Page 133 - The Circle of Life

the month which is normal commercial business and not to be wondered at.

Someone has to pay for the fancy offices and original portraits and genuine
coffee. It is presumably not for free and that someone is you, the client.

The bigger the law office the more money is needed to survive. That is logical.
All the lawyers regulate themselves with nice high sounding phrases to limit the

fees allowed to charge but there is (always) a loop hole. In South Africa you
have three different fee scales agreed to by all attorneys. The first two is limited

to which court is applicable, that is the Higher Courts and Lower Courts and is
limited to a specific rate which can be charged to your client. And then the loop

hole to make more money. The so called “attorney and own client” scale which
means charge whatever you will get away with in normal non-legal English

despite the different explanations from the law society in this regard.

Let me explain what happens in practise. A legal letter which could be written on
one page swiftly becomes ten or twenty pages. Why? Because the lawyer gets

paid per page written or per word and they count it which is easy with modern
computers. Thus you find the most wonderful phrases and words flowing in an

elegant way quoting legal sections and other parts of previous letters to create
as much pages as possible. It really looks impressive to the untrained eye but is

utter rubbish in the sense that it is totally unnecessary information.

Further the letter will be signed by the partner but in fact he was not the one

writing it but he would have (I hope) read and agreed with it. It was drafted by

a much junior professional assistant who booked his time against it. And so does
the next one and the next one and the next one. Everyone cashes in on that one
letter for everyone looked at it and made a small adjustment or not. Does not

matter for it is time spend and time is money and thus charged to you, the

client.

This technique is called “padding” and you will find my letters to be extremely

short and to the point so that this cannot happen. I simply don’t believe in long
boring explanations for it is not in my nature and never padded anything in my

life. To pad a letter (or any legal document) for more fees is unfair to you, the
client.

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