Why a 500 zł matter cannot find a lawyer – on the closed service standard

Many clients ask themselves the title question, usually with growing irritation, after a third refusal from a law firm. The answer they then formulate for themselves is usually: greed. Well, no. The true answer is far less striking and far more instructive – and in my view it is time to lay it out without beating around the bush.

The economics of an open engagement

A typical engagement for a lawyer is an open one: “please handle my case”. It carries risk and a burden in the form of a considerable number of duties arising from the rules of practising as an advocate or attorney-at-law – from conflict of interest, through information duties, to documentation and archiving.

On top of that comes the aspect least mentioned in calculations and weighing the most: the human aspect. Every client is a person. They have their individual emotions, expectations, endurance threshold, different financial resources, a different approach to the case, to the advocate and to settlement rules. Moreover, all of this changes substantially as an open case unfolds – a client calm in March can be a desperate client in October, and rightly so, because in the meantime their life goes on.

As a result, in a 500 zł matter and in a 50,000 zł matter the number of phone calls, formal duties and client emotions can turn out to be exactly the same. A lawyer who does not take that case is therefore not greedy – they are making a professional calculation of resources, above all their own time, against possible revenue. It is an unpleasant calculation, but a rational one.

The consequence: a gap in access to legal help

The consequence is a wide zone of matters where legal help is needed but economically out of reach. Not because there are no lawyers. Because there is no service format matched to the scale of the problem.

Let us, however, look at this dilemma from another angle. In many such matters clients could get the help they need if the engagement could be condensed into a specific action – defined, priced up front, with communication running through one predictable channel. That is what we call the closed standard of legal service.

What the closed standard consists of

A closed service is one where four things are defined up front:

1. the scope – what exactly will be done (and, just as important, what will not);
2. the price – a single one, known before the start, with no negotiations and no hourly billing;
3. the date – when the action will be performed and when the client receives the result;
4. the communication channel – structured, within the platform, instead of a series of calls and meetings.

Instead of a power of attorney to conduct a case for years – a power of attorney to perform a specific procedural action. Instead of an open relationship with an unpredictable course – a transaction with known parameters.

What each side gains

The client receives the legal service they need for reasonable money and – often just as valuable – by a known date. They are not buying “legal care” of undefined scope but a specific result.

The lawyer receives a specific, closed engagement, settled immediately, with no need for phone calls, meetings, explanations or price negotiations. And that makes a case that was not worth taking before become worth taking – not because the rate went up, but because the cost of handling it went down.

Note the paradox: standardisation, which part of the profession perceives as a threat to the individual character of legal service, in fact widens access to that service. It does not replace a retainer in a complex case – no reasonable person proposes running a commercial trial “as a package”. It fills the gap where today nothing happens at all.

From substitution to a service for the client

We are testing this same mechanism today on the B2B market, with court substitutions between lawyers – because there the parameters of the action are easiest to define and both sides speak the same professional language. Ultimately, though, the same standard can serve the relationship with the end client: from recognising the need, through closing it into a described service at a set rate, to settlement.

Summary

Lower-value matters fail to find a lawyer not because of the bar's greed, but because of a service format that is simply too heavy for them. In my view the answer is not appeals to lower rates – that is a road to nowhere – but designing a lighter format: an action defined, priced and settled in a single flow.

Wokanda.net is building that format, starting with substitutions between law firms.

See what a closed engagement looks like in practice →