The Benefits of Working With a Georgia Flat Fee Business Lawyer

Legal fees are usually done hourly, at least for most attorneys, but that doesn’t always work for business owners who need predictability and to know exactly what something is going to cost! That’s why, at Sparks Law, we offer flat fees for our legal work! Our clients know exactly what they’re going to spend, even before they give us the go-ahead to do the work.

What is a Flat Fee Lawyer?

Lawyers who do a single project for a set amount are called “Flat Fee” attorneys. Believe it or not, this used to be the norm! Before the insurance industry got its hands into legal work, attorneys almost always did their jobs on a flat fee basis. 

For better or worse, the norm now is hourly legal fees. Hourly fees have the client send in an amount (usually around $3,000) to a “retainer” account that the lawyer holds “in trust.” (There’s a lot of regulation around these bank accounts, but I don’t want to bore you.) The lawyer, then, bills “against” that retainer amount for the hour(s) the lawyer works on the case, broken down to 0.10 of every hour (6 minutes). A common hourly rate is $450 per hour, meaning that every 6 minutes that a lawyer works on a case, they get to take $45 out of the retainer bank account. 

This is all well and good when the legal job is unpredictable or open-ended, such as with litigation cases. However, it makes projects that could be predictable become open-ended. Customers complain that they’re effectively giving the attorneys a “blank check” to bill them for however much they want. 

This problem is exacerbated by the fact that most hourly based law firms have set a minimum number of hours that their attorneys have to bill, akin to quotas, and usually the attorneys get bonuses based on hours they bill for beyond their minimum amount. This incentivizes those attorneys to bill for more hours than are necessary.

Four Benefits of Working With a Flat Fee Business Lawyer

1. The incentives make cents! The incentive for the lawyer is to get the job done quickly and not bill any more time than is necessary, since their rate is already fixed. There’s no perverse incentive for the lawyer to “over-bill” and charge more, or take longer by doing so. With flat fee legal work, there are no surprise fees or sticker shock!
2. Flat Fees are predictable! Both the client and the lawyer are able to scope out the work and set a rate for all the legal work being done. And predictability is always great for business! The lawyer and the client’s goals are aligned!
3. There’s no scope creep on either side. Flat Fee work is straightforward and transparent.  While hourly attorneys often give an estimate of costs, that’s not a set rate; it’s only an estimate, and it can easily run over the budget! Differently, for flat fee projects, each person works to figure out exactly what’s going to be done and the costs of those things, before the work starts.
4. It’s typically faster! Because the rate is set, it’s in everyone’s best interest to get the job done quickly (the lawyer gets it off their to-do list and the client gets their legal work done fast). In contrast, hourly based legal work has a tendency to drag on and take a back seat to other client work that the lawyer has. Simply put, flat fees encourage efficient legal work!

Start Working With a Georgia Flat Fee Business Lawyer

At Sparks Law, we’ve been doing Flat Fee legal work since 2013; we’re one of the only law firms in the Country that do it! If you’re looking for a legal team with predictable, flat fees, give us a call; we’d love to talk with you!