a
PBX at a firm. The firm invites clients to web meetings via
Outlook and holds online CLE courses that it also stores for
later access by clients. It initially purchased a 32-seat device,
added 32 more, and will increase this to a total of 96 seats due
to lawyer demand. The cost of buying, installing, and using staff
time to maintain hardware and software, plus the cost of
attendant training, is initially twice the cost of buying time
for one year on a self-contained service. But the firm claims the
system has already paid for itself just in lower teleconference
phone charges for the first year. The long-distance charges are
only three cents per minute per use using Latitude.
The technology works by letting all participants look at a single
computer application on the web. In the example mentioned at the
beginning of this article, all the participants view the same
word processing file and can discuss alternative language,
strikeouts, changes, and redline edits while they are happening.
The lawyer and client then can build the new version and finalize
the document together. Participants might also work on a
spreadsheet, present a computer slide show, visit a website, or
share a whiteboard while using highlighters and drawing
tools.
VoIP and Videoconferencing
Web conferencing differs from video or voice over Internet
protocol (VoIP) in that it involves sharing only data over a
browser while the parties use a teleconference. Communications
with VoIP are improving at a dramatic rate. You can now view a
movie or baseball game in real time over the web or broadcast
from a single source to thousands and thousands of viewers (one
to many). Neither video nor voice, however, is ready for prime
time when it comes to a typical two-way interchange between
people (one to one), much less among a whole group (many to
many), as in a traditional videoconference.
Products like CUSeeMe let multiple people use a webcam for
low-cost videoconferencing, but the bandwidth and response time
are no match for the 30 frames per second used in a
broadcast-quality videoconference. Many lawyers complain that
even boardroom-quality videoconferencing still has too many
delays to warrant buying their own videoconference equipment or
taking the time to go to a public video room. Moreover,
low-resolution TV signals render poor broadcast quality for
documents and intricate visual exhibits.
Web Conferencing
Web conferencing, on the other hand, uses familiar, reliable
technologies that really work and make modest but genuine
improvements to the one-to-one attorney-client relationship.
Think of it as supplementing a telephone call while remaining at
your desktop and sharing data with your client through a
browser.
Now, let's up the ante-and the capabilities. If you can do a
three-way call, you can include third parties to share the same
view over their browsers. Try a conference call for closing a
deal with the document you prepared with five or 15 parties (many
to many). Every person on the call can view the same document,
negotiate, and eventually assent to final changes. The host can
save the document and then use the web conferencing software to
send it to everyone immediately, while they are on the call, with
the agreed-on changes.
Web conferencing is a relatively inexpensive and effective tool
for group collaboration. It can come embedded in a virtual "deal
room" or be part of a "distance learning" service. Some of the
sites marketed to the legal community are listed in "Deal Rooms"
on page 39.
The two most widely used web conferencing programs are PlaceWare
and WebEx. Accord-ing to The Lawyer's Guide to Marketing on the
Internet (ABA 2002), thousands of companies use one of these
products. The software also is very useful in training. When I
was chief legal officer at JusticeLink, our training staff gave a
live, one-hour eFiling training session on the web that showed
the actual website; presented via web conference/teleconference
to groups of 20 lawyers and staff at time, the program reached a
total of more than 4,000 lawyers.
Cost Comparison
An experiment by the eLawyering
Task Force of the ABA Law Practice Management Section compared
the cost of a physical meeting, a videoconference, and a web
meeting for 18 people in ten cities. The budget for the physical
meeting, which necessitated transporting 12 people to Chicago,
included at least $15,000 in airfare, hotel, and other travel
expenses (in addition to a lost day or two of work for each
lawyer). Instead, the videoconference format involved arranging
for some of the lawyers to use videoconference facilities at
their offices or at local law schools. Those who were not already
set up with the equipment-over half of the attendees-had to use
commercial (public) video rooms, which we booked and arranged
through a single service at rates of $200 per hour, per room. We
also had to pay $50 per site per hour to connect the ten cities
over a video bridge (a third-party service that links video and
voice connections).
To show the attendees the slides used during the meeting, a
special device was required to convert computer signals to video
so the slides would appear on screen while the attendees heard
the speaker's voice. The final bill
for the two-hour meeting approached $7,000.
The web meeting with the same number of ten connected sites was
by far the most viable. Using WebEx's one-time "retail" fee
structure of $35 per hour per participant, the two-hour meeting
of 10 people would have cost only $700-very attractive compared
with $7,000 for a videoconference. Instead of opting for the
"retail" fee structure, however, the Task Force chose to set up
an experimental six-month contract for ten WebEx seats, at a
total cost of $1,200 per month (excluding the teleconference fee
of $10 per hour per participant). Thus, the web conference still
cost $5,600 less than the videoconference, and any additional web
conferencing during the month could be arranged at the cost of
only the teleconference fees. Most significantly, no one had to
leave the office or even go down the hall to the firm's own
videoconference room, much less travel across town to a public
video room. We never left our desks.
