Samar Al-Mogren
I DON’T think it is acceptable or permissible to fetch a lawyer from an Arab country to take up a case in a Saudi court. Suppose this is permissible, then the fee charged by this expatriate lawyer, along with the charges for his travel and stay, would not even be one quarter of the exorbitant and illogical fees charged by a Saudi lawyer.
I think it is high time that we looked into lawyers’ fees and started regulating them. It is also high time that we enacted a bylaw that would set official rates for legal services. Leaving the matter in the current absurd and random state invites a lot of personal judgments that may lead to people being conned.
What draws one’s attention is the fees charged by law offices. They differ completely from one firm to another. This is due to fees for legal services being unregulated. Furthermore, there is no floor or ceiling for a lawyer’s fees in a legal case.
A woman wrote a letter informing me that her lawyer demanded fees for her divorce case that exceeded her dowry, which she had to return to her ex-husband according to the judge’s order. So where is the supervision over lawyers’ firms or offices?
The lawyer’s fee is one of his rights. However, when this fee exceeds a reasonable, logical level, then it has gone beyond his financial dues, which he deserves for representing a client. I know there are people who will say that the absence of a bylaw specifying lawyers’ fees is due to the differences between cases.
But this is not a difficult matter. If the authorities concerned list the cases being heard in courts, then they can enact a bylaw establishing lawyers’ fees within appropriate criteria. The cases can be grouped into categories evaluated according to the reputation of the lawyer or law firm and the lawyer’s experience. It is also unjust to set the same charges for legal services provided by an experienced lawyer having an excellent reputation and a newly qualified lawyer.
This classification and regulation of lawyers’ fees is important, as it would protect lawyers and plaintiffs alike. The fees should not be left in the current chaotic manner, allowing some law offices to charge whatever they like for representing clients in court. This is a humanitarian profession in the first place and its first objective is to defend the client’s right. How can a lawyer searching for the truth deny his client the right to pay a just fee that suits the case?
It is true that the legal profession is nascent in the Kingdom. Everything at its start is considered to be in an experimental stage in which there are both positive and negative results, but this should not prevent the existence of a bylaw that protects all from some people’s greed or attempt to profiteer from humanitarian issues.
The exorbitant fees set by some law offices contradict the lofty message of the legal profession. Some people are forced to relent on a lawyer’s demand for an illogical fee in return for assistance to get a verdict that pleases them. This cannot happen if we revere this respectable profession.
The matter cannot be left to personal judgment. Without a bylaw governing lawyers’ rates and a practical body to supervise it, this profession will be lost amid the trade-off and greed by some lawyers. Hence, our happiness over the existence and spread of this profession in our society won’t be complete.
