Hiring a lawyer and obtaining legal servicemen
is a little like opening a Pandora's box. One the box is open, you are letting yourself in
for a lot of potential problems including incurring fees for:
- Ghostwriting services
- Form preparation services
- Second opinion services
- Legal Researching services
- Delivery services
- Court filing services
- Client education services
- Consumer advocacy services
- Actual litigation services
- Appellate litigation services
- Financial services
- Tax planning services
- Dispute resolution services
The list goes on, so while you may appreciate the skills
of a competent lawyer, the costs of hiring one is beyond the financial reach of most low
and moderate income households. Typically, they do without legal services all together.
This is where "unbundling" legal services fits
in. In many cases, a consumer doesn't need a lawyer to handle an entire dispute. More
often they simply need legal advice. The internet is full of sites where attorneys will
answer simple legal questions for a small fee charged to a credit card. Check out:
Often you may wish to have an attorney ghostwrite a
demand letter, or rudimentary pleadings. Forrest Mosten has pioneered this field, and can
be contacted at www.mostenmediation.com.
My services are also available to ghostwrite demand letters that enable a claimant to
speak for themselves forearmed with legal authority, ipsedixit3@aol.com.
Some lawyers work through larger companies to advertise their ghostwriting services. See
for example, http://www.rd-inc.com,
where a retired legal professor offers to do ghostwriting for other attorneys.
The internet also provides a wealth of sites where
litigants can find forms, like:
The first national conference on unbundled legal services
met in October 2000, where the focus was using these services to benefit low-income
persons. However, much online literature warns against the perils of such unbundled legal
services. Most courts find that if a lawyer ghost writes pleadings for pro-se litigants
she is engaging in "deceitful," "contemptuous" or
"unethical" conduct because the litigant is misrepresenting his status to the
court.
Despite these difficulties with unbundled legal services,
I feel they should be made available for the limited circumstances where no attempt is
made to place a litigant at an unfair advantage or to deceive a court. In many cases,
these services make economic sense and help people who might otherwise have to go without
advice or legal support in difficult
situations.
