Effortless Lawyer Billing Format for Enterprises to Streamline Your Invoicing

Lawyer billing format for enterprises

we got a question from lauren small who says what can entrepreneurs expect around fees and pricing to work with a small business attorney her own experiences with the divorce attorney heavy side what do you think um you know i i can tell you you know what what to expect the best way to answer that question is is that when you interview a lawyer who's going to help you with your small business you should ask that question once you guys have talked about what what it is you're going to ask the lawyer to do and so for example if you're engaging me to start a limited liability company for you um i usually charge a flat fee for that um and it could be you know depending on the complexities of what you're asking me to do uh if you're at you know if they're going to be one or two members and it's going to be very straightforward you know you're going to pay about 500 bucks for me at least are there other people who charge up to maybe 1200 in the area from a legal fee perspective you might be looking at somewhere between you know uh 250 to upwards depending if you're at a big law firm you might be looking at somebody who's charging 600 an hour um and i don't know where the discrepancy or the delta is between companies it's just that some people charge a higher rate or because i mean i i'm hearing lower numbers but then yeah i've seen people get bills for hundreds of thousands of dollars on things and i guess that's more very specific stuff but it just yeah i mean i i i've never i've never charged anybody that much money but you know the thing about the because i've practiced for uh this amount of time and i've worked with so many i mean hundreds maybe even thousands of entrepreneurs if you bring something to me for example you bring me a lease to look at for a new retail space or a new office space or you bring me a contract a software license agreement for a piece of you know enterprise-wide software i can generally look at that and tell you hey look it's going to cost about x number of dollars for me to look at this for you flag you know big issues uh make some suggestions on how to resolve those issues and then you know if we get into negotiating it's probably gonna cost y dollars to do that attorneys a lot of times lawyers are reluctant to perhaps quote fees or estimates because the nature of our business is is that a lot of times we're working with very unique projects and so [Music] what i might charge one person or what one person might pay me to look at a contract might be entirely different than what another person might pay me because the second person's contract may come with all these really strange facts i'm working on a shopping center lease right now out in chesapeake where the the facts about ownership and cross easements and cross maintenance agreements and things like that have required that we spend a lot more time looking at a number of legal documents and then tailoring the lease to fit those legal documents so but but again my big thing is tell me what you're looking at i'm always willing to give you an estimate or a quote of what i think it's going to take based on my experience in in cases where it's going to skyrocket and get crazy how how often should someone be asking like hey like i mean i get what you're saying where oh they don't want to give you a quote or an estimate because they don't know but you know if someone is anticipating a 5 000 invoice and they get a 50 000 invoice there's a huge discrepancy there and i think that's where a lot of people get ticked off like where should the business owner the person that's requesting that contract work or or your expertise where is it in there right maybe writes the wrong word where is it in there kind of sphere to start asking questions on like hey can you not go past this amount like is that what they should be doing because i feel like just like with business legal work is kind of the same where it's like hey like i don't i don't want to get screwed here i only have this much money to spend on this and then i get a bill that's five times the amount what do i do here cause i i owe it right um okay great i mean i i think that uh from my perspective it's all about communicating with each other right you know i and i and and maybe that's um i i know that that you know for example if you if you talk to my mother she has an idea of what a lawyer should be and what a lawyer how long you should work and and maybe that's generational but i want you to be very open with me i want you to communicate with me um i want you to you know during our initial conversation or our first meeting or something i want to know those kinds of things i mean i i i am definitely not the kind of person who's going to say hey look um you know i'm going to quote you a fee of 5 000 if i see things starting to get crazy on my end you know if i see us hit that five thousand dollar mark within a couple of weeks i'm going to be concerned i i don't want to send a client an invoice that's going to surprise them that i hate surprised clients um they make for bad relationships um and and so i think it's all about management you really ought to manage the lawyer um and i'm willing you know i'm i'm part of the team right you ought to manage me like any other team member and if you uh you ought to have an expectation that if i think that things are getting out of hand from a billing perspective i ought to tell you i want to let you know what's going on um i certainly don't want to send you a 50 000 bill for something that you thought was gonna cost five thousand dollars um but you know it's again it's part of that interview process that tim has talked about i i think you should not feel afraid to ask any lawyer these hard what sound like hard questions but really ought to be just part of defining the relationship with yeah dtr to find the relationship questions right you ought to have this with your lawyer and with your accountant yeah yeah