Preplanning Requirements
Although they save time and money compared to face-to-face
meetings, virtual meetings need more structure and advanced
planning. Video or web meetings require strategizing-you need to
"produce" and "direct" the show, whether a formal presentation,
brainstorming session, educational workshop, or small team
meeting. It's not the same as physically getting a group together
in a conference room and winging it. This casual approach is
insufficient when the same person-to-person contact and feedback
are missing. In this respect, videoconferencing is superior to
web conferencing, which supplies even less
eyeball-to-eyeball feedback. Nevertheless, web conferencing has
more tools for spontaneous interaction than videoconferencing.
For further insights into planning a web or videoconference,
consult Cybermeeting: How to Link People and Technology in Your
Organization (AMACOM, 1998) by James L. Creighton and James W. R.
Adams, who wrote the book based on their extensive experience as
the videoconference managers for 3M Corp.
The Virtual Meeting Area
The web conferencing tool set includes an agenda list, a list of
attendees, a whiteboard, polls, text chat, application sharing,
and website sharing. Some even have video. These tools are found
in the "meeting area," the centerpiece of the web conferencing
experience.
In the meeting area you can, for example, set the agenda, show
exhibits, list attendees, and "chat" or "whisper." A chat lets
you send a message or pose a question in real time to the whole
group. A whisper is an exchange of private messages with another
participant. In experiments with virtual dispute resolution, the
pilot lawyers very much wanted the capability to whisper to their
clients. Another popular choice is the whiteboard, an online
blackboard, like a shared version of the Paint program, with
tools for freehand drawing, adding symbols (arrows or check
marks), inserting text, and highlighting in different
colors.
Figure 1 shows a live WebEx meeting area from an actual (but
virtual) session of the ABA's eLawyering Task Force. My name
appears in the upper right as "host." Although we had finished
the meeting and the others had signed off, I captured the screen
to write up some meeting notes.
In the upper right corner you can also see a tab for polling the
participants with questions such as "What is the size of your
firm? 1-2, 3-9, 10-50, 50+." When the attendees check a category,
the system shows a bar graph with the results. There is also a
tab for video. In the lower right corner, you can see the record
of our text exchanges using the online chat feature. The entire
left side of the WebEx meeting area is taken up by the
whiteboard. As the meeting progressed, we listed old and new
topics. As people jumped back and forth on different topics, I
used a check mark to show what had been finalized. We added the
extra text on the fly to create a to-do list with volunteers for
specific tasks as the need arose, just as you would write down
consensus points during a physical meeting. I used yellow
highlighting to make a point about planned WebEx
broadcasts.
Some of the web conferencing programs have rudimentary IP Video
that is merely incidental to sharing data over a browser while
speaking over a teleconference. Even over high-speed cable and
DSL connections, the IP Video is too slow and unpredictably jerky
to rely on it for little more than an occasional face shot to
reinforce the speaker's virtual "presence."
The meeting area also can include a PowerPoint presentation on
the proposed subject, allowing the presenter to page through the
presentation during the meeting so that "slides" change
automatically on everybody else's screen.
CyberCourts
Several jurisdictions are planning to use virtual conferencing
technology to create CyberCourts. These CyberCourts would allow
remote hearings, chambers conferences, and online dispute
resolution (ODR) with videoconferencing and web conferencing.
This concept goes a step beyond a web conference between a lawyer
and a client or a virtual deal room for closing a contract with
multiple parties who want to collaborate. ODR involves multiple
lawyers and their clients plus a judge or neutral to resolve
disputes. This multiplies the many-to-many relationship in a
contested matter.
In the U.S. business community, web conferencing is one of the
technologies that will find its place in online dispute
resolution and virtual hearings. The legal community is just
beginning to see the fairly large-scale emergence of ODR for
resolving cases involving e-commerce disputes. eBay uses the
online dispute resolution services of Square Trade to resolve
dispute transactions. Website owners can resolve domain name
disputes through online services offered by ICANN (Internet
Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers:
www.icann.org/udrp).
The American Arbitra-tion Association featured a demonstration
website developed by its eCommerce business group (www.adr.org)
with the ability to file an arbitration claim online.
As web conferencing moves into the mainstream, ODR will be one of
tools available to resolve disputes over the Internet. Lawyers
may not use web conferencing for evidentiary hearings for a
while, but it is a very serviceable technology that lets the
parties see a virtual exhibit or review the text of that case
management order for 15 minutes while talking with a neutral or
with the judge in chambers-without having to spend an hour or
more just getting to the courthouse.
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