Legal Costs

One of the most sensitive or concerning issues that people have when they wish to engage a lawyer to represent them, is the matter of legal costs or legal fees. This is a justified concern as most people engage a law firm to act for them when they find themselves in a position of vulnerability or distress, and where they may have to outlay some money for legal fees which they had previously not anticipated or budgeted.

Some Lawyers have gained an unfortunate reputation for being overpriced and expensive. Naturally engaging a law firm to act for you will cost money, however what you should know is that many of the stories that you hear about exorbitant legal costs are very much avoidable.

We understand that stories of people being charged extraordinarily large amounts of money in relation to their legal costs can be off-putting, especially in cases where an outcome has been disappointing or where they have not been fully informed of the potential legal costs involved from the outset of the matter.

We aim to avoid this situation by providing you with an upfront fixed fee, where possible. Obviously unforeseen issues can arise which may require us to perform additional work, and therefore review our fees, however we will always provide you with open and honest communication about such additional costs, as soon as we become aware of them, and well before they are incurred.

In the provision of our services, we offer several different legal cost billing methods. The billing method that we plan to offer to you will always be discussed and agreed with you from the outset of your matter.

Fixed Fee Billing System

For many of our matters, we prefer to offer a fixed fee billing system. This means that we provide our clients with a one-off fee payable, which covers all work completed from our initial meeting through to completion of your matter.

We favour a fixed fee billing system on most of our criminal and traffic matters where a plea of guilty has been entered. We will also consider using a fixed fee billing system on criminal and traffic matters that are defended, however this will all depend on the complexity and length of time that it will take to run the case, based on our extensive experience in this matters.

We also favour a fixed fee billing system for drafting commercial law documents where the terms are agreed by the parties, and in our wills and estates practice.

Where we elect to offer you a fixed fee arrangement, you will be advised of the total fee from the outset of your matter. If you are satisfied with the fixed fee amount that we quote to you, we will then prepare a costs and disclosure agreement setting out the terms and conditions of the client/lawyer relationship. We will also provide you with an invoice reflecting the fixed fee amount that we have quoted to you in order to complete your matter.

In some cases, we will require partial payment at the beginning of the matter, or at different stages throughout the carriage of your legal matter. However, in most cases we will simply require full and final payment of the fixed fee amount prior to the completion of your legal matter. In practice, this often means prior to your final court date or prior to you being provided with your commercial legal documents.

In addition to any fixed professional fees quoted to you, you will also be required to pay for any disbursements that are incurred throughout the running of the matter and paid by us on your behalf. This might include fees for filing legal documents in court, search fees or engaging a barrister for highly complex legal hearings. You will however be made aware from the outset of your matter of any likely disbursements that are expected to be incurred in your matter.

Staged Fee Billing System

We also offer some of our clients a staged fee billing system. This is often our preferred method of billing on matters where a variety of different steps need to be taken to complete the matter. But more importantly we like to use a staged fee billing system where the direction of a legal case could take many twists and turns throughout the running of the matter.

From the outset, we will anticipate all the potential steps that could possibly occur throughout the running of the matter and provide you with an estimate of how much it will cost you to reach each particular stage in your matter.

Often in highly complex litigation matters or criminal matters, unexpected issues can arise. We do our very best to anticipate these issues, however if unexpected issues do arise then we will sit down with you and advise you of the costs that are going to be involved at each stage.

Often in running complex legal matters, it can be almost impossible to anticipate every twist and turn that will occur. However, our policy is to advise you as soon as practically possible of any unexpected issues and costs that will be incurred throughout the course of the matter.

Hourly Rate Billing System

For large and complex legal proceedings, we generally engage an hourly rate billing system. With this method of billing, we advise you from the outset as to what costs our firm will charge you on an hourly basis for work performed on your matter. To be more specific, when we use this hourly rate billing method, we will charge you on a 6 minute incremental basis.

If we arrange to charge you using the hourly rate billing method, we will always provide you with a comprehensive and complete itemised account of all of the time spent on your matter.

Our firm policy is to minimise any unnecessary costs to our client and always provide you with full and frank disclosure of our legal fees and expected disbursements.

We welcome you to contact us with any questions about our billing methods and your legal fees at any time during the course of your matter.