Surfing the Fine Print

When Hong Kong millionaire Milton Kiang was working as in-house counsel for a large tech company, employees asked him to put standard legal forms on the internal Web site so they could fill them out themselves. He obliged. Then he got an idea.

"I realized there were people willing to do these (legal) activities themselves if they could do so in a cheap and easy way," he says.

To tap into that market, he started Legalstudio.com, a site that offers basic legal advice, forms and referrals for a fraction of the prices that most legal offices charge. His is one of several legal sites that have sprung up in Asia this year. All of them use the internet to do something that lawyers are notoriously loathe to do - offer fees below the market rate.

One of the most commonly requested procedures on Mr Kiang's site is a $60 "do it yourself" kit, which includes all the forms necessary to open a new business in Hong Kong. Going to a lawyer for such paperwork would cost between $450 and $580, several Hong Kong attorneys said. Similarly, a popular non-disclosure, or confidentiality agreement, costs $30 to do online, compared with about $130 from a live law office.

Diana Dawson, finance director at a small Singapore e-commerce company, used the site to download a contract her company needed to hire agents. She paid about $70 to download and file the document. A conventional lawyer quoted her a price of $1,150 for the same service. The process was easy, she said, although she complained that the online form "asked her for more information than the live lawyers had."

To be sure, offering legal advice online has its limits, and serious legal matters - such as litigation - still require a flesh-and-blood lawyer. But the availability of online legal advice appears set to expand.

Mr Kiang plans to "move up the value chain" and market the site to overseas businesses looking to expand in Asia. For example, a New York firm that wants to open a Hong Kong office can download the necessary paperwork and file the application through legalstudio.com.

The site has generated some interest from investors - Hong Kong incubation firm techpacific.com recently took a 25% equity stake in the company. Mr Kiang is forecasting profits by the third quarter of next year.

Singapore based www. WWLegal.com takes a simpler approach, but one which potentially could shake up the traditional structure of legal fees. The month-old site acts as a matchmaker for Singaporean residents who need to hire a lawyer. It promises to save customers money by automating some of the tasks that live lawyers do by hand. Applicants fill out interactive forms that ask for information about their case. The site then uses those details to match the customer with a lawyer who has the appropriate expertise. Lawyers who receive the referrals have agreed to lower their fees in order to be affiliated with the site.

"We can offer a lower price because by the time the lawyer meets with the client, he will have seen lots of information and will be ready to make a recommendation about the case," says Ong Ying Ping, a lawyer and one of the site's co-founders. About 100 private lawyers have partnered with the site, each one charging various rates for an initial consultation, Mr Ong says. The average consultation fee is $45 an hour, far below the hourly fees of between $100 and $175 that are customary with outside lawyers.

The site tries to draw people in by offering discussion boards on legal topics and free downloads of basic legal documents, such as an adoption petition or a "deed poll" to change one's name. "We are willing to provide this for free because we want to educate consumers about basic legal rights and regulations," Mr Ong says. Providing such information appears to have helped the site with the good graces of the Singapore government: Mr Ong says he is negotiating with the Infocomm Development Authority to help sponsor the site.

So far, the sites haven't sounded any alarm in the traditional legal community. The Law Society of Hong Kong, a quasi-governmental organization that oversees the law profession, says it hasn't received any complaints about such sites from lawyers or consumers. Nor have legal fees in Hong Kong been affected by the new competition from the Internet, a society spokeswoman says. But she also notes that it is still early in the game. "We will have to wait and see how things go."