Lawyers in general tend to charge clients an hourly rate for any legal services they provide. This has also been true of bankruptcy work, however, in recent years there has been a flood of set priced bankruptcy attorneys entering the fray. This has caused most law firms to follow suit. Because of fixed pricing, you should not be using price as a selection tool. Rather, experience and reputation should be your main influence.
With set prices, the hourly rate has come down significantly. Fixed price bankruptcy work ranges from $1,000 upwards. At $1,000 for roughly 10 hours work, that’s a meager $100 per hour for a highly experienced bankruptcy attorney. It’s impossible to quote prices for work such as bankruptcy as the costs involved relate to how much work is required. In Chapter 13 cases, the court may set the fees that a law firm can charge to handle your case.
Engaging a bankruptcy law firm to help you through the bankruptcy process is one of the few ‘new’ debts you may enter into when contemplating bankruptcy – and to answer an obvious question that many people ask, your lawyers fees cannot be discharged through bankruptcy. Most law firms will allow petitioners time to pay their legal fees – for Chapter 13 petitioners, that could be over one or two years.
As a rough indication of bankruptcy legal costs, you can expect to pay between $1,000 and $2,000 for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy petition and between $3,000 and $4,000 for a Chapter 13. Business Chapter 11 bankruptcy petitions can cost anywhere from $10,000 with some costing in the hundred’s of thousands. If you are concerned about the legal costs of filing for bankruptcy, ask your bankruptcy law firm for an estimate of costs and whether or not you can pay those costs off over time. Legal costs do not include the actual court costs for filing for bankruptcy.
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