There's Big Bucks in Checking Your Lawyers Work

You pay lawyers big bucks to take care of stuff. You expect them to get it right. Well, lower your expectations or get burned.

How's this for a few week's work?

• My wife's legal bill cut in half, saving her $30,000.
• My portion of my wife's bill reduced from $30,000 to $10,000.
• My portion of my wife's bill will be tax deductible.
• Found and corrected over $1o,000 in arithmetic errors in settlement in my favor.

Wishful thinking? Nope, they are in the latest settlement agreement.

The work of my lawyer? Well through his vocal chords, but he had lots of help from me. He had given up on this long ago.

How could I get her fees cut in half. Ever been to one of those places that has frequent half price sales? The trick is you double your prices and then you can have a 50% sale. Some shmucks come in and actually pay double. I've been called a lot of things, but not a shmuck. Remember my lawyer said write a check? Well I told him that if I wrote her a check it would be instead of the one he was getting. First rule, apply a little incentive.

I also said that I wanted her legal bills and would go through them line by line with challenges. I asked for details on her hourly rate, the delay in producing the bills, and why the fees weren't provided in monthly statements. I also compared the relative amount of work done by her vs. my side and wanted to know why the ratio of fees was not commensurate with work output. This is a very insidious technique. A lawyer can dump or push work to the opposing party. More details on that technique in a future post.

How can you get this info? Well it is private until a motion for fees is made, then they must be justified to the proposed payer. I'm not sure how many of these embarrassing questions had to be asked to the judge, but enough for him to declare her fees too high and to cut them in half.

When the lawyers went in circles for 6 months and I came in Pro Se and asked to have my employer held liable since they provided the same info and pointed out that opposition knew that since she subpoenaed them and did not share her discovery as required, the judge was impressed. Wow, am I good or what? Nah, I just care, I spent the time, I learned arithmetic and reading at the same early age as anyone else in a public school. The hardest thing was trying to get over the frustration of dealing with a rigged system. I thank my readers for help with that. I have to believe that the judge understood that she had wasted the court's time and padded her bill.

So why should I waste any energy in reducing her fees? Well first, they would impact my son. I couldn't give a shit about my wife now, but being practical, her trouble becomes my son's trouble and that I care about greatly. Secondly, I was originally going to get nailed for half her bill (and all of mine).

Well I didn't want to pay any fees, but the judge always allocates fees to the higher wage earner regardless of who hired the lawyer. Since he always does this, going to Phase III trial would only piss him off and cost me more money. This is a whole other issue that I have in a draft post. But I did get less than half the bill as originally proposed.

Tax deductible, how can that be? Alimony is tax deductible to the payer and taxable to the payee. Having made a good argument that I had done nothing to delay the case, then this paying of the opposition lawyer's fees becomes a form of spousal support. The separation agreement language must clearly spell out that it is spousal support and made part of the court order. If it is discussed but not part of the court order, you loose the deduction.

Arithmetic, how the hell can you screw up arithmetic that bad? Feel free to adapt this example as incentive for your children to study their math. Here's how, first do lots of rapid horse trading, scribbling on your legal pad, forget to copy down a change, and use Excel as a word processor without formulas. Yet another topic I can go into detail with. How do I know that no formulas were used? Because I had him give me the .xls file.

I've made good money during my career, but never over $40,000 per month. Not even close! OK, let's say this is a culmination of all the financial negotiation since Jan, $40K for 3 or 4 months work, still not too shabby. If you can afford to pass up that kind of money go ahead, I can't.

Moral of the story: Trust your lawyer and you'll pay twice. (jqism)