Unbundling at the Bar: the risk sits in the scope, the reward sits in the design

My own starting point is blunter than the report’s. Every public access instruction I have seen is unbundled. In my experience in public access matters it is rare for a barrister to take a case from the first letter to the final order with nothing left in the client’s hands. Even where the barrister does conduct litigation at some stage, it is usually later when the client realises they need more help. So the question for the Bar is not whether it unbundles. It is whether it does so with enough clarity to survive a complaint or claim.

What the research actually says

The study maps four service models: unregulated self-service consumer tools that introduce the client to a regulated professional; hybrid unregulated and regulated services, where a platform runs most of the matter and a lawyer delivers defined pieces of it; enabler tools that structure task allocation without providing legal services at all; and limited scope representation by a public access barrister.

Only the fourth is an established Bar model. The first three are largely solicitor led, and the report is candid about why. Providers told the BSB they had not approached the Bar because they did not understand how barristers could be instructed, and assumed the role was confined to advocacy in contentious matters. That is a marketing problem, not a regulatory one.

Two findings are worth pulling out for anyone weighing this work up.

The first is insurance. Uncertainty about liability has held unbundling back in the solicitor market for years. The study found the position at the Bar to be different. Unbundled work is not treated as a distinct area of practice for the purposes of the Bar’s cover, but that protection is conditional rather than automatic. It depends on the barrister operating within their scope of practice, and on the scope of work being clearly defined in the client care letter. The second condition is the one I see fail most often. Where it does fail, risk is no longer being managed through professional obligations and clear allocation of responsibility. It is being left to chance.

The second is prevalence. The BSB report cites the Legal Services Consumer Panel’s 2025 tracker survey for the figure that 21% of legal services consumers surveyed had agreed to share specific tasks with their legal professional, described as the highest level since tracking began in 2014.

The conclusion the study reaches is one I agree with. The existing framework can accommodate this work. Indeed, it already does; what it needs is clarity.

Where it goes wrong in practice

This is where practice adds something to the research. In my experience, public access work is consistently over represented in complaints against barristers, and in the large majority the root cause is the same. It is not negligence, or rudeness, or fee levels. It is a lack of clarity about the scope of services at the outset.

It fails in three distinct ways.

1. The scope is written in the profession’s shorthand, and lazy drafting is usually why. This is not intentional. It is habit derived from working with professional clients, and it is usually unsuitable for lay clients. A barrister and a clerk share a vocabulary and a set of assumptions. “Representation at the hearing on 4 March” is complete to them. To a lay client it is an invitation to imagine. One word can decide whether you are drafting a letter before action or carrying a negotiation for the next six months, and the client will not tell you which reading they understood until it matters.

2. The words are adequate but the understanding is not. Rule C125 requires a barrister who has accepted public access instructions to notify the client in writing, in clear and readily understandable terms, of the work agreed. The BSB’s own Public Access Guidance for Barristers puts the duty this way: “If you accept Public Access instructions you must forthwith notify your client in clear and readily understandable terms of the work you have agreed to perform and the fees which you propose to charge…”. Clear to whom is the operative question. Writing it down is the first half of that obligation. Checking that this particular client has understood it is the second half, and in my experience it is the half that often gets skipped.

   Rule C19.1 sits alongside it and is often overlooked. A barrister must not mislead a client about the nature and scope of the legal services being offered or supplied. Intention does not come into it. The fact that you did not mean to mislead is not an answer. What answers it is evidence that you took steps to make sure the client understood.

3. The work has ended and nobody has said so. The client keeps asking for help. The barrister, trying to be decent, keeps helping. Or conversely the barrister does not respond to the email at all. Three or four emails later the replies slow down, because there is a diary to run and this work is not paid. Then the complaint arrives, and it turns on one question nobody settled at the time: when the retainer ended. If there is nothing in writing that closes it, the client’s account of where the work stopped will carry more weight than yours.

   
   

   Free work after that point is riskier than it looks. It raises expectations, it may not be covered, and continuing to act without saying that you are acting outside the scope can be read later as acceptance that the work was inside the scope all along. If you want to do pro bono work, and many barristers do, keep it small, say expressly that it is pro bono, or route it through an established pro bono organisation so the contractual lines stay clean.

