Charge for consultations? 5 possible solutions

The charging of consultations provided by lawyers to their clients is a subject that is becoming very important nowadays, given the current problems.
The consultation is a right – duty of the lawyer by means of which contact is established between the professional lawyer and the client, on the occasion of providing the requested legal advice on a certain matter of interest.

Consultations may be genuine or preventive; the former are those in which the lawyer offers help with a specific problem and the latter are those in which the lawyer offers advice to avoid a future problem.

In addition, these consultations that the lawyer offers to the client can be punctual or continuous, in the sense that it can be a consultation made to a regular client or to a person who comes to the law firm for the first time, as well as they can be merely informative or real.

Regardless of the nature of these consultations, the lawyer has to be remunerated for all of them due to the full attention and dedication he/she gives to the specific matter. Therefore, it is convenient, as well as necessary, to determine the fee applicable to each consultation, differentiating each unified fee according to the type of consultation and, even, facilitating in which cases such consultation could be free or subject to any particularity, such as in cases of consultation to relatives or friends.

LAWYOU Law Firm considers that, in principle, any consultation offered by a professional lawyer should be remunerated since the fee is, in addition to an income obtained by the lawyer for the service rendered to the client, a way of giving value to the work and knowledge of a lawyer.

The consultation, contrary to what is understood, constitutes part of the lawyer’s fees, which is why the collection of these consultations is so important.

It is clear that the collection of the consultations offered by the lawyer to the client is a problem that the lawyer has to manage to solve and, for this purpose, it is convenient to determine the amounts for consultations through tariffs.

Although it is true, this dilemma is not only because the lawyers do not have a fee per consultation, but many times it is due to the «cheek» of the client who wants to leave without paying because he does not consider that it is something for which the lawyer should charge.

It is important to note that this work does deserve to be charged since lawyers spend time on consultations that could be devoted to other more relevant issues or even more rushed.

From LAWYOU we provide the ways to proceed to claim payment for consultations:.

1. Unified price. This is one of the least popular ways to claim payment for consultations, which consists of indicating, by means of an informative sign in the waiting room, the unified price of consultations. This is a method that is only suitable for large law firms or consulting firms.
2. Application. For those who feel less intimidated by the client, they can simply request payment for the consultation at the end of the consultation.
4. Application.
5. Request for payment after the fact. This way of claiming payment for consultations consists in that, once the consultation is finished, the lawyer contacts the client to indicate the payment of the consultation previously carried out. In this method there is the inconvenience, which is the «bread and butter», of whether the client pays or not, which is already another problem to be solved.
8. Deductible.
9. Deduct it from the total. It is common practice that, once the consultation fee has been charged, it is deducted from the total fees to be paid by the client. In this way, the professional ensures the collection of the consultation in case the client does not continue with his services.
10. Delegate. This technique lies in delegating to the secretary of the law firm in particular the task of claiming payment for the consultation made to our client. By this method, the client has to make an appointment with our secretary in order to be able to undergo a consultation with the lawyer in question. The secretary will be the one who will manage the appointments and, once the client has been summoned and summoned, will indicate the price of the consultation, thus avoiding that the clients presume that the consultation is free of charge. At LAWYOU we believe that this is the most appropriate option for a correct and efficient provision of services.

LAWYOU Law Firm is the ideal law firm to provide lawyers with the administration of the collection of the consultations provided by lawyers and the management of all payments. It has a wide range of professionals to ensure the effective collection of consultations and advice provided by the professional lawyer, saving time, effort and resources. LAWYOU guarantees lawyers the peace of mind of not having to worry about unpaid debts.