Our Fees
Mounteney Legal Services deliberately distinguishes commercial arrangements from those traditionally adopted in the legal sector. We work to fixed-fees whenever possible to protect clients from one of the greatest fears in the law – that of uncontrolled costs. We normally offer project-specific payment terms (i.e. payment once the work is successfully completed) and (when appropriate) our fees are based on the principle of commercial risk- sharing.
We offer fixed fees for typical transactions that can be viewed on our “Price List“.
Please do not hesitate to Contact Us for more information on work that is not detailed in the price list or if you have any questions or require any further information.
We aim to be best local value without trawling the bottom of the market where services might not be comparable. We fix our fees by considering:
- our local competitors’ charges on a like-for-like basis
- how much time the provision of the service usually takes
Our fixed-fee will apply regardless of how much work we actually do. In some cases this may mean we’ll get relatively better paid for doing less work than in other cases, in which the fixed fee will barely cover our costs. This is simply the nature of the mutual gamble between a lawyer and their client when they fix a fee.
More detail of all these matters are outlined in our Terms and Conditions, and for some products in more detailed client documents we issue for agreement prior to engagement.
DISCOUNTS : We maintain that it would be unfair on all our clients ever to agree any requests for “mates rates” (e.g. for our suppliers), volume discounts, or sector discounts. Accordingly we will never agree any reduction of our published fees except for two exceptions:
- We have a staff discount scheme for clients related to staff members
- Very large projects where we would expect to be repeating essentially the same job many times can be priced off-scale
All clients may therefore rely on our assurance that no other client is paying any less.
Because legal services are generally “distress purchases” (i.e. no one actually wants to buy legal services – they just have to have them in some circumstances) we find clients tend to stick with “the devil they know”. We genuinely appreciate regular clients, that is reflected in an increasingly responsive level of service – as our executives seek to build valuable connections – but existing clients still pay the same as new clients. We expect that existing clients will continue to use us because they want to, and we believe our value and service is competitive to attract new clients.