Hi everybody! It's Andy and welcome again to my office in Modesto, California. I'm
an attorney licensed to practice law in California as well as New York. In this
video I'm going to go over a concept in the law called Limited Scope
Representation. So I'm going to talk about how that works specifically in
California, but the concept of limited scope exists in other states as well. I
know for a fact New York has it. Other states almost certainly will have it. You
just need to check for the state or states that you're interested in. So that
said, the concept of limited scope representation is probably best
illustrated with an example. So let's say, for example, that you are in your kitchen
and you are trying to make yourself a sandwich. Bear with me, this really is
going somewhere. The sandwich making process, I guess, you know maybe start
with step number one getting all the ingredients out of refrigerator and ends
all the way down the line at say step number 10 with you enjoying your
sandwich. Maybe step number eleven is you doing the dishes afterwards, etc. So that
entire process of making a sandwich, you can partition that out in to very
distinct steps, I guess, or groups, phases, buckets, whatever you want to call
it. So, for example, step number one getting all the ingredients out, step
number two washing the lettuce, step three slicing the tomatoes, and so on and so on.
So all of those steps could, at least in theory, be done by somebody else. So if
you are, say, working with a friend and, you know, the two of you are trying
to make a sandwich, maybe you get the bread out, maybe he spreads the
mayonnaise on the bread, maybe he washes the tomatoes, maybe you slice the tomatoes,
and then all of you can, like all the steps kind of come together resulting in the
sandwich that you and your friend are enjoying. So that concept of taking a big
long process and breaking it out into distinct segments or chunks, phases, whatever
you want to call it. That concept applied to a court case is basically
what limited scope representation is. So, for example, let's say that you have a
divorce case in California and you know the first step in the divorce case might
be filling out the paperwork, the petition paperwork. Step number two might
be filing the paperwork. Step 3 might be, you know, serving the paperwork. All three
of those steps are relatively easy so if you're the
party doing the case you can, in theory, do all three of those steps
yourself. Step number four, however, might be doing financial disclosures. I have a
separate video actually that goes over the different phases in a divorce in
California. I'm gonna go ahead and link that right over here just in case, you
know, you haven't seen it, you guys have no idea what I'm talking about.
Pause this video, go watch that one and then come back with this one if
you're, if you're, if that's what you want to do. So of the three steps, those first
three steps I mentioned, those are fairly easy. Step number four - financial
disclosures - sometimes called preliminary declarations of disclosure
or PDD's, those can be more complicated. So a lot of times a party
who's doing their divorce themselves, for example, will get stuck on the PDDs
and not really know what to do. If you have a non family law case, for
example, it's a car accident case and there's discovery - discovery can be very
complicated to do so a lot of times parties are kind of stuck, they don't
know what to do. So a lot of times parties will also think that you know
because they don't have $5,000 on them or $10,000
or something, they're not gonna be able to get a lawyer interested. So the thing is
like, you know, you have to have $5,000 right, in order to get a
lawyer to help you.' That's not necessarily the case. Uh, you know, if you
have $5,000, great, but that doesn't mean, like if you don't have
the $5,000, it doesn't mean you have to do your case on your
own. There's a third kind of option in the middle where if you don't have $5,000
but you have $500, maybe the $500 is enough, you know, to get a lawyer to
help you for an hour or two to do, you know, your financial disclosures or to,
you know, respond to discovery, etc. So that's the big pro, I guess, for limited
scope representation for the client. It allows them to get legal help to kind of
get past like, you know, a minor kind of hump or obstacle in their
case that's really kind of, you know, bogging them down. You know, so, for
example, you don't have $5,000, but for $500 you can still kind
of get the same result, I guess. So, I would imagine that more people have $500
than $5,000 so that's actually a fairly big pro, I guess, of limited scope
representation. The, the other pro, I guess, for the lawyer's, you know, perspective if
you have a case as a lawyer that all you're doing is this one little distinct
kind of group right here, it's actually a fairly appealing kind of thing, I guess,
you know, it's relatively low stress, if you want to call it that, because from
the lawyer's perspective, he or she doesn't need to remember or worry
about, I guess, anything that happened before and he or she doesn't need to
concern themselves with anything that's going to happen afterwards. All they need
to do is just one little bit right here. So that's a very straightforward kind of
task, I guess, so that's a pro for the lawyer. Those two big pros aside, there is
one con. It is kind of a big con, unfortunately, as you know life is that
way. So the big con here is that limited scope representation does not work in
every case. Some cases, you know, if you look at them, they kind of break up very
neatly, there's very obvious kinds of demarcations or borders between phase
number one, phase number two, phase number three, etc. So in that case you can have a
lawyer do steps two and three, but not number one or you can have a lawyer do
steps, you know, four, five and seven but not six. So that's actually very
helpful and that's when the limited scope is the most useful. In some cases,
however, there is no way to neatly define that this is step one and this is step
to, like step one and two kind of all blend together so the thing is the whole case
looks like one gigantic step. In that case limited scope representation is not
going to work for you, most likely, so that's the humongous con. Kind of a
related con, I guess, or kind of drawback is that there is no way to easily tell what
kind of case limited scope representation works in. So there's no
bright-line rule that says 'Okay for every divorce case, limited scope
representation works, for every breach of contract case limited scope
representation doesn't work.' There is no way to tell. You basically just have to
look at your case maybe you can, you know, get a lawyer to do a free consult or
something. You just have to, you know, analyze it on a case-by-case basis. So
the two forms that you need or actually one of two forms that you need if you
will if you are going to do a limited scope representation in California.
Number one is if you have a family law case in California there's a specific
family law firm called the FL-950. I have a separate video again on how to
download forms like this I'm gonna go ahead and link it right over here so the
FL-950 is what you want and you can get it by following the steps in that video.
The second form is actually very similar, but it's for civil cases not family in
California. So the thing is if you have a car accident case, breach of
contract case and you are wanting to do limited scope representation, there's the
MC-950 form. Again you can also download it by following the steps in that video.
So one of those two forms you're going to need to fill out if limited scope
representation is something that you know lends itself to your case and again
the idea behind limited scope is that you take the big long process from the
very beginning of the case to the very end of the case and you break it out
into distinct kind of steps or phases, chunks, whatever you want to call it and
then you the client will do certain stand, certain steps and then for certain
steps that, you know, are too complicated or that you're not comfortable with
doing, you're going to hire a lawyer just to do those steps. And the benefit of
that is that the lawyer can help you kind of get over like an obstacle or a
hump that, you know, you don't know what to do with, but then once that obstacle
is kind of overcome, you the client can then pick up the case and kind of run
with it, hopefully until the very end. So that's the basic idea behind limited
scope. Try not to make that too confusing. If it was too confusing, sorry. You can
watch this video again, but hopefully limited scope representation is
something that makes intuitive sense and it's something that can help you out in
whatever kind of case you have. So again hopefully that helped and I will talk to
you guys next time. Go ahead and leave me a comment below if you want. I'm
also going to link the FL-950 in MC-950 forms below just in case you need
some way to kind of get them really quickly. So okay, I hope that helped and I
will talk to you guys next time. Thanks