We love being able to offer flat fee rates for your uncontested divorce cases here at the Ferrell Law Firm. Sometimes, though, a divorce proves to be more complicated than initially thought, or it starts out difficult from the get go. In those cases, called “contested” (meaning the parties are not in agreement on certain things about the divorce), we instead operate on a retainer fee basis. Some of our clients find retainer fees confusing or strange, so let me explain what they are and why we use them.

A retainer fee is, basically, pre-paying for services we’re about to offer you.  Hypothetically, when you come in to sign a representation agreement with us for your contested divorce matter, you would pay us right from the start a fixed retainer amount – let’s say $100.00 to make it easy.  Then, because we (hypothetically) charge $5.00 an hour, any time we work on your case we keep track of all the time spent on it, down to the tenth of an hour.  So if in the first month on your case we worked for 3 hours, we would charge $15.00 against the $100.00 you initially paid, leaving a month-end balance of $85.00.  You would then need to pay us $15.00 to bring your retainer balance back up to the $100.00, so we can start the next month’s work.  Let’s say, then, that we finish working on your case that next month, after 10 more hours of work.  After taking out the $50.00 from the retainer for that month, we’re done with your case and all issues have been resolved and we refund you back the remaining $50.00.

We use retainer fees for our contested divorces simply because it gives us a way to maintain payments in an ongoing case.  There are ways to lower your fees, though, and it comes down to one simple thing: time.  If you as the client offer up your time to make phone calls, send faxes, or secure records by doing your own leg work, that is time not being charged to you by us.

So, if you do have have a contested divorce case here in Memphis or north Mississippi and you want to save as much money as possible on attorney’s fees, you need to do as much of the work as possible yourself. And what type of work am I talking about? Things such as contested doctors bills or records, previous court reports and etc. We really don’t want to bleed you dry in lawyer fees,  honestly!