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Tips for Keeping Your Legal Bills Down

  • A law firm partner is going to bill at higher rates for time spent on your case. At the same time, though, having a partner work on your matter may actually be cheaper in the long run if it requires a high level of expertise, as it may take the partner less time to resolve a legal problem than it would an associate who has a lot less experience.

  • Lawyers typically bill for telephone calls. So make sure you have a good reason for calling your lawyer before you do so. It is sometimes a good idea to try talking to the lawyer's secretary or even a paralegal to see if you can resolve the issue at hand rather than talking directly to the lawyer.

  • Lawyers bill for travel time and costs. So if you're given the choice, plan meetings at your lawyer's office rather than insisting that he or she come to your office.

  • Your lawyer should provide you with an itemized bill that gives detailed information on how you are being charged. While every law firm does things differently, many of them charge not only for lawyer time but also for time spent by paralegals, legal secretaries and other support staff. You can use the information on an itemized bill to decide how to communicate most effectively with your lawyer's law firm without running up the legal bills.

  • The more time a lawyer has to spend on preparing a case, the more you are going to be charged. You may want to work on developing an effective working relationship with support personnel, with the goal of using your own time to help them work up the case and keep legal bills at a minimum. (This does not mean trying to do all the work yourself and then simply having the lawyer sign off on it.) You have to defer to the discretion of your lawyer, because it's sometimes easier for a lawyer to develop his or her own work product from scratch rather than trying to revise something that the client has already tried to do on his or her own.

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