Unbundling Book
Coming Soon… Limited Scope Legal Services: Unbundling and the Self-Help Client by Stephanie Kimbro published by ABA/LPM Publishing, March 2012.
Richard Susskind’s End of Lawyers:Rethinking the Nature of Legal Services introduced lawyers to changes in the legal marketplace and made them aware that they would need to adapt to these changes or be left behind.
My upcoming book will examine the practice of unbundling legal services as one method of adapting to these changes in the legal profession. The book is intended to provide an overview of how unbundling is changing the marketplace – both within and outside of the legal profession. Limited Scope Legal Services provides practical guidance for unbundling in different practice areas and within different law firm structures. Ethical concerns, best practices and successful marketing both online and off are covered and case studies, sample agreements, and checklists are included to provide additional guidance.
Serving the DIY Client: A Guide to Unbundling Legal Services for the Private Practitioner
Full Ebook Here. Below is an excerpt from the Introduction.
Introduction
We live in a do-it-yourself (DIY) society. Consumers are comfortable going online to handle business and professional transactions. They shop, conduct banking and investing, earn degrees and communicate with family and friends over the Internet. The public has gotten used to controlling online interactions and many individuals see the benefit and convenience of handling business on their own time.
The DIY consumer also understands that when a product or service has a DIY component, it tends to be more affordable. This is seen as an acceptable tradeoff for doing a little or a lot of the footwork. In the current economy, many lower to moderate income individuals are more than willing to do the extra work to save money on their legal needs.
For at least the past five years, online legal service companies, such as LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, have educated consumers about DIY legal services. Consumers fill out questionnaires and purchase automated legal forms for sale online that they must then be responsible for executing and filing at the courthouse. DIY legal form kits are also for sale at most office supply stores. Other consumers make the dangerous choice to cut and paste together legal forms from samples they have found online on various free legal resource websites. Countering this trend, some non-profits and court systems have taken steps to create self-help centers and to work with private practitioners who volunteer in court-sponsored limited services programs. However, these resources are not available for all individuals and may pertain to assistance in only certain areas of the law.
While some law firms have provided unbundled legal services for years, it is not a practice that private practitioners have widely embraced. Some non-profit legal aid organizations still carry reservations about unbundling based on the philosophy that everyone is entitled to full service representation, whether or not that ideal will ever come to pass and in spite of the growing number of pro se litigants flooding the court systems.
Private practitioners, if aware of how to unbundle, may not see how to integrate it into their practice in a way that would be cost-effective, either with technology and/or alternative forms of billing, such as value or fixed fee billing methods. They may also believe there are too many malpractice risks for the private practitioner in limited scope representation and additional administrative burdens to make sure it’s handled correctly. Guidelines and best practices are for law office management are not often taught in law schools, much less alternative forms of delivering legal services, such as providing limited scope assistance.
Yet, forty-one states have either adopted the ABA Model Rule 1.2(c) permitting unbundling of legal services or have adopted a similar rule. Combine that with the fact that the number of pro se individuals in the United States continues to rise steadily along with increasing numbers of individuals going online to seek out unbundled legal services from non-attorney companies. Our profession needs to renew enthusiasm for unbundling by private practitioners.
There are benefits for the professional as well as the public in unbundling legal services. Unbundling may be seen primarily as a service to be handled pro bono or “low” bono. However, private practitioners may also provide limited scope representation to serve another segment of the population in need of basic legal services while making it cost-effective for their firm. Adding unbundled legal services to a traditional law firm structure can be used to market a law practice to an entirely new client base and give the firm a competitive advantage.
The ABA Standing Committee on the Delivery of Legal Services has created a well-stocked library of resources on unbundling on its Pro Se/Unbundled Resource page. In November 2009, the Delivery Committee published its white paper entitled “An Analysis of Rules that Enable Lawyers to Serve Pro Se Litigants.”
This ebook will refer to these resources while focusing on providing a basic, easy-to-digest introduction to unbundling for private practice lawyers. The ebook will cover ethics concerns and best practices for unbundling and provide practical suggestions for implementation. This ebook will not go into ethics issues involved in an attorney’s participation in court-sponsored legal services programs. Instead, it will focus on solos and small firm’s potential to provide limited scope services. As a side goal, this ebook will hopefully start a renewed dialogue between the private and public sectors of the legal profession about using unbundling as an alternative solution for chipping away at the nation’s access to justice deficiencies.
Please check out the rest of the ebook here. 
