Your lawyer fees
If you’ve never been responsible for your own law practice (most people haven’t!), you might be wondering why lawyers cost so much and what those fees cover. In the interest of transparency, Prison & Police Law wants you to know where your money goes, so we took a snapshot of some of our monthly expenses.
The reality of owning a small business is that as a sole proprietor, a lawyer’s salary is not regular. After expenses are paid, whatever is left over is income. You’ll see more details about that at the bottom of this post.
Monthly expenses:
Online office software such as Word, Adobe Acrobat, SmallPDF, EFax, QuickBooks, Dropbox, and secure cloud-based storage for law firm records (Clio Manage): $360/mo
Rent, commercial tenants’ insurance, office parking, internet, photocopier, water cooler rental: $1000/mo
Bank fees: $10/mo
Fees for membership to professional organizations for mentoring and professional development: $40/mo
Malpractice insurance and law society membership (required for all practicing lawyers): $425/mo
Calgary Transit pass: $112/mo
= $1947/mo
These basic overhead expenses are almost $2000/mo. This doesn’t include incidental expenses like small office improvements such as furniture, signage, security, etc. It also doesn’t include the cost of outsourcing some administrative work like phone calls and emails, which is an additional $27 per hour of work.
On average during the months of January-April 2022, Amy made $3600/month of take-home pay from operating Prison & Police Law. That’s an income of about $43,000/year after taxes. However, the average hourly wage for a junior lawyer in Alberta is $45.18/hr. If Amy made that, she’d pay herself $7228.80/mo before taxes—almost exactly double what she makes now.
Hopefully this provides some helpful context the next time you wonder what your lawyer’s bills cover.