Mellisa Grisel: Unbundled Legal Services Provide a Bright Future for Law

Strickland Bonner: So you're a lawyer, and your clients are squeezing you for lower fees. How do you put more cash in your pocket? We want to expose you to new ways of practicing law. Endless hours with no home life and a lease on an expensive office are so 1999. It's time to make a change for the better. Here to help you with that are your hosts Ron Bockstahler and Kirsten Mayfield. Welcome to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast. Welcome to the 1958 Lawyer. Thanks for joining us today. My name is Ron Bockstahler,

Kirsten Mayfield: and I'm Kirsten Mayfield.

Ron Bockstahler: And today we're going to be speaking with Mellisa Grisel, the owner of Atlas Legal Services. I take a little while to get that right, and we're going to talk about unbundled services and the legal system

Kirsten Mayfield: in limited scope representation,

Ron Bockstahler: and kind of get an idea of what she's seeing and what's happening out there. Melissa, welcome to the show.

Melissa Grisel: Hi, thank you so much for having me here.

Kirsten Mayfield: Oh yeah, thank you for joining us. Hey, did you end up going to a flea market this past weekend?

Melissa Grisel: No, we actually decided that it would be safer to stay home, and then because we are so weak, we actually went to three estate sales instead. Anything

Kirsten Mayfield: good?

Melissa Grisel: Oh, a bunch of old fabric that was nice that I have no purpose for, but not not not a lot of treasures this time.

Kirsten Mayfield: Oh man, I always like it when you have a good find.

Ron Bockstahler: Sounds like a busy weekend.

It Melissa Grisel: was. I've never experienced fireworks like this before in my life. So I grew up on a lake in the Finger Lakes region of New York, and I was literally on the lake. So fireworks were never something that was far away, but it was usually confined to the weekends. The past week, now that I live in Calumet City, Illinois, I hear fireworks everywhere. My neighbor right behind my house had like professional grade fireworks going off over my house, and it was pure insanity. I've never experienced anything like that before.

Kirsten Mayfield: I am so jealous because we had all of the noise of the fireworks, but we can't see any because we're only at like a third floor building. But we have friends that are very like just down the block who have like a very tall skyscraper, and we used to go onto that roof, and you could see like the entire skyline. So we got no fireworks, just all of the loudness this year. No,

Melissa Grisel: I know. If you had gone to my previous apartment in Hyde Park, you know I was 30 floors up. Yeah, you had done, and we saw all the way to Navy Pier those fireworks, all the way to the south suburbs. But we were able to stand in the street and have fireworks go off all around us. That's my

Kirsten Mayfield: favorite because they're like right above you and they look amazing.

Melissa Grisel: I thought so. My husband got scared, though. He didn't. He didn't enjoy it as much as I did. Even my dog wasn't afraid. If you can believe, I was about to ask how'd

Kirsten Mayfield: Piper handle

Melissa Grisel: it. Piper was great. She was like watching. She was very brave.

Kirsten Mayfield: Oh, I love how you're calling Tom out on the air here.

Melissa Grisel: Well, you know, it's explosions and it's close, yeah. So maybe he's the smart one, right?

Kirsten Mayfield: Probably. Yeah, the instincts are there, and the rest of us are like, "Ooh, pretty.

Melissa Grisel: Yes, exactly. All

Kirsten Mayfield: right. Well, I am so happy to have you on the show today. You have designed your law firm in a very specific way. Why don't you dive into that? Just give us the details on why you set up the your law firm the way you did, and what your purpose is as a as a practicing attorney?

