We reported last week on the push to stop lawyers in Australia charging through the nose for about everything imaginable.. using our favourite example of charging clients for Xmas cards.. But as Tim Demtel would say…. But Wait There’s More
?
The Sydney Morning Herald has done some of its own research and turned up some more peaches
The $600 taxi ride, a 3 page document costing $750 and a client being charged for having an umbrella returned.
Here’s the introduction to the article.. full article at http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/the-lawyer-who-underchargedand-other-fairytales-20091123-iua4.html
The lawyer who under-charged…and other fairytales
Heard the one about the lawyer who charged like a perfectly reasonable, unmolested, even-tempered bull? Me neither.
There are plenty of them, but it is the horror stories and the bills so far-fetched that they read like cruel jokes that get repeated at barbecues and in organs such as this one.
The $50 or $100 accounts for opening Christmas cards, returning an umbrella, or photocopying, for example. There have been some crackers told in the past year.
Sydney man Mohammed Tariq has been plying his one-man stand-up comedy act on the steps of the city’s courthouses, employing a sandwich board, a pony and a donkey as props and telling the ones about the welcome letter he received from Keddies Lawyers ($60, ker-ching) and the two-kilometre taxi ride his family was billed for (that’ll be $600, thank you).
A costs assessor, barrister Michael Robinson, recommended Keddies refund Tariq $37,000 because of what he called deliberate “systematic duplication and overcharging”.
Legal bills have become such a sought-after form of popular entertainment that the consumer group Choice went looking this year and found one poor sucker whose lawyer charged $750 for the typing of a three-page document.
The great irony, of course, is that the farcical bills that come to light are often the more honest ones, where a lawyer has been silly enough to list their actual activity on the ledger.
Consumers of legal services should be given a glossary, informing them that the all-too-common entries of “case management” or “strategy advice” can mean anything from “Opening Christmas card” to “flirting with paralegals”, “choosing fancy dress costume online for Natasha’s Halloween party”, or “scratching self”.
