Our Policies

Since 1932, our founding partners, Paul Walter and Rusk Haverfield left us with a legacy of providing our clients comprehensive counsel that instills confidence and security for the future.

We work hard to maintain our legacy and recognize that to do so, we cannot rest on our past achievements. To ensure Walter Haverfield’s rich history of relationships, commitment, and results continues, we are focused on earning your trust and confidence in each matter you entrust to us. In the end, our success is measured by the satisfaction and success of our clients.

Our Commitment to You

As a proactive and innovative advisory law firm, we are committed to providing our clients with the highest quality legal services in a responsive and efficient manner. We make every effort to understand your legal matter and expectations by collaborating to establish reasonable goals and deadlines. We are focused on keeping you informed on the progress of our services and significant developments. In addition, we respond to your inquiries promptly, which includes returning your phone calls or communications promptly and providing you with copies of important correspondence and documents.

While you can be assured we will do our best to provide the highest quality legal services in a responsive, efficient manner, we cannot guarantee the success of any given undertaking. Throughout the duration of our engagement, we may express our opinions or beliefs concerning your matter, various courses of action, and the results that might be anticipated. Any such statement made by any partner or employee of our firm is intended to be an expression of opinion only, based on information available to us at the time, and must not be construed by you as a promise or guarantee of any particular result.

Your Responsibilities to Us

To meet our commitment and allow us to render our legal services, you need to fully and accurately disclose all facts that may be relevant to your matter. We ask you to keep us fully informed of new developments relating to your matter as they occur and that you assist and cooperate with us as appropriate in dealing with your matter. In addition, we expect timely payment of invoices.

Your satisfaction with our legal services is important to us. If you have any questions or comments concerning our services, staffing, billing, or other aspects of our representation, we ask that you promptly contact your Walter Haverfield attorney. Your satisfaction with our services and our responsiveness at all times is a priority throughout our collaboration. If your Walter Haverfield attorney does not fully satisfy your concerns, please feel free to contact our Managing Partner.

Our Normal Billing Policy

Unless a separate billing arrangement is made with your Walter Haverfield attorney, as reflected in an engagement letter, our general policy is to charge for our legal services at normal hourly rates, for the time that our attorneys, paralegals, and electronic discovery support personnel spend working on your legal matter. We base our schedule of normal hourly rates for attorneys, paralegals, and electronic discovery support personnel on several factors, including years of experience, specialization in training and practice, and level of professional attainment. We adjust our schedule of normal hourly rates annually, effective January 1 of each year, to be sure the rates are reasonable and competitive. However, we reserve the right to review and modify our rates more often if necessitated by special factors such as inflationary cost increases affecting our practice. Your Walter Haverfield attorney can provide our schedule of normal hourly rates upon request.

Our attorneys, paralegals and electronic discovery support personnel record their time in 1/10th hour increments. This recorded time includes office and telephone conferences with you and others, correspondence, legal research, drafting and review of documents, court appearance (including waiting time), and necessary travel time. If possible, we may perform other work while traveling to minimize the expense and time chargeable to you. Internal conferences will take place among our personnel, and two or more may attend meetings or proceedings on your behalf. Although this approach might appear to result in duplication of effort, we believe that this practice facilitates communication, improves the quality of the work, and ultimately is more economical. Your Walter Haverfield attorney will always use his or her professional judgment to spend only the time necessary to properly represent you.

In the course of our representation, we may pay certain costs to others on your behalf, which may include, but are not limited to, filing fees, transcript fees, witness fees, courier services, expert costs, outsourced litigation, and electronic discovery support services, out-of-pocket travel costs, and mileage costs. These advanced costs and certain office expenses, such as copier charges, scanning charges, facsimile charges, computerized research, litigation, and electronic discovery support service charges, will be charged to you in addition to the legal fees and will be separately itemized on your invoice. Our charge to you for certain office expenses, such as copier, facsimile, computerized research, litigation, and electronic scanning discovery support services is determined by us as a specified unit cost, intended to reflect various related costs of labor, supplies, and utility costs, and thus may not necessarily reflect the actual direct cost to us.

We bill our invoices on a monthly basis. Unless other terms are reflected in the engagement letter, payment is due promptly upon receipt of our invoice. We reserve the right to impose a reasonable interest charge on any balance that is not paid within 30 days after the date of the invoice.

Termination of Engagement

You may terminate our engagement at any time by written notice to your Walter Haverfield attorney. However, your termination of our engagement does not relieve you of your obligation to pay for legal services rendered or costs incurred or paid on your behalf prior to receiving notice from you. We also have the right to withdraw from our engagement for good cause. Good cause includes the refusal to abide by the terms of the agreement relating to the representation, such as the agreement to assist and to cooperate as appropriate and to pay our invoices promptly.