Divorce Lawyer: Billing for Soft Costs

It can be a tricky balance knowing what to do about your hourly billing rate and knowing also what to do about the initial retainer in order to cover court costs and the initial costs.  Determining what you will charge for a number of the soft costs can be even more complicated. Billing for soft costs can be important as they can really add up. If you decide not to bill for these, you will likely need to charge a higher hourly rate in order to ensure that your practice does not lose money. This article seeks to present a way to make this billing simpler, more streamlined, and easier not only for the divorce lawyer but also for his or her clients.

One of the complications of being a divorce lawyer is that there are a number of small and low intensity charges that are related to the costs of handling the case. The charges, however, vary depending on the individual case. In other words, it is not easily understandable at the beginning of the case what the charges that the attorney will accumulate for soft costs during the course of the lawsuit prior to beginning the case. This means that it is generally not possible to give a client and understanding of what their costs for this will be.

Another large reason for a divorce lawyer to want to offer an alternative means of billing for items such as photocopying, gasoline, car expenses, mailings, and any other soft costs is that it can be extremely time-consuming to have to track every expense and itemize it for the clients. Of course, this takes away from the attorney doing actual legal work and more on clerical duties. In other words, this is an inefficient method of making sure that office costs are paid for.

The solution that this article presents is to use a flat rate to charge clients for soft costs that arise during the course and scope of litigation. Generally, charging for such soft costs should be in the range of between $100 and $200. This is unless costs will be expected to be much higher than normal. Not everyone will use $100-$200 worth of soft costs. But, this allows for the divorce lawyer not to lose money when such costs exceed $200, and that attorney has simply billed $150 for the expenses.

By doing it this way, this means that the divorce lawyer can actually focus on actually doing legal work instead of doing secretarial work. This is even more helpful when the attorney is a small or solo practitioner and does not have the support staff to support a secretary in order to keep track of these types of expenses. However, there are copiers that will, for instance, keep track of this information for you. But, such items tend to be extremely pricey and expensive, and perhaps unaffordable for the practitioner who is seeking to keep his or her costs down.

New Orleans attorney Will Beaumont provided this article for informational purposes, not legal advice.