Legal Fees

WHAT IS "VALUE BILLING" FOR LEGAL FEES?

We understand that lawyers are useless if no one can afford them. We get that retaining legal expertise can require resources that may be tight. We hear from our clients that fee predictability and assessment of legal fee value is important. We focus on Value Billing, not endless billable hours which encourage inefficiency. The goal of Value Billing is to achieve an optimal result for every client, at an affordable price that is consistent with the amount of real effort required to achieve that result.

Instead of adopting crazy hourly rates and then offering “discounts” so that in reality no one is actually paying the full rate, but it’s hard to know what the rate really is if the discounts become mysterious, we publicly post all our hourly rates. We aim to keep all those rates competitive.

Likewise, instead of billing crazy amounts of hours on files such that the hourly rates become largely meaningless as it is the number of hours spent rather than the rate per hour which can drives up costs, we carefully control hours and minutes billed such that the time spent is always the reasonable amount of time in which high quality legal work can be completed for each client.

We don’t cut corners. Good legal services - like good services of any type - take time. But you can be assured that you will always be receiving an appropriate amount of legal effort applied to your matter.

We offer block fixed fees whenever possible to give clients budget predictability, and to permit them to weigh whether using a lawyer is worth it as compared to the importance of a matter.

We welcome client enquiries about projected legal costs for any matter, and will discuss fees with you during or soon after your first without obligation contact with the firm. We strive to take the mystery out of fees by publicly positing numbers so as to provide value & transparent billing to all prospective clients.

COMPLIMENTARY INITIAL EVALUATION

While many firms offer paid “consultations,” we find that unfortunately the long factual histories and legal complexities of many matters don’t lend themselves to short simple answers such as could be produced in a brief consultation. Instead, we offer you a complimentary evaluation of your case to determine if we are able to help you with it, and how much that might cost.

Thus you’re welcome to contact us without fear that you’ll be billed from the moment of that first contact. We may ask you for all your court documents if there are any, or a written summary of your situation. From that, we’ll attempt to determine if and how we might be able to advance your interests, and the resources required to do so.

Please note that you won’t be receiving formal legal “advice” as part of the evaluation, as we can only provide advice to our clients who have formally retained us. But the results of the evaluation would hopefully permit you to determine if you would like to retain us, or if you should continue to seek out other counsel.

For highly complex legal issues requiring extensive legal analysis and research, we may suggest that your best value would be to retain us for a formal written legal opinion, which would provide us sufficient time to give you a detailed answer and proposed solutions to your legal problem.