During our first consultation, we will take the opportunity to learn more about you and your matter while exploring outcome you hope to achieve. We do not believe in charging prospective clients for the time it takes to introduce themselves and share their matter with us, which is why our initial consultation is complementary.
Once we have obtained your instructions and if you would like to formally engage us for our services, we will prepare a Client Service Agreement outlining the terms of our engagement your acceptance, prior to commencing work.
Our Client Service Agreement specifies how we will charge you for the services you instruct us on. We are committed towards ensuring complete transparency and flexibility across our billing practices; which is why we offer our clients a variety of different payment structures from which to engage us:
Where possible, we prefer entering into a fixed fee engagement with our clients for the entire scope of the engagement. Unless otherwise qualified within our Client Service Agreement, we will not charge you more than the fixed fee provided for in our engagement schedule.
Engaging us on retainer is a recommended for clients who have a specific legal budget in mind over a sustained period of time. We will typically allocate time towards embedding our team into your business; identify (in detail) what matters require our advice (if any); as well as specifying the priority and timeframes for attending to such matters. In doing so, we will provide you with a total estimate as to costs for the attendances and settle on a payment and delivery structure for the same.
We do not usually charge our clients on an hourly basis unless it is the only practical means of accounting for our attendances or where you otherwise insist us to do so. Litigation is one of only a handful of examples where our services are subject to hourly rate; and in such instances, we will work to identify when and where we can reasonably fix our fee to particular attendances.
In some circumstances, we are prepared to enter into a conditional costs agreement with clients who have a sustainable business, and whose vision and mission is appropriately aligned with ours. A conditional costs agreement provides that the client will only be required to pay our professional fees upon the successful conclusion of a matter and in doing so, will be subject to an uplift fee (or premium).