About Us
About Our Founder Joel Miller
Joel Miller is our founder and long-time family law lawyer who stepped out of traditional practice to create The Family Law Coach. He wanted to see what legal services for people acting for themselves in a family law matter might look like if one started from the perspective of the user of legal services – the client. The Family Law Coach is the result of asking what affordable and useful services might be if we took a fresh look at the creation, pricing, and delivering of legal assistance to those who couldn’t afford, or didn’t want to pay for, full, traditional, legal services.
Clicking Read More takes you to a page setting out his vision of affordable and meaningful services to enable those acting for themselves to be as effective and persuasive in family court as they could be, and his journey to create and provide them. It also gives you the normal stuff about his credentials and background.
What’s Legal Coaching and How Can It Work For You?
Legal coaching, or simply “coaching”, is something new to family law.
It’s how an experienced family law lawyer can help someone acting for themselves learn the techniques and tricks to acting in court or mediation, and in negotiating with the other party. It’s how to help someone unfamiliar with public speaking and the family law system present their case in the most effective way.
What are unbundled services and limited scope retainers?
Traditional family law service is where a client delivers their case to a lawyer to handle and pays an hourly rate for the lawyer to do their thing. The lawyer and client enter into a “retainer agreement” for the lawyer’s services and the lawyer asks for a lump sum of money, also called a “retainer”, to be paid in advance before any work is done.
Generally, no lawyer can accurately predict what the total cost will be because they don’t know what complications the other side will create, what unexpected things will arise, and when the matter will be reached in court – or even how many times you’ll need to go to court.
Unbundled services are where the client hires the lawyer to do just a part of what they might normally do. The lawyer and client enter into a “limited scope retainer” agreement for the lawyer to do only what the agreement says. And normally the lawyer will charge at their hourly rate – although some may be willing to negotiate a fixed fee – and ask for a lump sum, or retainer, to be paid up front.
The Family Law Coach lawyers operate under a different type of limited scope retainer and they charge differently. This page discusses what the normal unbundled services and limited scope retainers are and what The Family Law Coach unbundled service and limited scope retainer are.