The unbundling of legal services is all the rage. Everyone’s talking about it, and some lawyers are doing it. However, creating and marketing new offerings is expensive. Undercapitalized law firms struggle financially to introduce new products and services. Thankfully, technology provides inexpensive opportunities for experimenting in this new arena.

The Possibilities

There are unlimited possibilities when it comes to deconstructing the components of traditional legal representation. Some unbundlers are providing document preparation. Others are providing advice for do-it-yourselfers. Some have built services offering online consultations and blank forms, and some are providing live or online boot camps for those in need of assistance.

The Limits

The only limits on unbundling are the creativity of the provider and sometimes the rules created by the regulatory authority in a particular jurisdiction.

Well, those aren’t the only limits. One other constraint limits the ability of a law practice to extend its offering by unbundling: there’s the small issue of MONEY.

Of course, money is a constraint for all businesses. Access to capital is a critical piece of making any new offering successful, and legal services offerings require substantial capital.

Most family law practices lack access to capital sufficient to finance a new offering. Most are operating on a shoestring and need their limited resources to maintain the existing business.

Experimenting with unbundled service and product offerings is challenging when cash is limited. It’s especially difficult when well-financed competitors, like LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer, arrive on the scene with tens of millions of dollars in venture capital from the world’s richest and most successful investment banking firms.

LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer, and others use their money to brand their offerings and have rapidly built trust with consumers. Trying to develop a brand and build trust on a limited budget is tough, if not impossible. Unfortunately, many small firms have already lost the battle to compete in the legal forms arena. Fortunately, there are other opportunities that the big players in the family law space haven’t seized yet.

How does a small firm with a big idea bring that idea to market when resources are scarce? How does that firm develop the technology required and then introduce the new approach to the market? What’s possible when the firm spends most of its monthly revenue to meet existing payroll, marketing, and overhead expenses?

Tools and approaches are available that give entrepreneurial lawyers the opportunity to test the unbundled offering without spending a small fortune. Keeping the budget under control is especially important when testing new offerings. It’s possible and even likely that many “great” ideas won’t appeal to customers. Most of the time, the only way to determine what appeals to the market is to present the offering and see how real customers react.

What if you don’t have an idea? Don’t worry: just start brainstorming. You already know what your clients need; you just need a new approach to giving it to them. Use WordStorm to brainstorm the next big idea. WordStorm is way more than a thesaurus: it’s an idea generation tool that really gets your mind flowing productively.

Build the plan before the product. Don’t jump right in and start building before you’ve developed a strategy. You don’t need a 30-page business plan, but you still need a plan. Lean Canvas is a simple, fast model for helping you develop the idea before you invest your time and money. Lean Canvas forces you to identify the consumer problem you’re solving, get specific about the solution, and explain what’s unique and valuable about your service.

Come up with a clever name and web address for your offering. Use Panabee, a free service, to come up with a name for your new service. Enter a few keywords, and Panabee starts spitting out available website addresses. A good name goes a long way toward turning an idea into reality.

Test your idea before you build anything. Use Typeform to get feedback from your current and former clients regarding your idea’s viability. See what they think using email surveys. Typeform offers free plans and paid plans (for more survey responses) for as little as $35 per month.

Talk to your target market once you’re ready to go. At some point, it’s smart to survey prospects who don’t have a relationship with your firm. Ask Your Target Market offers a panel of consumers you can consult as you validate your plan. The site charges less than a dollar per participant. If you get nothing but negative responses, it’s time to go back to the drawing board.

Build the front end, but not the back end. Don’t rush out and hire a developer or buy a virtual office software application. Take your good idea and use a tool like Carrd to build an inexpensive website for your offering. Build the piece of the product that customers will see, but don’t build the behind-the-scenes parts until you know whether it’s going to sell. For instance, if you’re offering form documents on the Web, build the sales site using a tool like Carrd (at $20 per year). Don’t worry about building the e-commerce piece: just use the simple forms Squarespace provides. Wait and see whether you get any orders before you commit money to create the other necessary parts of the product.

Go with a page rather than a site. Maybe you don’t even need a full front-end site built on Squarespace. Maybe you can get by with a single page using Unbounce. Unbounce makes it simple and easy to test one page against another as you flesh out the marketing approach for your unbundled practice. Unbounce provides easy-to-use tools and templates that allow you to build a page in minutes.

Brand your product on a budget. If you need a logo or other design elements to test your idea, buy them on the cheap. Run a competition on 99designs and let designers provide you with choices at bargain prices.

Test the marketing site with real users. It’s tough to get honest feedback from friends, family members, and employees. Put some strangers to work testing your site and get the feedback you need to tweak your approach. UserTesting.com charges $39 per participant for real people who provide detailed feedback about your application.

Collect payments without complexity. Taking payments can be shockingly difficult. Between navigating the payment interface, managing security, and arranging online merchant accounts, you can expend dozens of hours. Use PayPal to start and use its systems to integrate payment into your site or landing page. Some users aren’t PayPal fans, but the time you save will justify alienating a few users.

Talk to your website visitors while they’re visiting. There’s nothing more helpful than hearing objections and concerns from real consumers trying to solve the problem you’re addressing. Olark allows you to text chat with visitors to your site while they’re visiting. Find out what they like and what they don’t. The site offers plans starting at $15 per month, and setup involves cutting and pasting a single line of code into your website.

Get instant feedback while you sleep. You can’t live chat with every visitor to your site. Some refuse to talk, plus you won’t have the resources to monitor the site 24/7. Use Qualaroo for feedback from your visitors. This site offers free plans for low volume sites.

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Don’t forget about email. Email has been around forever and is frequently discounted as a marketing technique. That’s a mistake. Email is probably the most powerful marketing tactic available to most firms. MailChimp offers a free email marketing plan that allows you to stay in touch with your prospects and inform them of your offering’s benefits.

Watch your website visitors and monitor their behavior. Google Analytics allows real-time monitoring of your site visitors. You’ll know where they came from and what they’re doing on the site. Of course, you’ll get instant conversion data as your prospects move through your funnel. Google Analytics gives you valuable insights about your prospects, and it’s free.

Go raise the money you need to take on the world. Once you’re ready to take your offering to the world, the WSGR Term Sheet Generator will help you generate the documents you need to raise the venture funds you need to take on Rocket Lawyer and LegalZoom and build out the remainder of your product. Of course, you’ll have to deal with the nonlawyer law firm ownership issues in most jurisdictions. Until those rules change, we’ll be hamstrung in our efforts to compete with the nonlawyer offerings of others.

Experimenting is essential in these turbulent times. However, you can’t bet the business on a failed experiment. You need to find out what works and what doesn’t without breaking the bank and putting your existing practice out of business.