Fee Agreement Form
/Automate Your Fee Agreement
When you decide to make your law practice more efficient by automating some of your forms, you may want to start with your fee agreement form.
We have prepared a model Fee Agreement form that you may download, modify, and use for free.
Creating your legal fee agreement (engagement agreement) is non-billable work, so it makes sense to do it as rapidly and efficiently as possible. The document assembly (automatic document creation) features of your practice management application enables you to do just that.
Since you need to have your client's name, address and e-mail address in the contact list of your practice management system, you might as well save time when creating the fee agreement by merging that information into your form.
Biggest Obstacle to Automating Forms
The biggest obstacle to automating your forms is not mastering the software. It is not finding the time to do it. The biggest obstacle is selecting each form and updating its terms. I can't tell you how many times document automation projects have stalled because lawyers hesitate to settle on a "final version" to automate.
Here is how you can hurdle that obstacle. Tell yourself two things:
You can also tweak the terms of an automated document later. It is not cast in stone. Making some changes later is easy!
You can modify the terms of a document to fit the needs a client. It is easy to change the terms after automatically creating a first version.
Fee Agreement Form
Maybe you don't like your current Fee Agreement form or Engagement Agreement form. If so, the accompanying Fee Agreement form may be useful.
You may use this form freely and modify in any way you wish. Or you may copy terms from the form for use in your agreements.
The agreement is in Microsoft Word format with automatically numbered paragraphs. It contains variables, such as [CLIENT-NAME]and [PARALEGAL-RATE] that you should replace with merge variables supported by your practice management or document assembly software or with your own boilerplate text.
Intellectual Property Rights
You are hereby granted a non-exclusive, perpetual license to access to this Fee Agreement and may use, edit, modify, reproduce, distribute, prepare derivative works of, and this Fee Agreement.
Credits
Thanks to Paul Spitz for posting the agreement we modified for this article. Also, thanks to www.docracy.com for creating a website for publishing publicly available legal forms.
Disclaimers
Nothing on this site shall be considered legal advice and no attorney-client relationship is established. The rules of your jurisdiction may require additional terms and may prohibit the use of some terms in the agreement.
YOUR USE OF THIS WEBSITE AND ITS CONTENTS IS AT YOUR SOLE RISK. THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE". WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. WE ARE NOT LIABLE FOR DAMAGES, DIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL, RESULTING FROM YOUR USE OF THIS WEBSITE AND ITS CONTENTS.
