Pay As You Go

We will provide a Legal Services Agreement to you for your consideration before we do any work for you charged at an hourly rate

Lawyers must disclose how they charge and give an estimate of the likely costs for the work before they do the work. Before we start doing work for your, we will provide you with an Engagement Letter and a Legal Services Agreement that thoroughly explains how we charge and gives an estimate of how much we think your fees will be.

How to minimise your legal fees

This is likely to be the first time you have had to engage a lawyer so it may be difficult to know what you can do to minimise your legal fees. Here are some things you can do to help keep your fees to a minimum:

Understand time costing

Lawyers and Accountants (and any other professionals using time-costing) record the work it takes to do a task on your file in 6-minute units (ie. Each hour consists of 10 lots of 6-minute units). Generally, a time-costing agreement will provide that if a task takes less than 6 minutes to complete, your Lawyer is still entitled to charge the full 6 minutes. Also, the digital timesheets that are used to enter a description of the work and the time it took usually don’t allow entries of less than 6 minutes.

Avoid contacting your Family Lawyer multiples times per day unless absolutely necessary

Each time your Lawyer receives an email/call from you, they will record the time it takes for them to answer the call or to respond to your email. This may mean that you are charged for 6 minutes of work each time you make a brief phone call to your Lawyer and this quickly adds up. It is much more time-efficient (and cost-effective) if you put all your comments or concerns into one email or book a brief phone appointment, so everything can be dealt with at one time, rather than in lots of little contacts.