Melissa Grisel: Sure. So I'll first explain the setup of my law firm. So it is Atlas Legal Services, and I came up with the name Atlas to be a bit of a roadmap through the legal process. I designed it to be as unlike other law firms as I could possibly be. So when you think of law firm, you traditionally think about really expensive hourly fees and really rigorous representation on your behalf, kind of like a like a bulldog defense. But I wanted to do something that was different for a whole bunch of reasons, so Atlas does flat fee billing. Sometimes we do contingency fee billing, which is where if you win the case, you get a percentage. But mostly, I try to center around unbundled legal services. So, what unbundled legal services are is when you have services that are kind of a la carte that you can pick. You can pick and choose what exactly you need help with as your case goes along. So, for example, in Atlas, I primarily help people with landlord-tenant law, small claims issues, and I'm also integrating family law into that as well. So let's use family law as an example. There's a bunch of different steps to that. So let's say you really don't have a lot of money; you have some money, and you really need to get divorced. You can't just go on not getting divorced. So you would have different parts of that that you need help with, and different parts you can't. So, for example, I had a client who was a very sophisticated client, had done all of her research on how to do a divorce. She knew what an equitable division of the assets was, and her husband was on board with it. But they really needed help figuring out tax implications of what would happen to the retirement accounts. So, for a flat fee, I was able to just advise them, and I didn't need to appear in court on their behalf or anything else. Later down the line, if they run into trouble, they can always contact me and purchase an additional service if they run into something they can't handle. So, for example, I would give them an atlas guidance session, which is a really thorough consultation that walks them through how to represent themselves in court. That comes really in handy, actually, a lot with small claims issues, because people will have a problem and they don't know if going to court is the right solution, what their chances would be at court, and they certainly can't maybe afford, or they don't want to have to pay an attorney to represent them by the hour in a small claims case where they might really not win much of anything. So it's really beneficial to people in those situations who are able to help themselves. But the best thing about Atlas is that you can pick and choose everything from just that small guidance in the beginning to up to full representation. Except you're not paying by the hour; you are paying one flat fee. So if you have an uncontested divorce and you didn't want to deal with any of it, I would give a quote, and that would be it, no more, no less. And you never have to worry. Oh, discovery took longer than I thought. There's an extra couple $1,000 to your bill. That's that's never going to happen. So I really designed Atlas to be beneficial for potential clients who really needed to pick and choose and not overspend on something that maybe wasn't worth it to them to to duke out in court

Ron Bockstahler: with the with the flat fee arrangement, and something comes up that you unexpectedly, how do you address that in the flat fee program?

Melissa Grisel: Sure. So I actually get that question a lot. I talk about my law firm style at the Chicago Bar Association meetings. I also talk to my law school has an incubator program, and I've presented on that a couple of times as well, and I get the same question: What happens when discovery does take longer and it takes several more hours? Well, me as an attorney, I have the experience to say whether or not that's a risk, and then I weigh out what the balance is. So let's say there's a really simple small claims case, and I think it's only going to cost my client $2,000 worth of services. But I really, I really suspect that the other side is going to be really difficult, and I think they're going to put up some sort of motion that's going to make things much harder. But you know, maybe there's a chance they won't. So I'll do that calculation out, and then I'll charge extra for it. So I won't necessarily charge $2,000 I'll mitigate my risk by charging $2,500 and then you do lose out if you do spend technically more time on it. But you are allowed to charge more upfront, and it all balances out in the in the end. Does that make sense?

Ron Bockstahler: Yeah, I think it does make sense. I mean, I'd like to see more people doing it, but I don't. I just I don't see a lot of attorneys moving towards that fee just because it's so lucrative to be on a billable hour.

Melissa Grisel: For sure. So whether or not being on a billable hour is really efficient and productive is what is really hot in the legal market right now. So you think expensive billable hours are the way that everyone wants to go, but that's that's simply not true. There are so many clients who are looking for innovative services because law firms, right, are really ingrained in tradition, and they don't like to change. So all of these older attorneys or traditional attorneys, they're not moving anywhere. But that doesn't mean clients don't want something different. So people need to expect service models to keep up with the changing world, and one of the ways to do that in the law world, at least, is to change the forms of law firms so that they are based on flat fee services. So you really got to think: well, how can you encourage? How will lawyers become willing to adapt this model? Well, you get you get some of the do-gooders, right? Like me, who my first thought when building a firm was like, "Oh, how can I help people? I want to make my firms, my services. I want to make them really inexpensive, and I want everyone to flock to me and love me. But realistically, most people are worried about the bottom line. So one of the things I. Saying where you can overcharge what likely is to be the number of hours that you would spend on the case, you make your services a premium, and people will pay it because they really value the certainty of how much they're going to have to spend on a particular service, rather than just settling for trusting the lawyer that oh it'll it'll probably be somewhere between five hours and 10 hours like they like a set price and therefore you can charge more than you probably would billing it out by the hour.

