Fee's for court letters

racso1975

I work for a non profit addiction service and we are regularly asked for letters from solicitors for clients attending the service. We of course have cleint consent to forward on these letters.

I was wondering is there a standard fee that can be charged for these letters for clients availing of the free legal aid system?

chopser

who do you want to charge?

racso1975

Well my thinking and i'm probably very wrong on this is that we would charge the solicitor who requests the letter and they then recoup the cost of it when submitting their costs?

chopser

IYou are a non profit addiction service that I assume offers your services free of charge to addicts?

When addicts get in trouble then you are proposing to charge them for a letter that would be used as proof that they are receiving treatment by their solicitor in order to keep them out of prison. I imagine that the letter is for the benefit of your clients, it's not for the solicitor.

I'm sure you could charge but it seems strange to me that you would offer the treatment for free and then charge for proof that they attended.

racso1975

chopser wrote: »

IYou are a non profit addiction service that I assume offers your services free of charge to addicts?

When addicts get in trouble then you are proposing to charge them for a letter that would be used as proof that they are receiving treatment by their solicitor in order to keep them out of prison. I imagine that the letter is for the benefit of your clients, it's not for the solicitor.

I'm sure you could charge but it seems strange to me that you would offer the treatment for free and then charge for proof that they attended.

It does seem strange alright but we have lost over 100k in funding in the last 18 months and are looking at ways of meeting some our overheads and to a certain extent even stay operating.

Ken.

You could ask some solicitors you deal with to donate a few ream's of paper or boxes of envelope's for your cause. Not to expensive on them ordering in bulk and goodwill goes a long way

Victor

chopser wrote: »

IYou are a non profit addiction service that I assume offers your services free of charge to addicts?

When addicts get in trouble then you are proposing to charge them for a letter that would be used as proof that they are receiving treatment by their solicitor in order to keep them out of prison. I imagine that the letter is for the benefit of your clients, it's not for the solicitor.

I'm sure you could charge but it seems strange to me that you would offer the treatment for free and then charge for proof that they attended.

The flip side is that they have staff to provide drug treatment, counselling and ancilliary services, not writing letters. Writing up detailed statements and references can be extremely time consuming and a doctor would charge several hundred euro for a 1-2 page letter.

racso, work out how long one of these letters takes to do. Take the cost (apply some cost even if the staff are volunteers) of the relevant staff (doctor, counsellor, nurse, social worker, occupational therapist, etc., but perhaps not the typist) and multiply it by a factor of three. That is how a commercial organisation would price it. Apply a discount as appropriate.

Be aware that some addicts (if that is what your clients are) do have access to their own money and if the solicitor is being paid, then so should you. Better than the money being spent on their poison of choice.

dats_right

I would have thought that the solicitors that are requesting these letters are funded under the criminal legal aid scheme and not by a fee paying private clients, meaning that the solicitors are paid a set fee for their work. I do not practise in this area and I am not involved in the criminal legal aid scheme, however I am sure a lawyer practising in this area will confirm, but I do not think the solicitors could recover your fee under this scheme. So the solicitors would probably simply just stop requesting such letters from you, which could have a detrimental effect on your own clients.

Incidentally, the fees paid to lawyers under the criminal legal aid scheme have also been cut savagely over the past couple of years.