FEES
A few decades ago, the Supreme Court decided advertising would bring down the cost of legal services and give potential clients better information for choosing a lawyer. Instead, what we have is lawyers climbing over each other, claiming to be both the best and the cheapest.
My earliest contact with this fiasco was like everyone else's, but with a twist. When I graduated, I started my own practice, determined to learn the practical side from the ground up. A friend I graduated with went to work for the sincere-looking guy who was all over TV at the time.
You might remember this guy telling you how the profession had priced itself out of reach of most people and promising to remedy this. I was pretty impressed myself for a while. Then I had lunch with my friend one day, and it was an eye-opener.
My friend was getting about $30,000 and was expected to bring in no less than $6,000 a month in new fees. And if he scraped along at that level, he could expect to be out of a job within a year. And the fees they were charging were far higher than the fees anyone else I knew charged.
And that is the basic problem with lawyer advertising. You see the impressive, sincere commercial and listen to the jingle. You hear that you are a generic client with a generic case and that you deserve to pay a generic fee. So far, so good, but then things always change.
You get treated like a generic client and then it turns out you aren't generic, so you get surcharged and extra-charged. A few months or years later, you find out they didn't do a good job and they charged you more because they could because you were part of a huge pool of clients.
And so, it seems like somebody always has a new story about how they got gypped or how the lawyer dropped the case when it was more work than expected or when the judge said something mean. I heard the worst such story a few months ago and I have heard these stories for years.
A lawyer yelled at his client because the case was lost and it was his first loss, a year out of law school. And when he was done yelling, he filed an unnecessary motion for leave to withdraw, after judgment, after the case was over, including a statement that he did not think his client honest.
Frankly, I do not know what goes on in some of my fellow lawyers' heads and I don't want to know. I only know what goes on here. What goes on here is that I am honest and straight with my clients. If that sounds odd, ask my other clients.
Honest does not allow quoting fees in the blind. I don't throw in extra charges that don't match what I have quoted, so I don't quote fees until I know what a case is about because until then, I don't know how much work will be involved.
A will for a parent of minor children is much different from one for a person with none. Incorporating an ongoing business is far different from incorporating a start-up. A strong case against someone with assets is far different from a weak case against a pauper.
I can't quote in the blind, but I can share the principles I follow in setting fees. First, in order to honor my obligations to family and others, I must strictly limit my work to clients who hire me; otherwise, I could not give the 100% effort my clients have come to expect.
We can agree to flat or fixed fees where the time and effort required are predictable. Where appropriate and ethical, we can agree to a contingent fee. Hourly fees work best for more complex, open-ended work or where contingent fees are barred by ethics rules.
I balance fair and affordable with maintaining my ability to focus on the job. I pass along the full advantage of my experience and efficiency, and most clients tell me when their cases are over that my services were less expensive than expected.
But I will not quote over the phone or otherwise in the blind. And I won't tell you that one client is like another or that one case is like another just to get you to sign up and hand over a down payment that you believe is payment in full. If that is what you want, those ads are all over the TV.