BarbriSFCourseDetails
  • videocam On-Demand Webinar
  • signal_cellular_alt Intermediate
  • card_travel Ethics and Specialty Credits
  • schedule 90 minutes

Ethics of Client Billing and Fee Collection: Balancing Financial Interests and Fiduciary Obligations

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About the Course

Introduction

This CLE course will discuss what the ethical rules of professional responsibility permit, require, and prohibit attorneys from doing when pricing their services, documenting fee arrangements, billing clients, and collecting delinquent balances. The panel will outline practical approaches for avoiding ethical violations, legal liability, and financial loss.

Description

Billing and fee collection has always been a complicated area for the legal profession. When billing disputes arise, practitioners must balance their financial interest in collecting fees against their duty of loyalty to clients. For this reason, billing disputes are subject to scrutiny.

To minimize client disputes over billing and fee collection and avoid ethical missteps, attorneys must immediately review and reconsider their policies and practices surrounding fee agreements, time tracking, and billing and collections.

Listen as our authoritative panel examines the ethical dilemmas inherent in law firm billing and collection practices and offers practical steps firms can take to avoid ethical violations and legal liability.

Presented By

Carole J. Buckner
Miscellaneous

Ms. Buckner's practice focuses on legal ethics, professional responsibility and the law of lawyering, including advising lawyers and law firms, and rendering expert opinions. She also serves as an expert consultant on issues involving legal ethics including legal fees, billing, fee arrangements, conflicts of interest, fee sharing, referral fees, unauthorized practice of law, withdrawal from representation, modification of fee arrangements, client trust accounting, and other issues.

Jan L. Jacobowitz, Esq.
Founder & Owner
Legal Ethics Advisor

Ms. Jacobowitz is a legal ethics, social media, and technology expert who is the founder and owner of Legal Ethics Advisor. For over a decade, she was the Director of the Professional Responsibility and Ethics Program (PREP) at the University of Miami's School of Law. Under her direction, PREP was a 2012 recipient of the ABA’s E Smythe Gambrell Award---the leading national award for a professionalism program.  Ms. Jacobowitz provides legal ethics consulting, opinion letters, and CLE training to law firms and legal organizations.  She also serves as a legal ethics expert in litigation matters.  Recently, Ms. Jacobowitz has been involved in cases involving issues such as attorney fees, conflicts of interest, and the unauthorized practice of law.

Ronald C. Minkoff
Partner
Frankfurt Kurnit Klein

Mr. Minkoff is a partner in the Litigation Group and Chair of the Professional Responsibility Group. He is also one of New York State’s leading practitioners in the field of attorney ethics and professional responsibility, representing attorneys in a wide variety of matters including law firm partnership disputes, disciplinary cases, legal fee disputes and legal malpractice and professional liability cases on behalf of both plaintiffs and defendants. Mr. Minkoff also provides ethics opinions and advice to a wide variety of law firm clients.

Credit Information
  • This 90-minute webinar is eligible in most states for 1.5 CLE credits.

  • An excellent opportunity to earn Ethics CLE credits. Note: BARBRI cannot guarantee that this course will be approved for ethics credits in all states. To confirm, please contact our CLE department at pdservice@barbri.com.


  • Live Online


    On Demand

Date + Time

  • event

    Thursday, October 19, 2023

  • schedule

    1:00 p.m. ET./10:00 a.m. PT

  1. Areas ripe for ethical missteps
    1. Fee agreements
    2. Timekeeping and charging expenses
    3. Billing forms
  2. Common ethical challenges and best practices for law firms
    1. Resolving billing disputes
    2. Charging interest on overdue bills
    3. Withdrawing from a representation due to unpaid bills
    4. Using a collection agency
    5. Filing a lawsuit against a non-paying client

The panel will review these and other key issues:

  • What ethics rules govern the billing and fee collection processes?
  • What are some best practices counsel can use to collect past due fees while complying with ethics requirements?
  • What options do practitioners have for resolving billing disputes with clients?