With law offices and court buildings closed or limited because of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has never been a better time to be providing law services online. Byron Batres, who runs a company that helps families complete the probate process virtually, says he has more work than he can handle.
“The lawyers are virtually out of business right now; the courts are closed for regular hearings,” said Batres, who normally runs his company, EZ-Probate, out of the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies or VCET, a co-working space in Burlington.
“Most lawyers are paper-based and in-person based,” said Batres. “What customer wants to go to an attorney right now?”
But Batres is facing complaints that he’s practicing law without a license. He said he received a letter from California Bar to that effect April 28.
Batres, who has experience as a certified financial planner, got his start in the probate business after he served as an executor for a relative’s will. After a few friends asked him for help with their probate needs, he saw an opportunity to save people money on the process, and started EZ-Probate at home in 2016.
Probate is the legal process of transferring assets after somebody dies. Batres said he was surprised to find that filling out the paperwork was relatively straightforward.
“I was like, why are attorneys charging tens of thousands of dollars?” Batres said.
Batres created a system he describes as “Turbo Tax-like” for probate and worked for his first paying customer — someone in Colorado who had found him online — in January 2017.
He expanded the company after a LaunchVT startup competition in 2018. He said he ultimately raised $575,000 because of the exposure he got there, and two judges from the competition became investors. He said the company now has six employees, three of them full-time.
Now Batres works mainly with customers on the West Coast. He considers his work a public service, providing a simple system that starts at $600 for video instruction and limited support and a concierge service for $1,250.
For complicated cases (“the actual probate case is never complicated; the family is complicated,” he said) EZ-Probate acts as a fiduciary, and charges $5,000 to be the administrator of the estate.
The coronavirus pandemic has been good for business at EZ-Probate. Batres is banking on the expectation that many lawyers have made a poor transition to remote working and to opportunities where courts will accept online notary services or electronic signatures.
“Attorneys have no technology,” he said. “Some of them, I kid you not, still use word-processing typewriters to fill out forms.”
Meanwhile, fear of Covid-19 has inspired a rush of interest in probate services and wills, and Batres said the company did a record amount of business in March. He added he enjoys the thanks he gets for protecting customers from lawyer fees.
“Imagine if you had an intake form, and only the doctor can fill it out, and then the doctor has the audacity to charge you $10,000 and never give you any medical advice,” said Batres. “That’s really what probate is for those who are suckered into choosing an attorney. The vast majority of cases don’t require actual legal advice.”
Regulators of the legal profession in Vermont choose to differ, arguing that Batres is practicing law without a license, which is illegal. Sometimes it’s difficult to regulate such activities, in part because it’s tough to define what the practice of law is, said Mike Kennedy, counsel for the Vermont Judiciary and former president of the Vermont Bar Association.
“Though this is not one of those cases,” said Kennedy. “He’s offering legal services.”
The Vermont Bar doesn’t have jurisdiction over non-lawyers who practice law; that belongs to the Attorney General’s Office. Charity Clark, the attorney general’s chief of staff, said the office doesn’t confirm or deny the existence of investigations.
But Montpelier lawyer Dan Richardson, who does practice probate law, described what Batres is doing as “dangerous” and said he should be stopped.
“If probate court was always sunshine and lollipops, it could be easily handled through documents, and the lawyers wouldn’t be charging money,” said Richardson. Creating a simple will, for example, doesn’t take much time, he said.
But “the probate process can be complicated,” he said. “There are a lot of examples where if you don’t take it seriously, it can get complicated very, very quickly.”
Batres is not bothered by complaints that he’s doing something wrong. He said he hasn’t heard from any authorities in Vermont — where he doesn’t have customers. But the California Bar Association last month accused EZ-Probate of practicing law without a license there.
He said the legal path has been cleared by online services like Legalzoom and Rocketlawyer, which offer low-cost online legal document preparation services. He sees the Bar Association complaints as bids to suppress competition.
“They have a perverse incentive to charge outrageous legal fees and prevent people from doing simple law procedures on their own,” he said. Legal document preparation by non-lawyers is not considered to be the “practice of law,” according to Richard Granat, a lawyer who founded a virtual law firm and shares Batres’ stated goal of lowering users’ costs.
“The idea that non-lawyers can provide services that can help consumers and small business solve their legal problems at an affordable cost is a wedge in the lawyer’s monopoly over the delivery of legal services,” Granat said in a blog post published online by the American Bar Association.
It’s not the job of the Vermont Bar Association to address whether companies like EZ-Probate are operating within the law, said Bob Pratt, a Rutland lawyer who is chair of the Vermont Bar’s probate law committee.
“It’s not a Bar Association problem; it’s a practice of law problem,” said Pratt, who noted he is not familiar with EZ-Probate or its work. “The Bar Association really doesn’t have any forum other than to refer it to the authorities with jurisdiction. I’m going to follow up and see if it’s been referred and see what they are going to do about it.”
Meanwhile, EZ-Probate this spring is rolling out a new online probate service called “virtual paralegal” aimed at helping attorneys by further automating the probate process. The purpose is to help start the attorney-client relationship with the client’s documents in order, Batres said.
“We’ll set out to fix the attorney, in that they are non-systematic and woefully slow,” he said. “We can put evolutionary pressure on how attorneys charge.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated where Michael Kennedy serves as legal counsel. He is with the Vermont Judiciary.
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