Can I Afford a Criminal Defence Lawyer? You Might Be Surprised That They're Likely the Least Expensive Lawyers You Can Retain

It’s normal and sensible to worry about whether you can afford the cost of legal services. And since there are few life events as stressful as being charged with a criminal offence, the last thing you want is added stress over scrambling to come up with the funds to hire a lawyer to provide you with the defence you deserve and need.

Legal fees are always tied to effort, experience and time involved, even if they’re expressed as block flat fees. So for buying a house or drafting a will, the lawyer time required will typically be quite moderate, and thus the fees are usually very affordable.

Family & Civil Litigation Fees are Not the Same as Criminal Defence Fees

While court-based litigation services will often, unfortunately, burn through much more lawyer time than would legal transactional or document drafting services, usually we hear about crazy court costs in the many hundreds of thousands of dollars for family and civil litigation cases that are in court for many, many years, and may involve thousands of documents. What you hear about those cases is totally true, however, their numbers don’t represent the reality of criminal court defence costs.

Very few would ever think of criminal defence costs as being the bargain of all court litigation. Certainly, it’s never a bargain to be charged with a criminal offence. But perhaps oddly enough, for the results they can achieve of full exoneration from criminal conduct accusations and being able to completely move on with your life free of any cloud hanging over you, a relatively modest amount of criminal defence counsel effort and legal expense can work amazing results as compared to other types of litigation.

Why are criminal defence lawyer costs of going to court often so much less than for family and civil litigation lawyers going to court? It’s not because of dramatically different hourly rates. It’s largely because in the family and civil litigation realm, it’s two (or more) private parties, facing off against each other in a blow for blow manner, where one long letter begets one long response, one complex motion may beget a cross-motion, and the pre-trial process can drag on for many years, only to then wait years more for an actual trial date as it’s the criminal trials that get first priority before family and especially civil cases because of the Charter right to trial within a reasonable time being a criminal thing.

The Forced Efficiency of the Criminal Court World

In the criminal defence world, you’re only facing the government on the other side. While it’s true the government in theory has unlimited resources, those resources tend to be spread very thinly in the prosecutions world that I used to work in, with one prosecutor sometimes having carriage of as many as 400 files. Likewise, there are few courtrooms, limited court staff, and even more limited judges to meet all the criminal case demands, which all have little ticking clocks heading towards a best before expiry date. Thus it’s in everyone’s interests to be as efficient as possible.

Prosecutorial efficiency means that defence counsel may be able to negotiate good resolution deals with the Crown, depending on the persuasiveness of the law and facts that can be presented by experienced defence counsel. Such deals can also be pitched directly to a judge in the presence of the Crown, if agreement can’t be reached with the Crown. And even going to trial in the criminal law world might only take a few days in court rather than the weeks of family and civil trial court time (though there are notable exceptions, depending on criminal case complexity).

Value & Predictability of Criminal Defence Fees

Value for your money in criminal defence doesn’t just stop at the trial level. According to statistics, criminal appeals have the highest rates of success of any class of appeals, because of the weight appellate courts place on liberty interests.

In addition to value, criminal defence fees usually come with the feature of predictability, such that defence counsel can quote their clients fixed block fees, rather than the unpredictable hourly charges typical of family and civil litigation. Some highly complex criminal cases do need to proceed on an hourly basis, but even in those highly complex cases advance estimates of likely costs are usually possible.

So how affordable can criminal defence costs really get? Most less complex criminal cases can be resolved for under $5,000 in fees; compare that to family or civil litigation, where starting retainers may be $10,000 and up for litigation, and resolution of any such case that’s already in court is likely to, unfortunately, cost much more than that because of the way ongoing court appearances, information discovery processes, correspondence, and negotiations will continue to consume fees.

Most less complex criminal trials can be run in about two days of court time, leading to a trial fee of between $10,000 and $15,000, in addition to the analysis and resolution fee that will usually have been paid earlier. Compare that to the average family or civil trial, where fees always seem to exceed $100,000, and often are closer to $200,000 and up.

There are unfortunately lots of family and civil litigants who run out of money partway through the process to continue to fund legal counsel, because of the war of attrition processes involved. That doesn’t need to ever be the case in the criminal defence realm, where those of the most modest means are urged to apply for Legal Aid, and everyone else can focus on how to best take advantage of value and predictability in fees.