Understanding Attorney’s Fees

Reduced Rates & Limited-Scope Representation

I charge attorney’s fees that are commensurate with my experience, credentials, and the prevailing rates of attorneys of similar stature in the major metropolitan areas that I serve. While lawyers regularly handling pro bono cases or distinctly serving low income clients are best suited for clients of modest means, for clients with a moderate income I may offer reduced hourly rates at my discretion and/ or Limited Scope Representation as a dynamic option to efficiently use client funds. I would be glad to discuss such options with you during an Initial Consultation. I charge for extended Consultations because you’ll actually be discussing the details of your case with me rather than with a law clerk, paralegal, or junior associate like at so many law firms.

I’m The Lawyer Representing My Clients

When you hire me, you can be certain that I’m the lawyer who will actually be working on your case rather than farming your matter out to randomly chosen lawyers and junior associates, as is the case with so many law firms, legal plan providers, legal services apps on smartphones, and legal insurance programs. Clients who hire me do so because of my credentials, experience, ethics, and value. Unlike at so many law firms with multiple tiers of attorneys and underlings working on client cases and all of them charging you separate hourly fees to boost the invoice they’ll hand you, I provide a different and better kind of representation with personalized and transparent legal services and billing to match. I regularly discuss my work progress with clients, update them on the issues, and keep them apprised of the fees related to my work. I don’t have a staff of underlings to whom I farm out cases. Quite the contrary, I am the sole professional attorney working on my clients’ cases, and that’s the way it should be. You’ve hired me, and that’s exactly what you deserve – the best, nothing less.

Beware of Flat Fee Plans that Might Limit Attorney Work on Your Case

Some attorneys offer Flat Fee payments for services, often seemingly attorneys with questionable legal skills or attorney cadres working for legal insurance plans or legal service programs that commodify the profession of the law as if it’s part of the app-based gig-economy, implicitly promising legal solutions as if they’re “just a click away”. Be wary of such plans, as they might take ill advantage of low-income clients or small business owners who just don’t understand how legal transactions and litigation actually work.

It’s not a product, it’s a service. Professional attorney work is based on unknowable variables. A lawyer cannot know up front how complicated your case may become, the various avenues down which the lawsuit may progress, and how bitterly the litigants (i.e., you and the opposition) will fight each other. This is why attorney work requires the highest quality professionals trained in the best law schools and with work experience that sharpens their minds and abilities.

My work as an attorney requires the skill and forethought to draft high quality, customized, and precise legal documents focused on opening avenues and preventing problems down-the-road as much as possible. In litigation, my work necessitates that I: file motions and responses with aggression and alacrity; remain in frequent contact with my clients; properly read the personalities and biases of the opposition, witnesses, and judges; and know when to fight hard, sell softly, and negotiate wisely. When it comes time to hire a lawyer, this is what you must look for: a professional, a personality, and your hero in battle. This necessary customized level of attention may very well be far from what you receive when you rely on the anonymous round-table of underlings that would work on your case in a multi-tiered law firm, legal insurance plan, or legal services program. And that can be a tremendous problem and disadvantage. When I see such lawyers representing the opposition, I feel bad for the opposing parties.

Therefore I generally advise caution when considering Flat Fee payment arrangements as some lawyers seem to minimize the amount of work that they perform for clients under such arrangements: a practice which I firmly believe is unethical and can devastate a client’s case. From experience, I’ve seen how attorneys charging Flat Fees for their work represent their clients: cutting corners, not filing necessary motions, not answering their client’s calls, drafting boilerplate documents that are about as valuable as the stuff you can buy and download off the internet, and ultimately costing their clients more trouble and expense by making ridiculous errors beneath the honor of the profession itself. Eventually, such clients come to me with horror stories about prior attorneys they’ve had, and it becomes my job to fix the mistakes made by such lawyers.

In our adversarial legal system, all clients merit the most aggressive, intense, and ethical level of attorney representation. Sometimes that may be more expensive, but clients deserve the best.

For discerning clients, I stand prepared.