MANAGING AND MINIMIZING YOUR LEGAL FEES
At Lynch, Osborne, Gilmore & Durst it is our desire to provide you with the highest possible quality of legal services at a reasonable cost.
There are several things which you can do to assist us in controlling your legal fees.
STRIVE TO LIMIT THE USE OF YOUR ATTORNEY̓S TIME TO LEGAL ISSUES
In family law matters, it is inevitable that our advice and services to clients will extend beyond pure legal issue, and will involve financial, child related and even behavioral issues. However, our skills, training and experience are as lawyers and not as financial planners, child psychologists or counselors. Very often clients will want to discuss issues with us which can be discussed much less expensively and with a person of much higher expertise and experience, such as a financial planner or counselor. If you have questions relating to such issues we would be happy to recommend another professional to you, but to have extensive discussions of them with us is unnecessarily expensive and does not give you the best professional advise since they are often beyond our areas of expertise.
ALLOW US TO DELEGATE THE WORK YOUR CASE TO STAFF MEMBER
PARAPROFESSIONAL OR ASSOCIATE ATTORNEYS
Very often components of the work which we are doing for you can be delegated to other staff members. The delegation of the work to staff members will result in a substantial savings to you in legal fees. Through our experience we know which cases can be delegated without a diminution in the quality of the service which you will receive. If you will trust us to delegate some of the work and cooperate with our staff members, you will see a substantial savings in your legal fees. On the other hand, some clients always want to “see the doctor and not the nurse”, if that is your preference, we will accommodate you but your are very often utilizing the attorneys time which is not necessary and which will be billed at a much higher rate then a staff person or associate attorney.
ORGANIZE AND LIMIT PHONE CALLS
Organize and limit to your telephone calls for persons who have not worked with attorneys on prior matters, it sometimes comes as shock to learn that they will be billed for each telephone conversation. The billing rate is usually in excess of the actual time spent on the call. The reason why the billed time may exceed the actual time spent on the telephone call is because we are often required to review the file prior to the call, prepare a memo of the call for the file or otherwise take some action subsequent to the call.
ASSIST US IN GATHERING AND PREPARING DATA
There will be a great deal of financial information, records, employment verification and similar materials which we will need from you. Some clients are very cooperative in obtaining and organizing the materials which they give to us. Other clients do not want to be bother or give us materials in a “shopping bag” leaving us the task of sorting and indexing all of the material. We are certainly willing to provide that assistance and service to you, but it is not an effective or economical use of legal time and corresponding your legal fees, if you will work on your own and/or with our paralegals to gather and organize the financial information for presentation to the responsible attorney, the review and analysis time by the attorney will be reduced and correspondingly your fees will be minimized.
THINK BEFORE YOU ACT OR REACT
In many cases a significant amount of legal time is utilized addressing or responding to an impulsive, angry or illconceived action or reaction by the client. It is inevitable that you will have emotional reaction to various things which may occur in the process of your divorce. However, we urge you to think before you act and do not create confrontational situations which may require expensive legal intervention. Examples of such conduct range from an act of domestic violence committed in anger or frustration, failure to comply with court orders or agreements of support and alimony because of anger over an unrelated issue, failure to return or pick up the children at a regularly visitation time, etc. You can very quickly save several hundred if not several thousand dollars in legal expenses responding to such hasty or illconceived act.
REVIEW TOUR BILLS AS THEY ARE RECEIVED
We will, without exception, bill you on a monthly basis for the work which has been performed in the preceding month. Each attorney personally reviews his or her own billing and we take extreme caution to avoid or correct any errors which may occur on the billing. However, errors do occur. Our desire is for you to review and contact us and correct any questions or errors with regard to each months billing before bills are sent out. By doing so any charges which are misdirected to your account can be corrected and at the conclusion of the case there will be no dispute or question concerning the billings
PAY YOUR BILLS PROMPTLY
The fee agreement which you have entered into with us imposes a service charge on unpaid billings. The service charges significantly increase your total billing. To avoid those additional charges pay your bills promptly and in accordance with the fee agreement.
If you have any questions concerning the fee agreement which you have entered into with us or any billing which you have received from us, please do not hesitate to contact us. In addition to being persons who charged for our services, we are, also customers or consumers of services. We to have received bills from vender or professionals and know difficulties and hard feelings which can result when it is perceived that there is an error in the billing and/or it is felt that the billing is excessive. We want to do everything within our power and control.
We try very hard to make ourselves accessible to the clients and to return every telephone call on the day on which it is received. We have voice mail systems on which you can leave messages for us. We often retrieve our calls from the voice mail when we are out of the office in court, during the evenings or even over the weekends and will return your calls if possible. Therefore, we do not want to discourage you from maintaining communication with us.
