>schedule of attorney fees

Schedule of Attorney Fees

The costs and expenses of litigation and other proceedings cause perhaps as much anxiety for clients as anything else does. Costs and expenses of litigation can generally be broken down into three main categories: 1) court fees, 2) attorney fees, 3) expenses incident to proceedings.

Court Fees

The court fees are fixed and fairly consistent. The cost of court fees is based on the number of filings in each case. The initial filing fee is usually the most expensive filing fee, and then motion and judgment filings tend to be significantly cheaper. However, while a case will regularly only require one initial filing, each case can require multiple motions, for example. Court fees tend to be one of the more predictable and manageable costs of litigation.

Attorney Fees

Except in pro bono cases, every civil litigation client should expect to pay his or her own attorney's fees. Fees can be awarded to one party or the other under certain circumstances, but neither party should expect to be awarded fees (or costs, for that matter).

There are three components of attorney fees.

Hourly Fee

My standard hourly rates are as follows:

Description of Service	Hourly Rate
Office time: Including drafting, research, depositions, communications, etc.	$125.00
Court time: Including trials, hearings, arbitrations, etc.	$165.00
Travel time: In excess of 30 minutes.	$50.00
Appeals: All work.	$200.00
Mediations:	$115.00
Law clerk:	$95.00
Legal assistant:	$75.00

Retainer Agreement

The retainer is like a deposit against future services, from which your fees will be deducted first. From time to time, and as your deposit runs out, you may be required to refresh the retainer account.

My standard retainer is $3,500.00 for any proceeding where a flat fee is not prearranged.

Any money that remains in the retainer account after the proceedings have concluded is refunded to the client shortly after the case is ended.

Flat Fees

Certain cases are amendable to flat fee arrangements. A benefit of the flat fee arrangement is that the client can be certain of the expense from the beginning. Not all types of cases are eligible for flat fee arrangements, but we can certainly discuss whether your case is.

Uncontested divorce. Current flat fee: $780.00 — Because of the usually straightforward nature of the uncontested divorce, I am willing to charge a flat rate for my services. Not all uncontested divorces are identical, so yours may be more or less difficult than the average. However, I am able to charge a flat rate because the more difficult and less difficult cases average out in the long term. Your benefit is in knowing up front how much my fee will be. If you think that your uncontested divorce may be easier than the usual, then we can discuss the possibility of an hourly arrangement, but this runs the risk of costing you more (relative to the flat fee) if the work takes more than a few hours.

Other Costs & Expenses

The final part of the cost of litigation comes from the expenses that are incidental to trying cases. These costs can include court reporter fees, travel expenses, appraiser or broker fees, expert witness fees, or any of a wide variety of expenses that are too numerous to cover exhaustively here. The incidental expenses can cost anywhere from a few hundred dollars to many thousands of dollars. These costs are in a sense both easy to predict and difficult to predict. If you and your spouse jointly own a home, then you probably will need to have it appraised, for example. If you have little property and no children, then your costs will probably be rather low. Each case is different.