Gagne, Scherer & Associates publishes its fees online and doesn’t use tricks or impose surcharges. Other civilian military law firms don’t post their prices online because they know you wouldn’t hire them if they did, and they hide surcharges in the fine print of their contracts. Good representation can get pricey, and the sticker shock can be alarming for people on military pay, so these firms keep the costs hidden until they have emotional leverage. Some civilian military lawyers who use a flat fee model sneak tricks and surcharges into the contract that stealthily escalate the amount they take from their clients. Overseas cases trigger most of these surcharges.
These military firms don’t disclose their fees online because they want to get you on the phone or into a consultation first: into a conversation where they can gauge your income, urgency, stress level, and ability to pay. