If this is the first time that you have contacted our office, we thank you for your business. If you would like a consultation with one of our family law or personal injury lawyers, a specialized intake worker will be happy to speak to you about your matter and learn more about your inquiry. An intake will then be prepared and forwarded to one of our lawyers, who will contact you directly.
For services such as notarizing of documents, preparation of simple wills and powers of attorney, and simple “divorce only” applications, it is usually easy to predict what your matter will cost from start to finish. As a result, we offer a series of fixed fees for your convenience. Please call in to inquire further.
For most services offered at Woolcott Krashinsky LLP, we charge an hourly rate for our services. This hourly rate is agreed upon with you when we open our file. You can expect to be billed for all time spent working on your file. This includes (but is not limited to) court attendances; meetings with you; drafting of documents; telephone calls with you, the opposing lawyer, or the opposing party; and reviewing correspondence and e-mails.
With respect to most personal injury, motor vehicle, and disability claims, we offer a “deferred fee” service usually known as a contingency fee. In these cases, our office does not seek any payment or retainer from you up front. Instead, we agree to defer our fees until the matter is settled.
Not all matters meet the eligibility requirement for contingency fee service. Some more complicated or high-risk files require a more traditional billing model. Please contact us to ask which type of service best fits your case.
Most family law, employment law, and estate matters require payment of a retainer up front. The specific amount of the retainer is dependent on your case. More complicated or lengthy matters may require a larger retainer. By contrast, straightforward or procedural matters may require a much smaller retainer.
A retainer, once paid to our office, is deposited in a trust account. Your retainer remains your money that we hold in trust on your behalf, with the right to bill you from time to time for services rendered, and use the retainer as payment for same until it is exhausted.
Once you have retained our services, you will be sent a reporting letter setting out the terms of our retainer agreement, which we will ask you to review, sign and return to our office.
We offer free consultations with respect to most personal injury, motor vehicle accident, and disability claims. Please contact our office and one of our staff will be pleased to attend to your matter.
With respect to family law, child protection, employment, estate, and most other matters, we generally offer brief consultations via telephone. There is no charge for new clients to call into our office and speak to one of our lawyers. During these consultations, we will be happy to provide you with general information about the legal issues which apply to your matter.
It is important to remember that we cannot give you focused advice about your specific matter, or tell you what you should do with respect to a time-sensitive issue. To obtain detailed advice that pertains to your individual case, we offer consultations at our offices, which we are happy to schedule at your convenience. You may speak to one of our lawyers directly to discuss the fee for this service.
We offer free consultations for some of our matters, most commonly for matters where contingency fees apply. However this does not apply to other matters, where we offer paid consultations.
Family law and employment law matters are complicated. It is hard to offer a “quick fix” answer to most issues which arise. It is our experience that a free consultation lasting a half-hour or less cannot provide you with the information that you require to assist you, and may in fact serve to confuse or misdirect clients.
It is our experience that our clients leave our consultations with a high level of satisfaction for the service they have obtained. A paid consultation gives you the flexibility to make informed choices about where your matter will go. If you finish your consultation and want to retain us to do more work for you, we will generally "roll in" the consultation fee into our retainer fee.
Our lawyers have many years experience practising in the area of family law and generally will wish to meet with you and discuss your matter in depth, to ensure that you are receiving only the most accurate advice possible.