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Clients Can Shell Out $300 Per Hour for a Legal Secretary in the Land Down Under

By Lynne DeVenny

If this revenue-generating practice is not unusual in Australia, as alleged by Brian Bartley, chairman of the Queensland Law Society, then some law firms have found a way to turn $20 per hour legal secretaries into outrageously successful rainmakers who, with $300 per hour billing rates and earnings as high as $500,000 per year, would be more than welcome at many American firms, even in a down economy.

The Australian reports that Bartley says this abusive practice allows law firms to turn their legal secretaries into lean, mean money-making machines by "morning tea time" every Monday:

He said the charge-out rates of up to $300 an hour for these staff made it possible for them to earn their weekly wage before 11am on a Monday, meaning the remaining 35 hours of the week for each secretary was immensely profitable for the law firm.

Bartley is pushing for the practice to end, after his own experience "prosecuting solicitors for unprofessional conduct."

One of the few cases prosecuted for gross overcharging led to the senior partner of law firm Shine Roche McGowan (now Shine Lawyers) being suspended for 12 months for ripping off a vulnerable client who was billed $300 an hour for work done by secretaries. The tasks included arranging to buy and wrap a "box of chocolates and a thank you card" for the secretary of a doctor whose medical report was needed.

The then Solicitors' Complaints Tribunal ruled: "No fair-minded practitioner would be justified in charging his or her client at what the tribunal regards as an unusually high rate across the large number of hours involved including the significant time on the mundane matters of the kind described."

When they say "arranging to buy and wrap" do they mean the secretary was billed at $300 per hour for getting someone else to obtain the bonbons? Good grief, that's jaw-dropping, bloody brilliant, albeit a pretty crappy to treat your clients, if you get away with it.

In America, cash-strapped clients beg for paralegals to do as much work as possible at lower hourly rates. In Australia, clients should insist on typing their own documents and writing their own thank you notes before agreeing to pay a legal secretary's billing rate.

Bartley is not alleging that the practice is widespread, but wants all law firms to treat clerical staff performing tasks that "involve no legal skill" as an overhead expense - and not an overboard source of revenue.

Source: The Australian

Full post as published by Practical Paralegalism on September 15, 2010 (boomark / email).