Along a busy stretch of highway between Los Angeles and Santa Monica sits a small coffeehouse serving up more than overpriced latte. Nestled inconspicuously between a Starbucks and a Coffeebean in a crowded commercial plaza, the Legal Grind greets its visitors with a most unlikely sign hanging in the front window:
JUSTICE SERVED DAILY
Californians hankering for a cup of Joe and a good lawyer can get a caffeine fix at this full-service coffee bar that doubles as a legal referral and information center. Here, people with legal problems can meet with Bar-certified lawyers six days a week over java. Lawyer Jeff Hughes founded Legal Grind to make the legal profession more accessible to the public. “The casual atmosphere makes it much easier for people to come in and sit down with an attorney,” Hughes says. And the price is hard to beat: Twenty-five bucks gets you a legal consultation and a bottomless cup of coffee.
The Legal Grind’s menu is as open-ended as its patrons’ legal needs, although house specialties include routine legal matters such as filling out child custody forms, responding to eviction letters, and preparing wills. Instead of the urban alternative weekly and fliers for local poetry readings, the coffee table material here at Legal Grind consists primarily of self-help legal information to aid pro se litigants – everything from law books to court forms to how-to pamphlets for going it alone. Hughes estimates that for every 10 clients who walk through the coffeehouse door, nine will get advice and use it to press their own claim in court.
Legal Grind is a hip incarnation of an emerging national trend in legal services called “unbundling,” in which clients receive partial assistance that falls shy of full in-court representation. Since Legal Grind first opened its doors in 1996, Hughes estimates that the café has provided unbundled services to more than 10,000 clients. Each week, he says, attorneys’ schedules are passed out to more than 100 clients seeking advice with cream and sugar.
Unbundled legal services is certainly not a new concept, although today’s civil justice access crisis increasingly requires Americans to get sound legal help wherever they can find it. Forrest Mosten, a California mediation expert, is considered the modern-day father of legal unbundling, borrowing the idea from the real estate industry and introducing it to the legal community in 1972 when he co-founded Jacoby & Myers. The firm offered limited legal services for a flat fee of $15 – and met with limited success. Almost three decades later, however, Mosten is onto something. In 1999, he founded the Mosten Mediation Centers and ran it out of a small office in Sherman Oaks, Calif. Three years later, his operation boasts 47 offices in 26 states.
Mosten acknowledges that most clients settle for partial services because they can’t afford full representation, though he points out, “While most of us would prefer a Mercedes if given the option, we’d all choose the Chevy over public transportation or walking.”