Ron Bockstahler: It's interesting. I you know just in my experiences working with attorneys is you know every time they go into court they're racking up hours, which is racking up my bill, which it never seems to end. So I've never actually worked with anyone on a flat fee. So tell me what your clients look like. Who's your typical client?

Melissa Grisel: Sure. So I really wanted to work with cases that I was familiar with right out of law school. So when I was in law school, I volunteered at the Daley Center, which is the main court in downtown Chicago, and I would volunteer there in the self-help web center that was run by my law school, Chicago Kent's Access to Justice Program, and I would help people fill out those really complicated and weirdly worded court forms, and tell them where to go and what to expect. I could only give them legal information. Of course, I wasn't an attorney at the time. Can't give legal advice in a courthouse. There's a whole bunch of ethical rules surrounding that. But the most I saw were landlords, tenants, and people with small claims issues. So the tenants they maybe had a little bit of money, but maybe their landlord was shutting off their their power. They needed to tell their landlord, "Hey, you need to turn my water on right now, or "I really just need more time to move out, or "I need to work out a payment plan. That was probably a majority of the people there who are just trying to represent themselves in an eviction proceeding, and then on the other spectrum, you actually got a lot of landlords who own maybe one house where they lived upstairs and they rented out the basement, and then their nightmare tenants wouldn't move out. So their only income, or at least for a major source of that income, was the rent they're not getting, so they can't really afford to hire an attorney to fully represent them. But they still needed advice, or at least information on how to evict their tenant properly. And then, of course, you'd get people in small claims doing the same thing: what's a summons? How do I serve someone? Really easy questions that you could answer in a way that didn't violate any ethical standards. You could give them, you know, information. This, you know, put your name here. Put the amount of damages here. This is how you respond. And I knew from working there for almost three years that there was money to be made here. I have had people be so grateful for my completely volunteer information that they tried to shove money into my hand. They tried to hire me as an attorney, even though I was an attorney. So the market is out there for people in those situations. But on the other flip side of the coin, it's not just destitute people who need legal services for cheap. It's that you can get a higher volume of people paying a little bit with very easy services, like a counseling session. Those are really easy to do, and you just made more money than if you took one case from start to finish, and then of course there's people who have bigger claims, and then they kind of work their way to you, and sometimes you can decide whether or not you want to take them on contingency fee.

Ron Bockstahler: So how does unbundled and the services that you provide with Atlas compare to a product like LegalZoom?

Melissa Grisel: Actually, I used LegalZoom as kind of a model for what I wanted to do with my firm. I really wanted to have automated legal forms that I would send to a client, and they would fill out, and they would do most of my work for me. So, using technology to innovate this new process is is right on the forefront of what I know, I'm trying to grasp. I'm not necessarily a tech person myself, so I do find that I hit some walls when it comes to doing that. And there's no good, like set courses of action for small claims because they're all different and they're all crazy. But when it comes to things like LegalZoom, you get information that you could Google anywhere, and then you get some forms that are generally accepted forms that the people who work at LegalZoom know are probably accepted in this courtroom. But what you don't get from LegalZoom is the actual attorney. Advice that makes us worth the money. You don't get legalZoom representatives to tell you, "Hey, this judge really has a thing against parents who refuse to pay child support for this many months. You know, like you really need to watch yourself with that. Or this judge is really, really strict on their discovery deadlines, and you need to make sure that you follow these local rules that say you have to email them to the clerk beforehand. So all of this legal advice, you know, you need to present your case like this way. It's not so important that X happened; it's more important that Y happened, and you need to emphasize that. So all of that advice you can only get from a real attorney who's working on your case.

Kirsten Mayfield: So it kind of feels like you're bridging the gap. You're bridging the gap between what clients actually want as far as services and the way they want to pay attorneys and what attorneys are trying to bill. You're trying to bridge that gap, and then you're also bridging the gap between where technology maybe was trying to fill a void, but there's still that missing human element. So you're you're trying to fill those empty spaces, but you talk about how you you you get questions and you need to explain this stuff a lot. So do you find like a lot of pushback on the way you've set up your law firm? Do you think this is the way of the future, and you're just the first to get it, and more will jump on?

