Divorce Attorney Thoughts on a “True Retainer”

Figuring out how you will bill for your legal services as a divorce attorney can be quite challenging. One the one hand you do not want to bill too much and lose clients that would have been profitable. By contrast, accepting too little can result in you losing money, especially if the court forces you to remain regardless of whether you are getting paid. In the end, figuring out how you bill may be best figured out by evaluating what type of clients that you have and what clients you are looking to have.

One of the first considerations that you may have to determine is whether you will bill a flat rate or by the hour. (Your local/state rules may prohibit a divorce attorney from billing contingency fees, though there certainly can be exceptions to this.) A big problem for pursuing a flat rate is that it could be impossible to tell how expensive and/or long the litigation will last; this means that you could charge too much or too little depending on how the case unfolds. Against this, your clients may push you to pin down exactly how much everything will cost, and you may find that they are eager to be offered a flat rate.

A divorce attorney will more often bill hourly. Here, though, you will want to make sure that you are offering you legal services at a rate that you feel comfortable with and that your clients and prospective clients also are fine with. Instead of having a fixed price from the beginning, you may find it possible, after some experience in the practice of law, to have a fairly good estimate of how many hours something might take and be able to put forth an educated guess of what the scope of the representation might end up being.

A combination of these two practices could be thought of as a “true retainer,” which can be more or less a deposit given to a lawyer that is non-refundable but gives the lawyer and the client the ability to store the money such that the client keeps the divorce attorney retained in the event of future litigation. Sometimes a true retainer is used by a law firm as the initial retainer, and then if this is used up, the firm will begin billing by the hour.

One perhaps fatal drawback in taking this approach is that it could lead to a very unhappy client. For example, if a client pays you this money, then later decides that, for whatever reason, no longer wishes to have you be their lawyer, this client could possibly be even more upset when they remember that what they deposited is non-refundable. When running a law firm, word of mouth can be crucial. For this reason, you may find that it is simply not worth it to have a true retainer.

The above material is intended for information purposes only. It is not intended as professional legal advice and should not be construed as such. Will Beaumont practices law in New Orleans, LA, and Metairie, LA.