Lawyers are hearing more these days about the unbundling of legal services. Essentially, unbundling means that a lawyer agrees to handle only a small part of a particular legal matter (e.g., drafting a brief) while the client handles the rest (e.g., appearing in court). From the consumer's perspective, unbundling helps to reduce the cost of legal services, but the practice raises some tricky ethical issues.
This article from the National Law Journal does a nice job of summarizing some of the issues and the recent trend in favor of allowing unbundling: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1167818525221 Given the enormous cost of legal services and the number of people who cannot afford to hire an attorney, this trend sounds like a very positive one. If anyone has links to some recent scholarship on unbundling, I'm happy to post links here.