Norfolk solicitor who charged by file weight to be struck off
Thursday 26 November 2009 by Catherine Baksi
A Norfolk solicitor who admitted charging clients by the weight of their file is to be struck off after a hearing before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.
Trevor Hobden, a former equity partner at the now defunct Canada House Partnership in Norfolk, told the SDT he had not been properly trained to cost work and that he calculated how much to charge the estates of dead clients by weighing the files in his hand.
The tribunal heard that Hobden charged almost three times the proper fee and billed for thousands of pounds of work that he had not done.
He was found guilty of taking money from a client account in respect of costs without delivering a bill, taking money that was not properly due to him, overcharging a client, and failing to give clients proper information. He was cleared of having compromised or impaired his integrity.
Hobden will be removed from the solicitor’s register on 8 December 2009.
Comments
Never do we hear of Legal
Never do we hear of Legal Undercharging?
Undercharging
Then you should ask your solicitor to write a Will for you! It is unlikely that your solicitor will bemoan the fact that he is not charging enough to cover the corporate risk element of the work and is open to criticism and a negligence claim from disgruntled beneficiaries even where the Will has been drafted in direct accordance with the instructions given.
undercharging
And when did you last hear about a garage or an estate agent or a funeral director or a dentist undercharging? All of which make far more money than lawyers, the easy target because of their over-regulation and consumer protection. If all walks of life were a slither as well (over) regulated then either the economy would come crashing to its knees or the country would be renamed Great Utopia!