If you're only comfortable offering less time or are willing to offer more that's OK too. The lawyers in this article cited time limits from 10 minutes to more than an hour. The important thing is, once you've set that limit, stick to it. Letting the client take the document home and think about it will help avoid any later claim that they felt pressured or coerced into signing the agreement, Dorner notes. Go by the substance of the discussion.
Some lawyers find the time-limit approach too inflexible.
Once the conversation moves beyond that, the meter starts running. I then lay out, in a general way, what I can do, and what the initial fees are likely to run. This takes only 10-20 minutes, Jones says. After that, the conversation necessarily starts to become more specific, as the client gets into the nuts and bolts of his or her problem. For Joanne Fray, a GP in Lexington, Mass., the criterion boils down to whether the initial discussion is primarily for the client's benefit or her own whether it is to educate the client or to help her evaluate whether this is likely to be a profitable case.