Legal Coaching And Unbundling Pilot Project (LCUP) Launches Practice Group And Evaluation

Practice group

A recent survey of LCUP participating lawyers indicated significant interest in the formation of an online network or practice group for lawyers to share ideas and ask questions of other lawyers offering unbundled services.

The first meeting of the practice group took place on September 28 and the second on October 26, 2020. The September 28 meeting was a discussion amongst local lawyers about “Lessons learned on how to charge, bill, and promote legal coaching and unbundled services”. The October 26th session kicked off the 5th annual Saskatchewan Access to Justice Week, a 1-hour webinar focused on how unbundled services have worked in several Canadian jurisdictions (BC, AB, ON). The goal of the webinar is to encourage lawyers to offer unbundled services and inform the public about how these services work.

Evaluation

Research on unbundled legal services in other Canadian jurisdictions has yielded exciting results, showing a high rate of satisfaction among both clients and lawyers. The LCUP Working Group is now conducting similar research in Saskatchewan with the launch of the LCUP pilot project evaluation. The results of the pilot project evaluation will contribute to a growing collection of data from across Canada which will help inform legal practice, policy development and empirically-informed scholarly writing on the topic. We are grateful to the Canadian Foundation for Legal Research, for their financial support in conducting the evaluation.

The ‘nuts and bolts’ of the pilot project evaluation are as follows:

1. Who is involved?  Lawyers who have signed up for the pilot project have been invited to participate in the evaluation, as will their clients who have received legal coaching and/or unbundled legal services.
2. What is happening?  Upon finishing a limited scope retainer or legal coaching file, the lawyer and the client are invited to separately complete a very brief online survey of their experiences to gauge satisfaction with and views on providing limited scope and/or legal coaching work. We will also be in contact with participating lawyers half-way through the pilot project evaluation about their experience to date. Note: Participation in the evaluation is completely voluntary. Lawyers responses WILL NOT be linked to client responses, and all data will be collected anonymously, securely, and confidentially by the Social Sciences Research Lab at the University of Saskatchewan. The study has received ethics approval.
3. When is the evaluation taking place? Lawyer and client feedback is being collected online for one year, from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021. The data will be analyzed at the end of this information-gathering phase. All participants will receive a copy of the evaluation.
4. Where is the evaluation taking place? Links to the lawyer and client surveys are available on the main page of www.sklcup.com. To directly visit the feedback forms, please click here:
   Client feedback form  |  Lawyer feedback form

Get involved

We’re looking for more lawyers to help improve access to justice and client services. Join the Saskatchewan roster of lawyers who provide legal coaching and/or unbundled services and pilot project evaluation. Email Kim Newsham at kim.newsham@gov.sk.ca to join the roster and to be notified about new resources and training events related to unbundled services and legal coaching as they become available. Questions related to the evaluation can be directed to Brea Lowenberger, Director of CREATE Justice and Access to Justice Coordinator at b.lowenberger@usask.ca.

This article originally appeared on lawsociety.sk.ca.