Costs
Travis Schultz & Partners (TSP) promise to maximise your return by offering significantly lower fees than the industry standard. As an example, we are about 20 - 40% lower than a Queensland based ASX listed compensation law firm.
Many claim it. Few explain it. Before we take on your case, we propose a cost agreement. Cost agreements can be fraught with hidden costs and promises. Allow us to explain how we are different and better when it comes to costs; transparent and trusted.No Win / No Fee
We understand that the cost of legal proceedings can be daunting and the last thing you need during a stressful time. We guarantee No Win / No Fee for all our clients and provide one of the fairest, low-cost structures around. Free initial assessment plus our easy to understand No Win / No Fee policy gives you the reassurance, support and access to justice, rather than the fear and burden of financial consequence.
No uplift fees
In Queensland, law firms are entitled to charge an additional amount on top of their normal fees, where they act on a speculative (No Win / No Fee) basis. This additional amount recognises both the risk that law firms have to take in agreeing to act on that basis, and the fact that they will have to wait quite some time to be paid for their work.
The additional amount, called an “uplift fee”, can be as much as an extra 25% on top of their normal charges. TSP does not charge you any uplift fees as we believe that a fee structure must be transparent, certain and no more than a fair sum. Your interests come first.
Cap on costs
In Queensland, legislation imposes a statutory cap on the fees that can be charged by a law firm in speculative claims of 50% of the net settlement or judgement sum (after deducting refunds and outlays). This is the cap that many, if not most firms apply in their cost agreements with clients.
The so called “50/50 Rule” is intended to ensure that in smaller cases, the costs charged to a client don’t substantially erode their settlement or award. The cap means that the professional fees of the law firm cannot exceed 50% of the net settlement sum. The trouble is that a lot of the large firms have tried to make this the new rule, not just in small cases, but in medium and even larger ones as well.
At TSP, we don’t adopt the government’s 50% cap on professional fees. We self-impose a lower cap of 1/3, and this is a key point of difference. It is very reassuring to clients to know that the legal fees can never exceed 1/3 of the net settlement sum.
We only charge on the Federal Court Scale – a scale of costs set out by the federal government. It’s like a Medicare Schedule of Fees where there is a set amount for each item of work that we do. We don’t use time-costing (where lawyers charge at an hourly rate broken into 6-minute units. The client is charged for 6 minutes, whether the lawyer spends one minute or 5 on any particular task).
We offer the reassurance of a low cap – a guarantee that our fees will never exceed a third of the net settlement sum or award. Because we’re fair.
Easing the burden of outlay costs
Nobody likes being surprised by hidden costs so we pay all of the out-of-pocket expenses incurred in a claim along the way (excluding our client’s personal travel costs). Not only do we cover those costs, we never charge a single cent extra for doing so! Zero.
Outlays are the fees or charges of external third party suppliers which are necessarily incurred in running your case. They include items such as court filing fees, barrister’s fees, report costs, transcript expenses or search fees to government agencies.
At TSP, we take a different approach from most other law firms in this sector, by removing the burden from our clients and paying these as they occur and not even asking our clients to pay any interest charges or other fees for doing so.
At the end of your matter, we simply include the expenses on our final account. Some of our competitors resort to having their clients sign up to expensive litigation lending arrangements to defray the cost to the firm, but not at TSP.
No outlays to pay, no interest charges, and no complex litigation lending documents to sign. In fact, at TSP we have principled and compassionate industry leading lawyers who get the best results and then charge fees that are 20 – 40% lower than the Biglaw firms – so our clients win twice.
There’s peace of mind.