Litigation presents as one of the few areas of practice in the South Australian legal market where firms are prepared to push the envelope a little when it comes to raising hourly rates.
Hourly Rates
As is typically the case in the Adelaide market the overwhelming majority of litigation practitioners priced themselves in $400-$500 per hour market &77%).
The portion of litigators dropping their hourly rate under the $400 per hour mark was lower than usual with only 4% of respondents doing so. The greatest surprise though was not that 11% of the market sat above $500 per hour but that some 8% of the market dared to price themselves above $600 per hour.
Alternative Pricing
Some 72% of South Australia’s litigation lawyers indicated they’d used a billing method other than the pure hourly rate in the past 12 months. That’s pretty much bang on the national average for litigators however Adelaide’s litigators differed from the rest of the country when it came to implementation of such.
With 44% of the respondents noting the use of a retainer style agreement in the past year SA’s litigators sat well above the tendency for such arrangements by litigators in other states (between 23%-28%).
The use of fixed and capped fees was lower in South Australia than in other states with some 72% of the market noting their use. In other states this figure ranges between 96%-75%.