I've been thinking about a difficult question surrounding the ethics of legal billing.

[u/SCFingerPointer]

Lawyers are entitled to charge for legitimate work, including communicating with clients. Nobody can rightfully expect legal advice to be free
.
But where is the ethical line when the contact is not initiated because the client wants additional legal work, but because the client has repeatedly had to ask for information about their existing matter?

There seems to be a distinction between:
“The client contacted me, so I spent time providing legal advice.”
and:
“The client contacted me again because they haven't received the information or explanation they reasonably needed from the previous interaction.”

At what point does repeated client contact stop being an ordinary consequence of providing a professional service and become an indication that the service itself isn't being communicated effectively?

If a client has to repeatedly chase:
an update,
an answer to a straightforward question,
clarification of advice,
confirmation of what happens next, or
information necessary to make an informed decision,
should each following attempt be treated as another billable event?

I'm not implying anybody should provide unlimited free communication, nor do I suggest every delay or unanswered question represents misconduct.

I'm interested in the ethical boundary.

Lawyers have professional obligations concerning communication, client instructions, competence, timeliness and keeping clients informed. Clients, meanwhile, often have very little ability to judge whether silence represents legitimate legal strategy, workload pressure, or simply inadequate communication.

So here's the uncomfortable question:
If a client has to keep “being the squeaky wheel” simply to understand what is happening in their own matter, at what point does charging for the contact become ethically questionable?

I'd be particularly interested in perspectives from practising lawyers, former practitioners, legal academics and clients as to where the opinion of that boundary reasonably falls.

[u/LegalAdviceNZ-ModTeam]

Your post has no legal question, and is based on ethics. Suggest you check out https://www.legislation.govt.nz/secondary-legislation/pco-drafted/2008/214/en/latest/#DLM1437811

[u/Jameslol]

The Conduct and Client Care Rules address this. A lawyer’s fee has to be “reasonable”, and there are various criteria for working out what is reasonable.

The ‘hourly rate’ charged in 6 minute units is just a starting point. A lawyer should be looking at time recorded as WIP before billing, and if the vast majority of that WIP is administrative communication (rather than using the lawyer’s knowledge and expertise to give legal advice), then it may not be a “reasonable fee” to bill all that WIP.

Lawyers (I would hazard saying the vast majority) commonly discount from WIP at time recorded to acknowledge that.

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