The question of unpaid legal fees.
The payment of legal fees is always an issue in family law cases. Now, no one has a coffee can sitting around, filled with money to pay for their family law case or divorce. On the contrary, financial issues are often part of the hardships at the time of break up. Likely, hard times with money means no money for legal fees.
How are legal fees funded?
Often times, clients in family law cases, and other cases resort to borrowing. Credit cards and family loans are a common source of funds to pay legal fees. Moreover, selling assets is a means of funding legal fees. Of course, you do not want to sell so many assets that you have less to divide up!
Your lawyer does not want to chase you for unpaid legal fees.
Unpaid legal fees, cause stress in the attorney client relationship. Naturally, you want your lawyer to be on your side and not looking at you as a bad debt. Simultaneously, the lawyer wants to focus on the issues in your case and not accounts receivable. Fortunately, most people pay their legal fees and maintain a positive attorney client relationship. Unfortunately, that is not always the case.
What happens in the case of unpaid legal fees?
Your lawyer has options when there are unpaid legal fees:
- Be relieved as legal counsel for your case.
- Apply for an attorney lien against anything you might receive from the family law litigation.
- Institute of lawsuit for the collection of unpaid legal fees.
- Obtain a judgment against you for unpaid legal fees.
- Always preferable, work out a payment plan on unpaid legal fees.
A recent case adds to the client’s for hardship of unpaid legal fees.
Normally, when a request is made under the open public records act, the government must act immediately and provide the records. Ordinarily, this occurs with no litigation. Indeed, the entire system was set up to keep the government and it’s citizens out of litigation. The policy was simple. The citizens are entitled to the records that are public. Of course, the government managers of such records must provide them to the citizens upon request. Administratively, there are forms to be completed and timelines to be met. Upon the citizen, submitting the proper form, the government is on the clock. Upon the government, failing to timely provide records, the requester has the right to litigate with the government agency. Further, few cases even end up in superior court.
For example, a case with the Elizabeth Board of Education ended up in court. The government failed to provide the public records. The requester was represented by attorney, Walter Luers, who is the leader in the New Jersey bar on litigating open public records cases. So egregious was the government’s behavior that the court entered an order, granting legal fees to Walter’s law firm in the amount of $78,646.!
Final pointer:
Communication. If you are falling behind on your bills with your lawyer, communicate and attempt to resolve any issues before unpaid legal fees, ruin the attorney client relationship. $78,646. On top, there were delays in entry of the judgment. Walter’s firm wanted interest to run back to 2020 when they won the case and the government wanted interest to run back only to 2022 when the case was docked. Decisively, the New Jersey appellate division ordered that interest will run back to the entry of the judgment in 2020.
A note on interest, when interest was running at 0.25% per year little attention was paid to the accrual of interest on judgments. Of late, the interest on judgment has skyrocketed in 2025. The rate is 5.5%. That can add up to a real money.
Photo by erica steeves on Unsplash