When you hire a divorce or family law attorney, you will be required to pay the firm a retainer fee. A retainer is a fee that you pay to your attorney when you hire them to represent you. Pucci | Pirtle, LLC only takes security retainers. A security retainer is an up-front amount paid at the commencement of our services and it remains the property of the client until our firm applies it to charges for services rendered. Every month you will receive a bill, and that bill will reflect the hours and charges spent on your case; the bill will show what funds remain in the trust account and what funds were earned. Earned funds will be transferred from the trust account and will be then paid to the firm. Any unearned funds remaining after the completion of our representation will be promptly refunded to the client. If the retainer is expended and your case is still ongoing (full disclosure – it is rare for an initial retainer to cover your entire case), you will owe a replenishment retainer to the firm. Pucci|Pirtle does not handle divorce or family law cases on a flat fee – I don’t know any attorney who does, but we do handle real estate transactions and estate planning matters for flat fee retainers.
Our retainer agreement is longer than most firm’s and explains all about how you will be charged, how you are expected to pay, and what is required of our firm in the course of our representation and what we expect of our clients. Read the agreement (and anything!) before you sign and ask questions.
The staff at Schwarz & Pucci, LLC would like to announce that Julia A. Pucci has been appointed to serve on the Illinois State Bar Association Family Law Section Council for the 2012-2013 period. Per the website for the Illinois State Bar Association, the mission of the ISBA Family Law Section is as follows:
- to encourage and support a high level of professional and ethical commitment and expertise among those who practice family law in all its substantive branches;
- to remain sensitive to the changing needs and mores of families and individual family members in our society; and
- to respond, through reasoned efforts directed toward the appropriate branch of government, and bar and/or the public;
- to accomplish understanding of the law as it exists and is applied, or change of that law, where it is needed.
Serving on the Council is quite an honor, as committee members help to create seminars for continuing legal education, draft and review proposed and pending legislation, contribute to the Section newsletters and, overall, attempt to affect a positive difference in the overall legal community.
Congratulations again to Attorney Pucci!
– Julie Pirtle
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