Melissa Grisel: Absolutely, I do get a lot of pushback from older people usually who are really, really traditional in their mindset about how law firms should work. And most of the pushback I get is thinking that, oh, well, how's the judge going to react? But what are all these problems. How are you going to address all these problems? What happens when you go into court for your client on a limited appearance? They only paid you to go to this one hearing, and then the judge holds you accountable for being there the entire time, even though you're not getting paid extra money. You know, well, I can answer that. Yeah, judges don't do that. They're glad that pro se litigants get any help because it makes their lives so much easier to not have to deal with pro se litigants all the way. And there are representation laws in place that allow for that kind of representation. So there really is no chance of that problem happening, so you get a lot of pushback when it comes to potential problems and how are you going to handle that. But in reality, the problems aren't really as big of a deal as they think they are. Having an hourly-based law firm leads to just as many, if not more, problems, and it's just a different way of doing business. And the way flat fee firms are going, they are going to be the future. Absolutely, I would love to see death to the billable hour. There's no reason for it in almost any area of law at all. Every single area of law can have flat fees that benefit both the client and the attorney. So, I am one of the only law firms when I started my firm about two years ago to do this model. So, one of the things I struggled with I didn't really have other business models to work off of, so I had to do a lot of trial and error, but then you'll see bigger firms who have the funds to do faster trial and error. They are moving some of their practice to flat fee services, and they're really starting to follow the money, follow the sense of where that's going. I will also say that there is one other law firm out there in the world that I discovered recently, they're in Iowa. They're called the Law Shop, and they are everything I hope Atlas to be. They do everything flat fee, and the attorneys are happy. They run seminars and workshops, and I encourage any lawyer who is interested in learning how to adapt their practice into a flat fee, entirely flat fee firm, or if they want to learn more, to to contact them.

Ron Bockstahler: Melissa, sounds like you're trying to simplify the U.S. legal system in some ways. United States has 1.3 million attorneys practicing law today, which represents 70% of the attorneys in the world. Why do we have so many attorneys in the U.S.

Melissa Grisel: Sure. So we have so many attorneys in the U.S. because we are a highly litigious civilization. Our society views law as a fight, fight, fight, fight, fight. Everything has to be contested. It has become noble to be an attorney with the mindset of I am the top attorney and I deserve all of this prestige, and it becomes reflective back on how the courts work. So everything is fought over, but not everything needs to be fought over. So there's something called. Collaborative law, where instead of trying to sit one party on one side of the stand and one party on the other side of the stand and have them fight it out, it's kind of where everyone gets together and collaborates. Right, mediation. Sometimes you can get other entities involved that maybe should be like psychiatrists or counselors or financial planners and have them all set at a table and work together,

Kirsten Mayfield: and this is kind of reflective of what's happening in the world on like a police level too. They're trying to say let's bridge the gap between just this like two sides fighting the police versus whoever they deem is not following the law, and let's put some people in in that place, such as therapists and social workers, and so you're saying that this is kind of what's happening in the legal court system too.

Melissa Grisel: I'm sure, except I say don't defund the lawyers. Lawyers can make it happen. They are going to be a great asset. Lawyers don't have to be just the police. They don't have to be the hammer in the courtroom. They can be the facilitator for all of these issues. So a lawyer knows that in a divorce, when there's significant assets involved, they're going to need to have a financial planner give their opinion somehow. And wow, wouldn't it be better to just hire a financial planner who can sit down and give them their opinion and have the clients work it out themselves, rather than subpoena someone to appear in court, and then you have the other side subpoenaing their own person who has a slightly different opinion. So you don't need to fight it out; you can facilitate it. So besides moving towards flat fees, I think it's also moving towards collaborative law.

Ron Bockstahler: So you mentioned technology. What are some of the tools that you're able to access today that you couldn't have, say, two three years ago?

