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What is your hours worked to hours billed ratio?
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Be very careful. I charge a flat fee for uncontested divorces and often those are the most demanding clients. Then I feel abused and unhappy and the relationship turns sour.
Boundaries are important, especially with flat fee clients. Good boundaries and a good assistant to deflect or at least mitigate. I do flat uncontested, but always with a provision to switch to hourly if things go sideways.
We bill hourly on most cases but for small ones we will take a flat fee. In family law, even when they say it’s agreed ask one question if a child is involved to see if there is truly an agreement - have y’all agreed on child support ?
If you take a flat fee be sure it’s not contested. Otherwise, charge an initial retainer and bill hourly. My firm uses an evergreen requirement so client shave to keep the amount of their initial retainer in trust at all time.
I do flat fee on some things and hourly on others
I do the same. It’s hard to say because it’s so area dependent too.
Child custody and visitation modification can be either depending on the facts.
Child support, usually always flat fee
Dissolutions with or without kids, always hourly, even the simplest divorces on paper get messy real fast.
I also agree with the other points everyone has raised. A lot of the cost depends on the jurisdiction as well. In the Bay Area of CA, $20,000 to $40,000 in a contested divorce case is average.
Do not EVER flat fee family law. EVER.
I bill hourly for everything. For things like simple divorces, I try to keep the hours down as best I can so it stays reasonably inexpensive.
I send clients invoices every month and ask for a top up of their retainer. I don’t bill every client every month though. If I’m in a holding pattern and have done very little work/had a couple emails or calls only, I don’t bill that out, because I think it’s a waste of resources (unless that’s all that is on the final bill). I let my clients know this right off the bat, so they aren’t surprised if they don’t get a bill every month
Hourly, always.
Definitely hourly. And we bill 2x a month so clients aren’t surprised by their invoices. It’s tough for middle-income clients with minimal assets. If we really like a client, we cut them a break on some of the bills, but not by a significant amount.
Thanks for all the responses. So are you seeing divorces with $20-40k total fees regularly, for average people? Just seems so high for the average person.
In my experience, the most expensive cases come down to two factors: are there children, and are they able to agree on ANYTHING? If "yes," and "no," respectively, then their case is likely going to run between $20-40k or more.
I had a former law partner who used to tell our family law clients, "your bill will be as high as your anxiety." While a bit inartful, he was telling the clients who call and email multiple times per day (which there are those clients) that they are going to be the ones running up their own costs if they can't take a step back.
We advise clients when their goals or position is costing them more than the issue is objectively worth. But sometimes no matter how hard you try, someone will insist on spending $3000 of your billable time arguing about the five "extra" Christmas trees (yes, this happened).
We are hourly, except for when we are doing a mediation. We have a flat rate for mediations.
I always do hourly