Affordability rather than innovation is the key for South Australia’s planning and environment lawyers. Admittedly affordability is always paramount in the Adelaide legal market but it’s the surprising lack of innovation with only 71% of the state’s planning and environment lawyers having offered a pricing model other than the hourly rate in the past 12 months that sits as key. In other practices areas/jurisdictions the use of alternative pricing generally sits no lower than 80%.
Those firms and individuals who did use alternative pricing models used fixed price most commonly. The use of retainer agreements was unusually common with over 30% of firms adopting this method.
Hourly Rate
The $500 per hour mark tends to be a price ceiling for Adelaide’s lawyers and planning and environment lawyers are no exception to this. Some 87% of the market’s lawyers priced themselves under $500 per hour with most finding the $400-$500 price band as the most friendly.
Planning and environment when looked at on a national scale tends to be an area where a strong body of lowly priced service offering exist and Adelaide fits within this mold having 24% of the market price themselves in the $300-400 band.