Melissa Grisel: That is kind of a hard question for me, Ron. I'm still using the technology I had two years ago because I am such a new law firm. I kind of tried to start right out the gate with integrating my technology, so when I started Atlas, I really wanted automated forms, right? So there's a lot of different parts of legal issues that use forms that look like any form at all. So, for example, when you're really poor, you can get a fee waiver form, and you go to the court and you ask them to approve it, and then they approve your fee waiver form or they don't. But there's a lot of questions in there that aren't necessarily very obvious, and even though it's like a fillable PDF, it doesn't really walk you through it. So Illinois Legal Aid Online is a fantastic resource for litigants in Illinois that need help filling out these forms themselves. They have programs where it's access to justice. They walk people through. I'll put your name here. How much money do you make? And then it auto-populates the forms, so I had the same idea of utilizing that in my law firm with a bunch of like if-then statements, right? So if you're suing for this much, then you need this kind of complaint. If you're suing for that much, then you actually are going to switch courtrooms and go over here. So that is the goal. It's not quite a reality yet. You have to have a lot of income to make big changes to programs like that, and I am not in position right now to do that. But I am trying to seek out ways to make forms fillable and easier. I want to be able to give my client this very simple form here. Fill this out, and then I can take that information and slap together a complaint in a couple of minutes. So one way you can really make money by using this technology is if it normally takes you, let's say, an hour on the phone with a client to get all of the facts that you're going to put in the complaint, and then it takes you 30 minutes to put it in the complaint. Well, won't you save a ton of time if you email the client this, like maybe a little quiz or like a step-by-step program that they fill it out all themselves, and then the complaint is made for you already using a pretty standard form, and then all you have to do is look it over. I mean, maybe that took you 10 minutes, so now you can have, you know, a lot other clients to fit into that time that you save by using technology.

Ron Bockstahler: So, unless I asked you earlier, who's your clientele? Are we primarily looking at poor people as the primary clientele that's looking at flat fee services

Kirsten Mayfield: or underrepresented people as well.

Melissa Grisel: Underrepresented people is a great way to look at it because it's not necessarily just poor people. In order to qualify for free legal services through legal aid, you have to make. I think the rule is less than. Than 125 percent of the poverty level of the United States, and a lot of other legal aid societies have very limited numbers of people they can take in for for free work. They're completely overwhelmed with the amount of people who need legal services, so they'll only take people who maybe have an easier case or very very particular kinds of cases. So you have a ton of people who, first of all, overqualify, can't qualify for legal aid, but then they also can't afford to have a $10,000 retainer for for for something that might really be simple. So my clients, again, I kind of have my charity mindset in there, where I do have a lot of clients who are poor tenants, and I end up helping them for almost no money at all. But that is a personal preference of mine. The point of flat fee firms is to not necessarily get poor people who can't afford anything. Although you can all of a sudden get poor people who can afford a little bit and take their money, the idea is you are going to have clientels who are discerning customers, and you are going to win them away from unpredictable billing, hourly billing law firms, and into your predictable flat fee forms, so when you look at my ideal clientele pool, you're going to get sure a couple of maybe people who can't afford a lot; they can only afford a little bit, but that you're still helping them. Like you are help if you give someone advice and steps on how to do something, and that's the only thing they're ever told in their entire case. Their outlook completely changes, and all of a sudden they're able to represent themselves fully. But then on the other side, you're going to get discerning customers who really like the idea that they know what they're getting. They have this giant list of every single service that you are including for this amazing, sturdy, reliable price. So you're going to get intelligent people. You're going to get people who know how to look for other things, and you're going to get people from all walks of life. So you're not just going to get like teenagers who have a ticket and they need a little bit of help, and they Googled and they don't really know what they're doing, but they Google cheap attorney, and then they might find you. But then people who know what unbundled services are specifically look for that, and they're really happy when they find it.

Ron Bockstahler: So we're a litigious society that buys into marketing because every time we turn around we're being marketed to, how how much do you get that man? If it's low cost, it's low quality.

