Open Door Challenge

Professional legal services are expensive.

In a 2006 State Bar of Texas report on lawyer’s hourly rates, the average hourly rate for attorneys in the Austin-Round Rock metropolitan service area was $257.00 an hour. By the time a lawyer finishes listening to a client’s problem, a family may have just exhausted their monthly allowance for food or rent.

However, providing professional legal services is also expensive. Contrary to the public’s belief that lawyers are rich because they pocket $257.00 of pure profit an hour, as small business owners, this isn’t the case. Between liability insurance premiums and health insurance and runners and file clerks and legal assistants and payroll taxes and office space and professional fees and membership dues and books and reference materials and computers and copiers and printers and scanners and fax machines – everything comes out of that hourly fee.

These economic times are troubling, and it means lawyers and clients will need to find common ground. There could very soon come a point at which legal professionals have no choice but to lower their rates. For many clients, however, the point at which they can’t afford to pay those rates has already come.

The State Bar of Texas encourages attorneys to devote at least 50 hours a year of pro bono legal services to the poor “as an aspiration goal”. Programs such as the Lawyer Referral Service of Central Texas’ Match Program encourages participating attorneys to provide legal services to low income clients at a reduced rate of $60.00 per hour. Non-profit law firms like Texas RioGrande Legal Aid and service organizations like Volunteer Legal Services also provide assistance to the indigent.

But what about the working middle class?

What about the people that have a good job, but still cannot afford to find the budget to pay for tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees when an emergency happens?

What about the people that don’t qualify for free or reduced fee legal services because they work eighty hours a week at two jobs to support their family?

Currently, many of these people settle for the cheapest lawyer they can find. The client pays a minimal amount, the lawyer does a minimal amount of work, and a disagreement inevitably ensues when the client wants more work and the lawyer wants more money.

Economist Taylor Cook spent most of 2008 working on a better solution.

The central premise of the Open Door Initiative is that good lawyers want to do good work for good clients, irrespective of their ability to pay. Law firms are still businesses, and in order to keep the lights on a client’s ability to pay cannot be completely ignored. The Open Door Initiative provides a systematic, formulaic approach to offering sliding pricing for hourly based professional services.

Many lawyers offer a reduced hourly rate for friends and family. We have learned the hard way: you must still make a profit – albeit a small one — or it is easy to become resentful when the family member of friend becomes just as demanding as the client who is paying full price.

The formulas used in the Open Door worksheets require that the lawyer must make a profit. The worksheet allows a client to pay a fair fee based upon their adjusted gross annual income as benchmarked against the Living Wage in Austin. Furthermore, the Open Door worksheet allows a lawyer to take a client’s monthly resources into account when calculating the legal fees.

This is the Open Door Challenge to criminal defense lawyers, family law attorneys, immigration attorneys, plaintiff’s lawyers, and every civil lawyer who represents people: will you adopt a comprehensive sliding scale system to make our profession’s rates affordable to everyone?

The sliding scale formula created by the Open Door Initiative is an opportunity for all lawyers in Texas to extend choice and affordability to all clients, guaranteeing everyone a quality defense at any price.

For firms interested in implementing a sliding scale, here are some resources:

If you’re seeking an attorney participating in the Open Door Challenge, click here to choose from those who offer a sliding scale pricing plan to all clients.

Open Door Challenge architect Taylor Cook on the sliding scale formula: