One of the most common concerns among lawyers looking at passing on their precious legal know-how to an online advice system is that they will lose work as a result.

Olswang IT director Tim Hyman says the worry is whether firms will jeopardise traditional face-to-face work by selling expertise online.

"In the short term you might gain clients and make money, but in the longer term how can you assess which clients would have used you anyway? You could have lost out."

This is where Richard Susskind's concept of the "latent legal market" comes into play.

Susskind argues that a huge number of commercial clients are reluctant to pay premium face-to-face rates for certain types of standard advice, but would be happy to pay cheaper rates for an online consultation.

Certainly this is the thinking at Clifford Chance, where Christopher Millard and Mark Ford, the lawyers responsible for the NextLaw system, see their data protection advice system as tapping in to a latent market.

"This is work that clients might previously have ignored, even though, as the system will advise them, they could conceivably face imprisonment for failing to comply with data protection regulations," says Millard

But at Linklaters, Paul Nelson believes latent markets are of little relevance to Blue Flag.

"This is a high quality service which works in tandem with our existing investment bank practice.

While the latent market might be appropriate in some situations, it doesn't apply to Blue Flag," he argues.
However, Nelson does agree that real lawyers will not lose out because of virtual lawyering systems.

"The system does away with the repetitive transaction-based work and frees up lawyers to do the more innovative stuff," he says.

"Rather than taking work away the system supplements it. The marketing benefits of having a virtual lawyer sitting on the client's PC all day with the Blue Flag masthead on the screen are considerable.

"My practice area has doubled in size since we introduced Blue Flag."