Melissa Grisel: That is actually something that I feel is a realistic struggle for law firms who are trying to implement this style. I had struggled personally with making sure my prices reflect the quality of work that I'm giving people. So I've had a couple of mentors who have actually said the same, who gave me the same advice, and the advice is, oh, you know, if you're too busy to take on another client, double the price, and there's a good chance they'll pay it anyway. And now you're getting paid twice, so you can charge a premium for your services, and then there will be people out there who are still going to buy it. You don't need to underprice your services by a la carting. I mean, if you go to a restaurant, right, and you see the menu that's a la carte, and like if you care about prices on a menu, like I do, you look that a side salad is $9 right? $9 What? That's really expensive. But then when you look at the entrees, and the entrees are you know $20 you're like, wow, that's that's actually not that bad. I don't have to pay for the whole entree. I just want a little salad, so even though the salad might be overpriced, I don't know if my analogy is really following through.

Ron Bockstahler: Yeah, I don't know because I go to the steak joint and I see a steak for 56 bucks, and I notice that nothing else comes with it, and I'm like, wow, that's a lot of money.

Kirsten Mayfield: Bold, it's a bold move.

Melissa Grisel: It is. Let me see if I can rephrase that because affordable doesn't mean cheap. You can afford to go and spend a little bit on a couple of different services that are really hitting the key areas of your case that you need help with, and in that way, you're saving money for not having to pay for the whole caboodle if you don't want it, but those prices aren't necessarily cheap for what you're getting. So if you hire an hourly lawyer who, let's say, charges $300 by the hour, and it takes them one hour to draft a complaint, but then you. Also, you already had to give them a $2,000 retainer because you know they're going to do other things for you. They basically charged you $300 for doing that complaint, but I, who have a flat fee law firm, charged you $400 to do that complaint. So you didn't have to pay a $2,000 retainer. I made $400 on doing the same amount of work as an hourly attorney.

Ron Bockstahler: Makes sense. I hope we can move things in that direction, as you've expressed. Final question: What's the one thing in the legal profession that you would like to see changed?

Melissa Grisel: There needs to be more access to justice. People are unrepresented in the majority of everything that goes into a courtroom and it clogs the system horribly. Pro se litigants have that's litigants who don't have a lawyer. They do not know what they're doing. They mess up all the time. Something that could have been settled in one court day actually takes five court dates. They don't show up having the right documents, they just they need some representation, and there's so many people who fall into that access to justice gap. They can't afford a really expensive attorney. They cannot get free legal aid, so they are in the middle and they are pro se because maybe the case isn't that important where they want to spend their entire life savings on a lawyer. So the entire frame of legal services, the provision of legal services needs to change to provide access to justice for these people,

Kirsten Mayfield: and that also helps with helping the legal process because we're not like piling up the courts with all of this improperly handled work and making things go longer than they necessarily need to, and then extending deadlines for other people who might need things moved through just because things are jammed. Then, right?

Melissa Grisel: Yep, I have had judges personally thank me for taking on clients on a limited scope basis because the judges couldn't tell the litigants, "Hey, you need to bring me all of your evidence tomorrow. Get your bank statements in line. They can't give that person advice, and I have had them like personally thank me for yes. I wish there were more people like you.

Kirsten Mayfield: Well, hopefully there will be.

Ron Bockstahler: That's awesome. Yeah, Melissa, how can how can our listeners get a hold of you?

Melissa Grisel: So anyone can Google my firm, which is atlaslegalservices.com My phone number, if they want to get a hold of me that way, is 312-291-4643

Ron Bockstahler: All right. Well, Melissa, thanks for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Wish all the best success and luck in the world. We really like to see the flat fee model move on, and definitely want to see access to justice to more people. I think you called that the access to justice gap.

Melissa Grisel: Yeah,

Ron Bockstahler: a big issue in this country.

It Melissa Grisel: is. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Ron Bockstahler: All right, everyone, have a great day. Thanks for listening. The 1958 Lawyer. We'll be back again next week with another show. Look forward to talking to everyone

Strickland Bonner: then. Thanks for listening to the 1958 Lawyer Podcast. If you like the show, tell a friend, and please subscribe, rate, and review us on Apple Podcasts, Google, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you'd like to hear more about Ron, Kirsten, or Amata, go to amataoffices.com All the links are also available in show notes.