When hourly is the honest answer
We quote fixed or capped fees where we can. Sometimes we can't, and saying so up front is more honest than pretending otherwise.
Our stated position on fees is simple: we quote. Fixed or capped, wherever the scope is readable. Hourly is a last resort.
That position is true. It’s also incomplete, because it doesn’t say when hourly is the honest answer: the times we’ll decline to quote a fixed fee even when a client asks for one, because doing so would mean lying about what the matter is.
Three tests
Before we put a fixed or capped fee on a matter, we run three tests internally:
- Do we know the counterparty’s position? Not what they’ve written in a letter, but how they’ll actually behave through a six- or twelve-month process. If the counterparty is unknown, unreachable, or known to be erratic, the shape of the matter is outside our control. Quoting a fixed fee means absorbing that risk, and either losing money if they escalate, or pricing in enough headroom that the fee stops being a “fixed fee” in any meaningful sense.
- Is the endpoint defined? “Draft the shareholders’ agreement” has an endpoint. “Resolve the shareholder dispute” doesn’t; not at the outset, not until we’ve had at least one substantive exchange with the other side.
- Does the scope include a judge? Anything that depends on a court’s sitting schedule, interlocutory applications, or opposing counsel’s willingness to agree directions: we can’t scope it. We can budget it, weekly, in writing, with revisions at each phase. That’s not the same as a fixed fee.
If any of those three is uncertain, we bill hourly. We tell you that on the first call, before the engagement letter. We disclose the hourly rate up-front, we send running totals weekly, and we revise the estimate in writing when we cross a phase boundary.
Why the weekly disclosure matters
Hourly billing has a reputation problem for a reason. Clients who have been billed hourly before at a large firm have usually received their first bill three months into the matter, discovered they’ve crossed a threshold they didn’t know about, and felt ambushed.
That’s not an hourly-billing problem. That’s a disclosure problem.
The fix, for us, is: every Monday, every client on hourly billing gets an email with the hours booked in the prior week, the running total against the estimate, and (if we’re tracking towards the upper end of the estimate) a note about why and what’s causing it. The client can pull the plug on a line of argument, redirect, or agree to extend the budget, without waiting three months to discover the problem.
It takes us about forty minutes a week for a typical book of matters. It saves, on average, one tense conversation per quarter.
The matters where we still give a capped fee
Early-stage advice on a shareholder or founder dispute. The first phase, the advisory one, before it’s escalated. We cap at a number (usually $6,000–$18,000 depending on complexity). If the matter resolves within the cap, you pay only what we’ve booked. If it escalates, we hit the cap and move to hourly from there, with a fresh estimate.
Family-business succession documents. The drafting piece. Fixed fee per document package. The family conversations that surround them (the ones where the actual work happens) are hourly, because you can’t quote “three conversations” when the first one might go for four hours.
Small M&A (under S$10m) with a clear scope: share sale, asset sale, joint-venture setup. Fixed fee, quoted after we’ve seen the letter of intent.
The point
We’d rather be honest about hourly than pretend to a fixed fee we can’t hold. Clients who’ve been burned on under-scoped fixed fees at other firms tell us, afterwards, that the weekly email was the thing that made them trust the billing. Not the rate. The disclosure.
If a firm tells you they’ll fix-fee a contested litigation with a counterparty you haven’t met yet, ask them how. The answer is usually a very large fixed fee, or a number that won’t survive first contact with the facts. Neither is a kindness.