Affordable Legal Services – A Win-Win Situation

When I was 5 years old, I would stand at the entrance of my parents’ grocery store and greet the incoming customers by offering them a complementary piece of candy. It has been said that I was the original Wal-Mart greeter, though this claim has never been verified. Working in my parent’s family owned and operated business made me aware of the daily plight of an entrepreneur that fights to survive and aims to thrive.

There is a point to this anecdote – just like entrepreneurs, lawyers have to decide whether they will provide better quality service or lower their cost of service in an effort to be successful. Given our legal system’s current access to justice issue, I believe that the better option is to reduce the cost of legal services as this will benefit both lawyers and clients.

The legal profession is a service based industry and customer service is vital to acquiring and retaining clients. After reading sections of Richard Susskind’s book, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, it became apparent that clients’ needs are not being met, which is largely due to the cost of legal services. Susskind suggests that “[o]ur focus should be on helping our clients to meet their formidable more-for-less challenge rather than obstinately holding on to outdated, inefficient working practices” (28). It is no secret that many individuals do not have the financial resources to address their legal issues, but what puzzles me is why more hasn’t been done to respond to this problem.

There are a number of ways that lawyers can reduce legal fees to attract more clients and Susskind provides valuable insight about embarking on this endeavour. The author discusses his conception of “bespoke” legal work and explains this concept as a lawyer viewing a client’s circumstances as being unique, which requires the lawyer to handcraft a legal solution that specifically focuses on the individual matter at issue. While Susskind believes that some legal issues arise that require “the application of acute legal minds and the handcrafting of tailored solutions…much less legal work requires bespoke treatment” and can be handled with a standardized approach (24). To illustrate his point, Susskind uses the example of an employment contract. He explains that if a bespoke approach was adopted, the contract would be drafted from scratch for each client, whereas if a standardized approach was implemented, a routine process and template or precedent would be used for numerous clients. By using the former approach, the lawyer expends a great deal of time on each contract and each client receives a substantial bill, which excludes a number of potential clients who cannot afford such a service. However, by using the latter approach, the lawyer initially invests time in drafting a contract to serve as a template and each client pays a reasonable bill, which attracts more clients as the service is more affordable.

Susskind’s views on the bespoke and standardized approaches were echoed by a founding partner of relatively new law firm that I had the pleasure of meeting with recently. The lawyer explained that some legal professionals generate money by reinventing the wheel each time a client walks through their door, thus implementing a “bespoke” approach. He informed me that this approach is nearing extinction as the majority of people cannot afford this type of service. He went on to share his method of using templates to generate money by offering his legal services at a reasonable cost to obtain more clients, thus employing a standardized approach. His successful implementation of the standardized approach causes me to believe that it would be better to cast a wider net and capture more people by reducing the cost of certain legal services, as this would result in a win-win situation.