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From time to time I may present a view about some legal issue or scenario. Those views are my personal views and are not intended to be legal opinion on any specific issue. If you need legal advice on an issue feel free to contact me directly or consult your preferred legal adviser. Whatever you do, do not rely on any legal views expressed here unless I expressly say that it is safe to do so (which I probably won't anyway). As for any other opinion I give or view I present, you take your chances there too.

Back office stuff

August 28th, 2008

One of the aspects of my job is managing litigation on behalf of my clients. More often than not I am responsible for co-ordinating a team of people including an advocate and one or more witnesses and expert witnesses. More often than not I am contractually responsible for the team’s fees and expenses and I invoice my client for those costs in addition to my own fees. Understandably, legal fees in a litigation matter can be pretty high and despite their best intentions, clients sometimes become alarmed at the costs of running a court case a couple months down the line and payments sometimes start to come in later and later as clients try desperately to maintain cashflow or even delay the inevitable. This isn’t to say that all clients do this, they don’t. For the most part my clients are wonderful and they pay without delay.

Many attorneys will pay their team when the attorneys themselves are paid and I understand that completely. If you have an advocate and an expert witness leading and giving evidence at a trial for a few days the cost to the attorney can comfortably head north of R20 000 to R30 000. These are costs the attorney usually has to bear until the client pays the fee and unless the attorney has a substantial practice, this represents a significant dent in the attorney’s cashflow so many attorneys simply delay payment to the rest of the team.

The downside of this is that the rest of the team may need to source income from other projects to keep going and may not dedicate as much attention to the case at hand or may simply lose interest if they are not being valued enough to be paid for their work. Unless a client is fortunate enough to have a team that can look beyond not being paid on time (or sometimes at all), the client will ultimately suffer when vital experts become unavailable or witnesses fail to attend a hearing forcing a costly postponement.

The point is that it is so important to pay legal fees, not just to keep your attorney focussed on the job at hand (regardless of my intentions I also need to pay the bills each month and being paid for my work means I am not distracted by the need to maintain cashflow and still keep the case going properly) but, perhaps more importantly, to maintain a coherent team because maintaining a coherent and motivated team could be the difference between success and failure.

Short of dire financial circumstances I believe it is vital to pay my advocates, my service providers and the rest of my team, often before I pay myself. Without them I can’t do my job as well as I would like to and can’t service my clients as well as they deserve. I’d like to think my clients feel the same way about me. Many do.

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