A study of on-line legal service adoption in Hong Kong

This research examines the determinants of customer adoption of the online legal services in the B2C E-commerce market in Hong Kong. Drawing from the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and other models such as the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), Triandis Model and the Innovation Diffusion Theory (IDT), an extended model of TAM (ETAM) was developed. A quantitative survey, with 207 valid questionnaire collected, was to identify the important factors affecting customers’ intention to adopt the online legal services and their major concerns. The survey findings revealed that Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, Compatibility and Trust are the primary determinants of consumers’ intention to use online legal services. Nevertheless, Facilitating Conditions and Perceived Risk are found to have no significant impact on customers’ intention. The research findings provide some theoretical insights into the consumer behavior in seeking professional services in the online environment. It may be useful to legal service providers to promote the adoption of the online legal services and capture a share in the Internet-facilitated legal business services market. Introduction E-commerce is growing exponentially with more companies offering their products and services online, and communicating with their customers over the web. Besides handling brick and mortar transactions, e-commerce also changes the way in which professional sectors operate and deliver its services. For example, web-based medical services provided by eSalveo enable patients to access to doctors via email. Doctors can give diagnosis or refill prescriptions over the email without paying patient visits. To the legal profession, the emerging concepts of online legal services and “virtual lawyers” have vast implications on the practice of law and the delivery of legal services to customers. In the past, lawyers were the only interface between non-lawyers and the law. The emergence of World Wide Web allows customers to gain access to legal information through online facilities and thus enable legal practices to be more transparent. Moreover, the expensive lawyer fees billing by hourly basis further hinder the communication between lawyers and the public. Online legal services can remove these barriers and bring lawyers within the public’s reach at a more reasonable charge. With all the above implications and benefits to general public, it seems that people should welcome greatly to the on-line services. However, there are not many people accepting the new concept, our study here investigates how people perceive the hindrance in adopting the on-line legal services in Hong Kong. Current Trend and Situation It is a trend that law firms, governments, legal aid societies and commercial legal information providers are providing online information and advice in USA and UK. According to Susskind (2000), online legal services are “online resources that contain the knowledge of lawyers which no longer needs to access exclusively by traditional human consultation” delivered in a face-to-face, one-to-one, consultative, and advisory fashion. Legal web sites, virtual lawyers and online legal guidance systems are examples of online legal services. Linklaters, a law firm in London, is offering legal services via its Blue Flag expert systems and charge a subscription fee from its corporate clients for using question-and-answer advisory services on the web. Along with their living, people can seek legal information and guidance from legal websites and even can chat on-line with lawyers. Most of the legal web sites offer legal forms or documents at a specific cost for downloading. Online legal directories and referral services guide are offered to assist people in searching for a lawyer. The online legal service providers can be law firms or some other nature. Public legal information providers in UK such as Free Lawyer, EmpLaw, Divorce Online and LAW-on-the-WEB are not law firms, although all have lawyers working behind them. For instance, EmpLaw and LAW-on-the-WEB, which use their information and services to attract subscribers and potential clients seeking for law firms, earn their revenues through referral schemes. The estimated monthly visits of these four websites reach 175,000 to 200,000 (Davies M., 2002). USLaw, an on-line legal service provider in US, has a legal chat room where people can interact with lawyers. MyLawyer.com provides standard legal documents, such as will and testament. For example, when preparing a will, rather than getting a blank form, people can download a software that leads them some step-by-step considerations. The intelligent software will pass all the concerns back to MyLawyer.com and then a will is prepared accordingly. The proposed version will be emailed to the user for further adjustment. There are three types of online strategies: i) marketing websites; ii) virtual legal practices; and iii) Web-enabled legal practices that can be adopted by law firms (Davies M., 2002). In Hong Kong, most of the law firms such as Johnson Stokes and Master (www.jsm.com.hk) and Herbert Smith (www.herbersmith.com) are using websites as marketing tools to promote their firms and services. Web-enabled legal practice by integrating the Internet with the conventional legal practice is a current trend. For example, the legal website www.thebroke.com established by Yip, Tse, Tang Solicitors is a one-stop shop to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about bankruptcy and connect lawyers with those would-be bankrupts. At present, there is no virtual law firm in Hong Kong. LegalStudio, a commercial online legal service provider, is a pioneer in offering online resource for legal solutions to individuals and businesses in Hong Kong. Apart from general legal information and answering common legal questions, do-it-yourself legal kits, which concern conveyance, divorce and company setup, bankruptcy, and formal legal agreement (e.g. wills, trust and sales of goods agreement), can be downloaded at affordable costs. A legal Q&A forum where lawyers will answer questions by email is also available. The fee charged by LegalStudio is modest compared with the traditional legal services. Let’s say, LegalStudio offers legal online software related to divorce at HK$400 and a confidential enquiry service, which will be answered by practicing lawyer, for HK$300 an email. Scope and Purpose of Study With adopting on-line legal services, people may have the following concerns. Firstly, online legal services involve a more private information exchange between customers and web provider. Secondly, a personal client-attorney relationship is substituted by an impersonal web interface in online legal services which may have difficulties in convening legal terms and professional knowledge for a layman. Thirdly, customer trust in the context of the online legal services is multifold, that is, trust in the Internet as a transaction medium, trust in the service provider and trust in their expertise. Fourthly, while online commodity transaction allows customers to make product and price comparison before making transaction, it is difficult to make such comparison for online services due to the intangible nature of services and instance spending upon downloading of information. In this study, we confine our scope on people perception on online legal services providing to general public. As online legal services are still in its infancy in Hong Kong, this paper aims to predict attitudes and behavioral intention rather than actual usage. By developing an Extended Technology Acceptance Model (ETAM), which caters for the above concerns, we will examine the important factors affecting customers’ intention to adopt the online services. Our extended model ETAM would also be applied to study other professions related to their on-line services such as medical, insurance, accounting and financial investment services, etc. which share the similar characteristics of online legal services. In the next section, a review on the literature related to IT adoption is conducted. In Section 3, the research model is presented. In Sections 4 and 5, the research methodology and findings are provided respectively. A discussion of the findings is given in Section 6. Followed by the limitations of the research in Section 7, a conclusion of this paper is made in Section 8. Literature Review A variety of theoretical perspectives have been used to study the determinants of IT usage. Intention-based models are one of the perspectives to predict usage by identifying the determinants of behavioral intentions of individual users. TAM, TRA, TPB and Triandis model are examples of Intention-based models. Another approach for IT adoption research is Innovation Diffusion-based models, such as Innovation Diffusion Technology model (IDT). A brief description of these theoretical models from which the research model adopted are presented in the following sections. Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) Social psychological theories such as the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and its extended model, theory of planned behavior (TPB), were widely adopted as theoretical basis for studying users’ adoption of IT systems and the Internet. For example, in Crisp, Jarvenpaa and Todd (1997) and George (2002), these theoretical models were adopted to study users’ attitudes towards the Internet and their intentions to make online purchases respectively. TRA proposed by Fishbein and Ajzen (1980) is a well-accepted intention model to explain the attitude-intention-behavior relationship. As presented in Figure 1, TRA posits that actual behavior is determined by behavioral intention, which is a function of one’s attitude towards behavior and subjective norm. TRA assumes that individuals are usually rational and will consider the implications of their actions before making a decision to engage a behavior or no