When a client does not pay me I
wonder how can they respect me if I don’t
insist on payment?* Letting
a client go indefinitely without payment is the ultimate beta move, and sets up
a toxic dynamic from which there is no where to go but down. Either the client
gets right on their payments, or we part ways.
Any other arrangement is not worth the hassle.
To get paid, you have to send the
client a bill. The worst mistake is
not sending bills to your client on a regular and frequent basis. If you send a client a bill six months into
their case, they will not have a sharp memory of everything that has happened
and often believe that the bill is inflated. Another mistake that attorneys
make is not putting sufficient details in their invoices. Conversely, some attorneys go overboard, and
the billing entry takes longer to read than the actual work took to
perform. A client should not have to
wade through sixteen generated phrases per billable to figure out what it is
you did for them that day.
The worst kind of client is the slow
payer. The thing that clients who slow
pay do not understand is that unless there is a court order or a statute which
requires me to move on their case in an expeditious manner, slow payers get
moved to the bottom of the stack both on my desk and in my mind. The clients who pay me promptly go to the
front of the line because they are treating me and my services as a priority.
The simplistic “fix” offered to the
slow payer problem is “just make everyone put money in trust.” This works to a great extent. I do a lot of work on a flat fee basis, and I
require payment in full before I will put pen to paper or dictate a single
word. Otherwise, I require fee
retainers. Even so, there are times when a retainer is not called for and there
are some clients who refuse to deposit retainers. Most of the time, this works out fine and the
client pays their bill promptly. In this
situation, the lawyer has to depend on their intuition and other indicators to
determine if the client is a good risk. Most
importantly, a case without a fee retainer is a situation that has to be
monitored closely.
Whenever I encounter a client who
resists a retainer I keep a very close eye on their billables and their payments. It is an absolute beginner’s mistake to allow
billables to get too far ahead of a client’s payments. Once this happens, you
are trapped too far out on the limb to cut it off without falling to the ground
with it. This is especially so in
litigation where in one month an invoice is de minimis and the next an invoice is
several thousand dollars. When billables
outstrip payments by 90 days or more, your chances of receiving full payment
are practically none.
In my experience slow payers are
the most demanding clients. Ironic, isn’t it? One of the hardest things to
learn as an adult is when to quit someone, whether it is in a personal or
professional setting. I’ve learned the
hard way to quit slow payers sooner rather than later.
Frankly, I’d rather heat a can of beans
on the engine block of my truck than involuntarily
work for free. At least I’ll still
respect myself in the morning.
*NB: This post
addresses only paying clients, not pro bono cases where the lawyer is voluntarily working for free.
Copyright 2013 Julie Ann Sombathy
All Rights Reserved
