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Professional fees

3rd August 2018

By: Terry Mackenzie-hoy

     

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You can get advice from a fairly good consulting engineer at a rate of about $700 for an eight-hour day, which is near enough to R1 200 an hour.

This would be a person who is registered as a professional engineer and has at least 20 years’ experience. The rates that individuals and consulting practices may charge are set out in a Government Gazette. However, as a consulting engineer, you can charge what you like. This is not a great idea, since clients very seldom think that consulting engineers are necessary for design work – they think that, most of the time, the builder or electrician or air-conditioning contractor can do all the work, including the design, and they are miffed that they have to shell out for something they consider has no value. Charge too much and they are gone.

Consulting engineers/professional engineers also have a code of conduct, which is a set of rules that can be summed up thus: “Don’t do anything your mother wouldn’t like, and be nice.”

It is a bit of a shock when we engineers meet the legal profession. I used to think that lawyers were a fairly dignified group of people until I started reading correspondence from various attorneys. Letters contain innuendo, accusations, misinformation and unreasonable demands. Very often, these letters are penned by inexperienced candidate attorneys and vetted by partners and often these miss the point, and have spelling and grammatical errors.

I am not talking about one or two examples. In one letter, for example, a woman asked her ex-husband’s lawyer to advise if she had the passports of her children in safekeeping. The lawyer replied and wrote that the woman was trying to waste her time to inflate the legal costs to her ex-husband. Thus, we conclude that writing ‘yes’ would cost a significant sum. Hello?

Obsession with fees does seem to haunt the legal profession. In one case, a father wanted custody of the children. Since the children are well fed, clothed, healthy and well housed and have a caring mother who transports them to school, one would imagine that the lawyers on both sides would agree that custody by the father would not happen. But no! The lawyers (both the mother’s lawyer and the father’s) recommended she see a marital psychologist who is prepared to interview the mother, the father and the children, inspect the home and write a report – all for a sum of R60 000. Wow! Nice work if you can get it.

Heck, I was an expert witness in a murder trial for eight days, with our lead engineer, and we charged R65 000. Two engineers – so, effectively, half the shrink’s rate. This is similar to the recent fee I had to pay for an educational psychologist to tell me that a young girl had dyslexia: R4 500 for three hours. Golly.

One has to ask: Is the rate for the shrinks and the lawyers too high, or is the engineers’ too low? I know that consulting engineers are only 50% efficient and so we have about 70 ‘billable hours’. At a rate of R1 200 an hour, we can raise about R84 000 a month, which is not great, but okay. If the educational psychologist does the same sort of hours, the fee is about R20 000 more, at R105 000. The marital psychologist does a great deal more – three investigations rake in about R180 000 a month.

It is my belief that, in marital and family matters where psychologists and lawyers are involved, unholy cartels develop. The lawyers steer the work to the shrinks in the expectation that the shrinks will send them work. They all go on first name terms. It is all good business. The engineers have no such interests. There is nothing to be done but, if I am right, then it is not fair.

Edited by Martin Zhuwakinyu
Creamer Media Senior Deputy Editor

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