Same here.
I do that too. I might say something like, “If you hire me to do it, all I am going to do is X, Y, and Z, which you could easily do yourself without having to pay an attorney.”
I also let people know when the amount in controversy in a dispute is likely to be gobbled up by attorney fees.
For example, if you are a plaintiff and you want to hire me to litigate an $8,000 dispute, you might be better off reducing your dispute to small claims court ($7,500) and handling it yourself. If you are a defendant and you are defending a $1,000 claim in superior court, you might be better off fighting it yourself or just paying the claim instead of fighting it with an attorney. Otherwise, you might end up paying me $X just to fight over $X.
If it’s a simple estate, that’s about an hour of billable time. During that hour (really within the first half an hour) the lawyer ought to be able to tell if the statutory form will do the job. Some lawyers have a paralegal give the client a questionnaire and then review that with the client. If you’ve done that, you’ll know even sooner. If it’s a complicated estate, the statutory forms won’t work, so there’s really no issue.
I would hope an estate planning lawyer would already be familiar with the statutory form wills in his jurisdiction. They’re typically part of the probate code, which is part of the law in which the estate planning lawyer specializes.
Me too.
In my practice my flat rate for a simple will is a hair less than my hourly rate. I don’t want to lose money on wills, but at the same time I want to build goodwill.
People talk to each other, so word gets around as to who does good work for a fair dollar, and who does not. If I do a will for a person, and that person is satisfied, then there is a significant chance of future estate business when a friend or relative of that person dies, as well as any number of different types of legal referrals. Cultivating a good client base starts with always giving good value for the money.
I don’t think that there is anything wrong with a lawyer charging a flat rate for a simple will that is far higher than that lawyer’s hourly rate, for there is nothing to stop a person from calling about for prices, but I do think that it is bad business in the long term.
That seems very reasonable.
Um, well, sorry, I suppose I have to amend “many” to “not all”. :smack: Things have changed lately. However, as I pointed out, California still hasn’t, and that’s where the OP lives. 
Yup. The rules are less clear there. And I don’t have time to hunt for California ethics opinions just now.
It seems to me that lawyers have a fundamental conflict of interest: on the one hand, the duty to perform a service in an expeditious (and cost-effective manner), and the desire to increase billable hours.
Perhaps, the solution is to hire another lawyer (to keep tabs on the first)? Counsel for counsel?Nice ring to that…
Yeah, I’ve heard stories about one law partner who would intentionally sabotage settlement negotiations in an effort to keep a case going through (billable) litigation, then spin the story to the client so the opposing party looks like the bad guy.
Allegations of a lawyer (now Senator) grossly overbilling a religious order sworn to poverty (for example, billing 30.3 hours in one day at $450 per hour): http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2008/01/21/jaffer-investigation.html?ref=rss
Oh yeah, that reminds me of another law partner I heard about who allegedly billed more than 24 hours in a day (just don’t bill all those hours to the same client, you see).
There was yet another who essentially encouraged associate attorneys to get “stuck in traffic” when driving to distant courthouses instead of simply scheduling telephonic court appearances.
For the edification of my fellow Dopers, I have determined what it is I was actually driving at with all this noise. It is the common law that one has a “duty to mitigate damages”. In other words, the law recognizes that if you see someone tearing your house apart, you have a duty to ask them to stop, at the very least.
I was only making it about the lawyer because if the person involved is too clueless to do it, once they hire a lawyer, the lawyer should know to.
Where I am (Ontario), yes, there is generally a duty to mitigate damages, and if a lawyer did not advise his plaintiff client of the client’s duty, the lawyer would be negligent.
To continue . . .
Note that this does not always apply in all situations, and is not necessarily the same across jurisdictions. Google about on “mitigate damages common law tort” and “mitigate damages common law contract” for some examples of when there is such a duty and when there is not.
I haven’t seen any lawyers who bill for a single such trivial change, but in my experience it’s very common for lawyers to be excessively focused on such trivial issues, which does increase bills overall for clients and increase work for subordinates at the law firm.
“Hmmm … I don’t like the way bold and underscore looks here. Change it all to italics. And can you go through the document to make sure that the month and the day [as in Jan. 24] aren’t split across lines anywhere?”
Ultimately, no ruling is going to turn on such issues, and judges and courts really couldn’t give a damn, but lawyers have their subordinates spend hundreds of hours of work on such trivialities. There might be a big dose of ego and self-importance involved here, in addition to any bill-padding that might be going on.
In general, most lawyers are not going to just go ahead and do work that they know their clients will not be able to pay for.
I don’t know about elsewhere, but here in Ontario, if a person wishes to contest a lawyer’s bill, that person can have the bill assessed by a government assessment officer, who will have the lawyer explain every minute of the bill. If an explanation is not satisfactory, then the item gets knocked off the bill.
Not so much here in the U.S. The bar associations in some jurisdictions offer fee arbitration programs. Otherwise, the standard method usually includes:
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Informal resolution between lawyer and client. For example, a law firm recently billed my company (I’m in-house counsel, so I deal with a lot of outside lawyers) over $5,000 for a land contract forfeiture in Ohio. I sent the billing partner an email saying, “huh?” The bill got high because they assigned a brand new lawyer to the case (in order to keep fees down, theoretically) and let him figure it out for himself. He screwed it up; a lot. I made clear that it was fine for the firm to train new associates on routine matters like land contract forfeitures, but that we weren’t about to pay for the guy to fix his own mistakes. He finally agreed to accept whatever we thought was fair (I sent him a check for about half the billed amount).
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Grievances. Ethics rules prohibit excessive fees. If the client thinks he’s been overbilled, he can complain the ethics police.
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Court. You see this two ways. Third parties may complain about excessive fees if they are ordered to pay attorneys’ fees. I’ve worked on a few of these cases. In one, our client was seeking about $5M in fees in an insurance bad faith case. In another, a client had lost at trial and the court annexed arbitration program awarded fees against a party who rejects an award from the program unless that party improves on the award at trial. The other party was seeking around $200K.
Clients also refuse to pay fees that they find unreasonable. When that happens, the lawyer might sue the client (although it gets tricky because of malptractice counterclaims).
That would be the fellow who is threatening to sue me for $15 million, because I successfully defended myself when he sued me and his lawyer and his previous lawyer and another lawyer for a little over $1 million each. The $1 million action was because he didn’t want to pay his own lawyer’s bill in an action in which I successfully represented his previous lawyer whom he was sueing. He sued his previous lawyer whom I represented because he didn’t want to pay a 12 year old judgment against him by that lawyer. That judgement was for that lawyer’s bill for successfully defending in a bad debt matter.
The last time we were in court, a police officer closely escorted him – he’s a big guy who gets rambunctious, loudly tells judges what he thinks of them, and likes to play with large saws at home. A couple of weeks ago I received a note from the court registrar’s office saying that in the future they will not handle his payments toward my judgment, and I heard through the grapevine that he has now also threatened to sue one of the court clerks (he has already lodged various complaints against a flock of lawyers and judges).
He’s now been before an assessment officer, the court registrar, three small claims judges, a Superior Court judge, five Divisional court judges (with yet another Divisional Court appearance pending), and three Court of Appeal judges. All because he was not satisfied with his lawyer’ bills, and those lawyers sued him.
I’m beginning to get the impression that he does not like our profession. 
Strikes me as just the type who will *still * call you for legal help next time he gets sued, and be outraged when you demand a $10M retainer. 
Funny you should mention that. One of his siblings tried to hire me a few weeks ago.
That was about the same time a previous client with a five figure bad debt to me called up wanting me to do more work for her, and was extremely upset when I declined.
The calls left me shaking my head.