Unbundled Legal Services

Woody Mosten’s latest contribution to the delivery of legal services, co-authored with Elizabeth Potter Scully, is a “must have” for any lawyers who want to grow their family law practice to include limited scope legal services. Family law is uniquely suited to unbundling and Mosten and Scully have provided a practical and useful step by step guide to a wide range of applications which lend themselves to limited scope services. Their handbook is long on practice pointers and practical suggestions. The material is well organized, easy to follow, and clearly addresses the various applications of limited scope to multiple aspects of family law practice, from document assistance, negotiation coaching, case management, limited scope court appearances and coaching of clients who are mediating their disputes. I highly recommend it as a first step for any lawyer considering adding limited scope legal services to their family law repertoire. The market for limited scope legal services is only going to grow, and smart lawyers are well advised to add this range of services to their family law practice in order to remain competitive.

Pay particular attention to Chapter 12, which is an overview of the ethical and malpractice minefields of limited scope, and follow the excellent suggestions there carefully. The point of unbundling is to expand your legal practice and increase access to quality legal advice for those who might otherwise be unable to obtain it. While unbundling isn’t as dangerous as its detractors would have you believe, there are ethical and practical considerations which cannot be ignored. The ethical rules regarding unbundling vary widely from state to state. Even states which have adopted the ABA Model Rules sometimes interpret them differently. The authors have addressed this dilemma by focusing on the nuts and bolts of forming, managing, and growing a limited scope family law practice. While the authors have included a table of the relevant rules, be sure to go online and make sure you are complying with the most recent iteration of the rules in your jurisdiction. They change frequently. Actually, there’s a good (and lawyer-friendly) reason for that. As states adopt limited scope, they are often tentative, not sure how it will work, and cautious about protecting the public interest. They tend to start out with stricter rules until they see how it works in their state. As they find it works beautifully when done correctly, they tend to relax the rules to make it easier for lawyers to ethically and safely meet the growing consumer demand.

Mosten and Scully have provided a broad smorgasbord of situations in which unbundling can be incorporated into a family law practice. Unbundled Legal Services is both an introduction to the application of limited scope to a family law practice, and a practical resource and reality check for the experienced family lawyer.

Woody Mosten is a true pioneer in expanding the availability of affordable legal services. He invented unbundling, and this is a worthy next step in his impressive and growing legacy.

M. Sue Talia, Author of
Unbundling Your Divorce: How to Find a Lawyer to Help You Help Yourself

This extraordinarily comprehensive guide to offering unbundled legal services to the primarily self-represented – who are now a majority of family litigants – offers a uniquely authoritative and practical source for every family lawyer. In the 17 years since he wrote his first ABA book on unbundling, Forrest Mosten has established himself as the creative energy behind the steady growth of unbundled legal services. In this new edition, Mosten and his co-author Elizabeth Potter Scully answer every possible practice question that both naifs and lawyers already accustomed to offering unbundling to clients could ask, including addressing often-voiced misconceptions about malpractice liability and disciplinary issues. In a sign of the unbundling movement’s maturity, Mosten and Scully integrate discussion of client vulnerabilities, disadvantages and sources of mistrust of lawyers and new knowledge about the access to justice crisis among family law clients. Mosten and Scully have written the Unbundling Bible.

Dr Julie Macfarlane
Distinguished University Professor and Professor of Law
University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada
Author of The New Lawyer and
Director of Canada’s Self-Represented Litigants Project

This book is a comprehensive guide for lawyers who want to offer unbundled legal services. Doing this is trickier than it sounds and it entails some ethical and malpractice pitfalls, described in chapter 12. So anyone providing these services would be well-advised to get this book.

John Lande
Isidor Loeb Professor Emeritus, University of Missouri School of Law
Author of Lawyering with Early Planned Negotiation

Latest & Greatest – Unbundled Legal Services: A Family Lawyer's Guide

January 31, 2018

Using the prevalence and proliferation of self-representation as an impetus, authors Forrest S. Mosten and Elizabeth Potter Scully have embarked upon the advancement of a method of legal representation known as unbundled legal services, or as it also called, limited scope representation in their book, Unbundled Legal Services: A Family Lawyer’s Guide. Broken down into its simplest terms, unbundled legal services refers to the practice of offering various legal services and allowing the client to select the “discrete lawyering tasks” he/she wants the lawyer to perform. The authors have identified seven categories into which these tasks fall and have provided a framework through which such unbundled services can be delivered, thereby allowing a family lawyer with the flexibility to offer full service court representation or become a non-court family lawyer offering limited scope services. Each chapter focuses on the various roles that a family lawyer is typically called upon to assume and explains how such roles can be transformed into one unbundled service. For instance, in many cases, lawyers are, at the same time, dispute resolution managers, negotiators, document drafters, and litigators for their clients. However, according to the authors, each of these roles can be unbundled and offered to the client as separate tasks as opposed to the typical all-or-nothing approach that most full service representation presents. Thus, the client can hire the attorney for those tasks for which he or she might need the most assistance. At the end of most chapters, the authors have provided their readers with practice tips for putting the presented models into play. Also, the authors have set forth the ethical considerations involved with unbundling and possible malpractice “minefields.”

If the idea of the unbundled legal services approach is new to you or if you have not yet considered it as an option for your law practice, come to the Harris County Law Library and have a look at Unbundled Legal Services: A Family Lawyer’s Guide. Who knows? It might be the right plan for you.

Harris County Law Library

Mosten and Scully’s book offers a glimpse of the future and practical guidance for how to get there. As the authors note, “If you choose and can afford to operate your practice without unbundling, you probably will be able to do so for at least the next decade. However, just like many doctors in the 1930s opposed health insurance, today few doctors can practice without seeing patients covered by some form of health plan. It’s in the tea leaves.

Family Court Review, October 2018

One of the most valuable aspects of the book is the clarity with which Mosten and Scully break down the practice of law into separable, discrete functions. Digesting their taxonomy of tasks, roles, and responsibilities, one can begin to cultivate the ability to differentiate and maintain boundaries, a skill critical for the limited scope lawyer. Limited scope practice, or unbundling, has also been referred to as “discrete task representation.” This suggests that both the lawyer and the client must be able to distinguish those tasks and roles and to recognize and respect the limits of the representa- tion. In negotiating the terms of the representation, the lawyer plays a critical role in educating the client about the various services he or she can provide and helping the client determine which tasks will be the client’s responsibility. Both must guard against “scope creep,” but the lawyer has a par- ticular obligation to do so.

It starts innocently, with a call from the unbundled client on a busy afternoon asking a quick procedural or substantive question about an issue the client, not the attorney has agreed to handle. It’s an easy answer, the client is worried and the attorney knows she can quickly alleviate that worry, and it seems uptight, rigid or just too time consuming to explain that providing such information is beyond the lim- ited scope of the attorney’s representation and therefore before she can answer the question they will need an updated retainer agreement. “Just this once,” the attorney goes beyond the agreed upon scope, and the clearly drawn lines of demarcation begin to blur.

Mosten and Scully’s book offers a glimpse of the future and practical guidance for how to get there. As the authors note, “If you choose and can afford to operate your practice without unbundling, you probably will be able to do so for at least the next decade. However, just like many doctors in the 1930s opposed health insurance, today few doctors can practice without seeing patients covered by some form of health plan. It’s in the tea leaves.

Pamela Cardullo Ortiz
Family Court Review, October 2018

Learn more about Woody’s legal coaching services and listen to podcasts with on unbundling with Julie MacFarlane (author of The New Lawyer) and others.