Long story short, I believe I have been grossly overcharged by my divorce lawyer. In essence he’s called me on multiple occasions under the pretense of needing to ask a quick question and proceeded to tell me about his kids and wife and tell stories etc. and then billed me for all that time.
Now I understand I’m the idiot who thought we were just shooting the shit and I probably should have asked up front if he was billing me for the whole time, but isn’t this somehow unethical?
Have you discussed it with him? Giving him your expectations of what the reasonable time charge should be? Have you considered that he may doing work for you when you are not on the phone with him?
Thank you
I imagine the telephone time is line itemed on the invoice.
The telephone time may have a minimum charge, like a quarter hour. If he really has to call for a 10 second question, there may not be an additional charge for the added schmoozing.
I was going to mention that as well. I believe the lawyer I worked for many years ago billed out in 15-minute increments for phone time.
This is likely the case. It’s one of the dirty secrets of the legal profession. The firms I used to work for would have minimum time charges for a lot of things. Sometimes, it was something as simple as the fact that the billing was done in tenths of an hour (six minutes), and I could actually accomplish two or three things in that same six minutes, resulting in two or three charges of time. Sometimes it was because there was a minimum charge based upon average time to accomplish a task at a minimum (say, for example, going to a hearing), and during that time I could accomplish multiple billed tasks each being billed in addition to the minimum for the overall task ongoing at the time.
I hated time slips. I thought it was an entirely dishonest practice as done by most of my industry (I worked for firms representing employers and insurers in workers’ compensation cases in California). I often would jigger my time slips to avoid charging for things I had actually done, in order to minimize the effect of the billing system. I’m quite happy such things aren’t necessary as a teacher. 