Underneath all three sits the same asymmetry. Where the client is what the regulatory bodies describe as an unsophisticated purchaser of legal services, ambiguity is read the client’s way. You cannot prove what was in their head. You can only prove what you told them, and what you did to check they understood.

One instruction, ten decisions

Take a client care letter that says “representation at the hearing on 4 March”. Now ask what it does not answer.

• Is there a conference before the hearing, and how long is it?
  • Is that conference in the days before the hearing, at court immediately before the hearing, or both?
• Which documents will be read, and how many?
• Skeleton argument or position statement: included, offered, or excluded?
• Any involvement in preparing the bundle?
• Will there be an attendance note or a recording afterwards for the conference or hearing?
• Who agrees the terms of the order and circulates it?
• Who communicates with the other party, and at what point does that stop?

Every one of those is a task, and every one will be done by somebody. If the letter does not say who, the client will assume it is you, because you are the lawyer and they are not.

The fix is not a longer client care letter. It is a client care letter with two columns: your tasks on one side, the client’s tasks on the other, with the client’s column written as explicitly as yours. A client who can see what they did not buy cannot expect a complaint about the scope to be upheld.

The end of the retainer

Say so, in writing, when the work is finished. An email or attendance note recording the outcome, the reasons for it, and the fact that the instructed work is now complete does three jobs at once. It is good service, it is evidence, and it closes the engagement cleanly and with evidence.

Fees deserve a mention here too. In Michael Glaser KC and Victoria Miller v Katharine Jane Atay [2024] EWCA Civ 1111, handed down on 3 October 2024, the Court of Appeal upheld a finding that a term requiring the client to pay the agreed fees in full whether or not the hearing went ahead was unfair under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, and unenforceable against her. A clause in your client care letter stating that fees are non-refundable is not the end of that analysis and potential dispute. It is the beginning of one.

Now the rewards

The BSB, quite properly, does not write about commercial upside. I can.

Public access work is generally paid up front. For a profession that spends a great deal of its life waiting on solicitor payment, that is not a footnote. It is a structural advantage.

You get the client relationship. A great many barristers do this work because dealing directly with the lay client is more satisfying than receiving papers and returning an opinion. You see the effect of the advice, and that matters to people.

Clients get access. Someone who cannot afford full representation can afford a defined piece of it, and can buy more if they choose to. That is the access to justice argument, and it holds, provided responsibility for everything else is clearly allocated.

There is also an honest commercial point that follows directly from doing the scope work properly. A client who was going to draft their own witness statement may well pay for it once they can see the option priced next to the alternative. Breaking a service into components is a transparency measure and a revenue measure at the same time. Those two things are not in tension.

Then there is position. The study suggests platforms are open to working with barristers and simply do not know how, so chambers that can explain the public access route in plain terms are well placed as those models develop.

Think of it as a shared project

This conceptual shift is small and it changes everything. Unbundling is one matter delivered by two parties, the barrister and the client. It is not a barrister doing a few jobs in the vicinity of a client.

If the word unbundling puts people off, here is a suggestion of my own: call it shared legal services delivery. The BSB’s report confirms no commonly agreed definition yet exists across the sector, so the field is open. Once you see it that way, the work to be done before the next client care letter is obvious. Map what you actually do. Break it into components. Decide what is standard, what is optional and what is excluded. Price it. After that the client care letter more or less writes itself, and can be adapted for each client rather than drafted from cold every time.

Conveyancing providers have already done this, which is why a conveyancing scope of services is often the clearest document a consumer will read all year. General litigation, by and large, has not.

There is a technology point here, and it is a modest one. A tool that shows a client two columns, your tasks and theirs, and lets them add a task to their order, is not difficult to build. The hard part is not the software. It is the thinking that has to come first, which is somebody sitting down and working out what the component parts of the different services actually are. That is a barrister or chambers exercise, not an IT project.

In short

The risk in unbundled work sits almost entirely in the scope, and scope is something the Bar can design rather than something it has to survive. The BSB’s study makes the case that the framework already allows for this work. What is missing is the product thinking, and that is within every barrister or chambers’ gift.

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If you would like to discuss this topic further, or find out how Beyond Compliance can help you or your chambers with scope of services or client care documentation please contact us at hello@beyond-compliance.co.uk or call us on 0121 288 5227.

Michaela Hardwick