The Lawyer Nobody Fully Hires

How “unbundled” representation quietly redraws the access-to-justice gap in family court instead of closing it

By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.

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In most of the country’s family courtrooms, the person standing in front of the judge has no lawyer. Not sometimes — usually. National data compiled by the National Center for State Courts puts the share of family cases with at least one self-represented party at 80 to 90 percent in many court systems. California’s own courts report that seventy percent of the roughly 200,000 divorce petitions filed there each year start with at least one unrepresented party, a number that climbs to eighty percent by the time judgment is entered. Utah’s numbers run similarly stark: about half of petitioners and eight in ten respondents in divorce cases proceed alone.

Into that gap has stepped a product: limited-scope representation, also called unbundled legal services. A lawyer drafts one motion, reviews one settlement, coaches a client for one hearing, appears for one court date — and is retained for nothing else. It is being marketed, increasingly by firms with an obvious interest in growing their client base at a lower price point, as the next wave of access-to-justice reform in divorce and custody law.

It may be exactly that, for the right case. It may also be something less generous: a way for the legal industry to say it has addressed the representation gap in family court without actually funding full representation for the people who need it most.

What the rule actually allows

The legal basis is real and narrow. ABA Model Rule 1.2(c) states that a lawyer may limit the scope of a representation if the limitation is reasonable under the circumstances and the client gives informed consent. That’s the whole permission. Roughly a third of states have modified the model language further, and implementation — whether a limited appearance must be filed with the court, whether informed consent must be in writing, whether a lawyer can quietly withdraw after one hearing — varies by jurisdiction. There is no uniform national standard for what “unbundled” means in practice; there is a patchwork of state court rules built on top of a single permissive sentence.

“The client remains the party of record and the last line of defense for everything the engagement didn’t cover.”

That patchwork matters because family law is not a single, discrete transaction. It is custody, support, property, and safety, often litigated across months or years, frequently reopened by contempt motions, modifications, or enforcement actions long after the “case” was supposedly resolved. A lawyer hired to draft one motion has no obligation — ethical or contractual — to show up when the other parent violates the parenting schedule, when a support enforcement action is filed, or when a hearing that was supposed to be procedural turns into something else. The client remains the party of record and the last line of defense for everything the engagement didn’t cover.

The population this actually reaches

The industry pitch treats limited-scope representation as a bridge for people who would otherwise get nothing. For a narrow category of cases — a truly uncontested filing, a document review before signing, one clean procedural question — that bridge is real.

But family court is disproportionately not that. The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System’s Cases Without Counsel study, based on interviews with 128 self-represented litigants across four jurisdictions, documents people navigating custody and support disputes — cases that, by their nature, tend to be contested, emotionally charged, and procedurally demanding, the opposite of the clean, boundable transaction that unbundled representation is built to serve. A lawyer’s own list of where limited-scope work becomes risky reads, functionally, as a list of what family court actually is: high parental conflict, contested custody, allegations of abuse or substance misuse, protective orders, police involvement at exchanges, disputes over day-to-day parenting decisions. Those are not edge cases in family court. For a large share of litigants, they are the case.

There’s a secondary data point worth treating carefully, now traced to its source rather than a secondhand citation: Custody X Change surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults who had finalized a divorce involving child custody within the prior two years, using the Pollfish platform, with a 4 percent margin of error. It’s a retrospective self-report survey of consumers, not administrative court data, and the company sells co-parenting software — a commercial interest, though not one that obviously biases the specific finding here. With that caveat: 86 percent of cases where both parents had attorneys reached a settlement, versus 71 percent where neither did — and only 63 percent where just one side had a lawyer.

“What the numbers cut against, either way, is the simple story that any representation is better than none.”

“Those are not edge cases in family court. For a large share of litigants, they are the case.”

Two-attorney cases also produced joint physical custody most often, at 82 percent. The company’s own cofounder cautioned that the study shows correlation, not proven cause, but offered a plausible mechanism: attorneys on both sides may push their clients toward a negotiated agreement rather than trial. What the numbers cut against, either way, is the simple story that any representation is better than none. Asymmetric representation — one parent with full-scope counsel, the other with a single unbundled task or nothing — settled worse than no representation on either side. The same survey found only 65 percent of low-income parents had a lawyer at all, against 84 percent of everyone else, which is the access gap this piece is about, stated as a straightforward number.

The part that survives the swapped-jerseys test

This is not a gendered story, and it shouldn’t be told as one. The parent who can afford full representation and the parent who can’t sort along income lines, not along which parent is the mother or the father. A mother priced into unbundled services when her ex can afford full-scope counsel faces the identical structural disadvantage a father would face in the same position: less continuity, less strategic advice between filings, and a lawyer who is contractually entitled to stop helping the moment the retained task is done.

“The parent who can afford full representation and the parent who can’t sort along income lines, not along which parent is the mother or the father.”

What the rule change actually does is legalize an old reality — most family court litigants have always been under-resourced relative to the complexity of their case — and repackage it as a service innovation. That repackaging isn’t inherently dishonest. Some of the firms promoting it are the same ones warning, in the same breath, that it’s the wrong choice for contested custody. And it isn’t only the private bar pushing it. In February 2023, the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators — the national body representing every state’s top judges and court administrators — formally resolved to promote limited-scope representation nationwide, directing states to write new rules authorizing it, build standardized court forms for it, and train judges and the public on it.

The resolution’s own text is candid about why: middle- and modest-income people who don’t qualify for legal aid and can’t afford full representation are being left out entirely, and existing limited-scope rules are underused. That’s a legitimate problem to solve. But a national judicial body promoting a part-time lawyer as the fix, at the same moment its own courts report that 80 to 90 percent of family law litigants have no lawyer at all, is also a system quietly settling for less than full representation as the standard it’s willing to build toward.

“A national judicial body promoting a part-time lawyer as the fix is also a system quietly settling for less than full representation as the standard it’s willing to build toward.”

What closes the gap and what doesn’t

Court-run self-help centers, plain-language forms, and navigator programs — the tools the National Center for State Courts is actually pushing into state systems — target the same population unbundled representation claims to serve, without the ethical ambiguity of a lawyer who is retained for part of a case and legally silent on the rest. Those are structural investments. Unbundled representation, as currently regulated, is a private-market workaround for the same underlying failure: full-scope family law representation costs more than most litigants can pay, and no jurisdiction has built a public system that closes that gap at scale.

“It was never designed to solve the problem it’s being marketed as solving.”

The honest framing isn’t that limited-scope representation is a scam. It’s that it was never designed to solve the problem it’s being marketed as solving. It’s a reasonable option for a genuinely narrow slice of cases and a documented risk for the contested, high-conflict cases that make up most of a family court docket — the same docket where 80 to 90 percent of litigants already have no lawyer at all.

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Sources: National Center for State Courts, self-represented litigant caseload data; California Law Review, “Self-Represented Litigants in Family Law: The Response of California’s Courts”; Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, “Cases Without Counsel: Experiences of Self-Representation in U.S. Family Court”; American Bar Association, Model Rules of Professional Conduct, Rule 1.2(c); Legal Innovation Regulatory Survey, state adoption data on Model Rule 1.2(c) variations; Custody X Change, “Statistics: Hire a Divorce Attorney for the Best Custody Outcome” (July 2021 survey, 1,000 respondents, Pollfish platform, 4% margin of error); Conference of Chief Justices/Conference of State Court Administrators, Resolution 1: In Support of Promoting the Use of Limited Scope Representation in Civil Court Proceedings (adopted February 13, 2023).