Do you think £180 per hour is normal charge for solictors?

[RTKangaMummy]

If not what do you pay?

Anteater, it's supply and demand. If I was running a FTSE100 company faced with some legal complications that could potentially wipe millions off the share price of the company I was managing, then I suspect I would consider £650 per hour for the most senior and experienced solicitor available to be money well spent.

some office frogs..

I guess when you have a lucrative monopoly why would you want to change it? Venting a little due to some legal bills but the word PARASITE does spring to mind.

The world would be a better place is you divided Laywers salaries by 10.

Well, we've just avoided the conveyancing solicitors recommended by a friend, who chose them because they were cheap. The one we went for charges significantly more, but they really kick butt. Friend has taken 7 months from offer to exchange of contracts. We could have done it in three weeks (if only the vendors of the place we're buying would get off their hindquarters, but that's another story).

Money well spent, as far as I'm concerned. I suspect the chief exec of Glaxo, faced with a nasty negligence lawsuit, would feel the same (except that the numbers would be much, much bigger). Ouch. Am in the wrong business...

When I was working for a website agency we charged people at £200 an hour and they were just idiots who were about 18

That's the way the market works

Market forces do not apply to a monopoly.

What has been the rate of salary increase in the legal sector for the last 20 years?

How is it a monopoly, Anteater? Solicitors have a particular set of skills, which some people are prepared to pay a great deal of money for. So do plumbers, though the sums are smaller. And music teachers. And website designers. It's not a closed shop -- if you want to become a solicitor you can, assuming you have the right qualifications. Obviously not everyone has the talent or drive to hit the £650 an hour bracket, but the rarity value is why those individuals are in demand.

Seriously, if you see a really good barrister (Orlando Pownall, for example) in action and compare that individual's performance with others in his field you realised just how specialised and valuable his skills are.

Not saying the same is true of every high street solicitor -- I have regular dealings with solicitors at the lower end of the legal aid market, and it's often hard to tell whether they're just bent or just incompetent or whether they're both together. But there are some outstandingly able individuals at the top of the legal profession. I don't find it surprising that they command those sorts of rates.

Anyway, Anteater, market forces are part of the problem. Because of the free market, lots of American law firms now have offices here and they pay their newly qualifieds ridiculous amounts of cash. The London firms had to jack up the salaries they pay in order to keep their best and talented from following the almighty dollar... Which necessarily means the end client paying more...

Frogs
Well I guess your right; £150+ per hour is a fair price to pay for an incompetent or bent solicitor. £650 sounds very reasonable for a good one, don?t know why I thought any different!!

Suppose we, as ever, have to follow the states, bet it will turn out fine..
After all, small businesses are ?open for businesses when it comes down to no win no fee cases.

Why did I ever think that solicitors were over paid.. Basically because as we all know, they are!

My solicitor is £160 per hour and thats not for a partner. if its something you can do yourself, like a divorce, then do it yourself.

Anteater - with ref to your final point - if tehy weren't then e wouldn't have the joy of threads like this on Mumsnet

Frankly for some of the solicitors I encounter, I'd want paying before I'd use them. A lot. For them, £150 an hour is significantly too much. Trouble is, these guys will not generally be paid by the end user, they'll be doing publicly-funded work paid for by you and me, the nation's taxpayers.

Mine is £130 + vat per hour, plus £13 to per e-mail or phone call (assuming they don't last longer than 6 minutes!!!!) I'm in the wrong job

solicitors charge out those kind of rates - but they don't earn that!! I have been qualified for 9 years, do legal aid family law work and earn £24k. My sisters who are nurses earn more than that! I regularly advise taxi drivers, teachers etc who earn more than that.

If I worked in the city doing corporate law i would be on zillions but legal aid work in the provinces is not well paid. We work bloody hard, it's very stressful and on top of it all people seem to think that we're a bunch of sharks with no feelings.

Lawyer- bash away but get your facts right!

and it's wrong to assume that the higher the charge-out rate the better the lawyer. The law is the law. Look at the McCartney -mills divorce - need I say more? Dread to think what those lawyers are charging!

Anteater, the solicitor doesn't keep anything like the charge out rate. I've been a qualified legal executive for 18 years and charge £155 per hour plus VAT. The reason phone calls are charged for is because they take time, simple as that. They'll be charged in units of 6 mins, but often if they go up to 9 mins I'll only charge for 6.
You keep talking about salaries, but the salary bears little resemblance to the charging rate. For example, I earn bill in excess of 5X my salary pa. The rest goes on salaries for support staff, overheads and of course partners' profits.

Just as an aside, we had a plumber quote us for some work recently and I calculated that he was charging £350 per hour plus VAT. We didn't use him as we thought he was a total prat but presumably other people were paying him this amount, so he must have been making a very good living. How difficult is it to be a plumber compared to the qualifications you need to be a solicitor. Also solicitors have other expenses - not just a white van.

Just my thoughts. However, I am not condoning total rip off solicitors, but I felt that this put the fee into perspective a bit.

Good point, figroll. I've just paid £1350 for a decorator to paint my living room (not inc. materials) because that's the going rate in a very expensive area.
Am at a plumber charging £350 an hour, tho'!

It takes 4 years to qualify as an electrician or a plumber.

Solicitor has just charged £10,000 to sort out girlfriends will

bloody hell, must have beeen a lot of sorting out!

but there wasnt much work to do,she didnt own a property or have any children

private doctors, business consultants, patent agents, accountants all charge similar rates. It's a free market. The worse you are the cheaper you are. The better you are the more in demand you are and the higher your prices. Thank God we live in a country like this. In Communist China they did have a time of paying doctors what they paid roadsweepers. Some people on this thread might think that was better. The other way to tackle it is high tax. We had 98% on some incomes in the 60s or 70s. My father a fairly lowish paid NHS consultant was paying 66% tax on his highest earned income and I think 83% on his building society interest. At that point people started leaving the UK.

the solicitors salary is not the charging rate anteater. You might be paying someone who earns £40k £200 per hour but that money is not going to the solicitor its going to the firm. If you don't like it don't pay it! shop around, there are cheaper lawyers out there. Its not a monopoly, there are billions of lawyers out there you aren't obliged to use the first one you see.

I always get annoyed on threads like this because I'm a legal aid lawyer and we don't charge per hour as we just get paid per case whatever the amount of work you happen to have done. Oh and there hasn't been a rise in rates for 10 years in my field since you asked.

to put it in perspective - senior PR consultants can and do charge between UK250 and 650 depending on the situation. Esp in London and New York. I sometimes get the guilts over charging a client $400 an hour to help them manage crises but then realise that a) I have a rare skill that they need and b) that if they don't want to pay that then they don't have to. Plus the money I earn for my company helps pay x number of salaries, support x number of families, x number of local sandwish shops benefit etc.

So although PR is a fairly pond-scummy job at times its also helping companies, governments and organisations get the attention of people for products, services, campaigns that drive either the sales, or uptake of pap smears, or donations to a hospital.

The least defensible is the product/sales - except that by making sure customer x's software is the well-known and has a good reputation I encourage people to buy it which, given company x has set up software development in Bangalore, is helping build the Indian economy AND helping company y reduce admin overhead by 10% which means they don't need to reduce headcount this year...

which is a lengthy way of saying that imho even the economy has its own organic nature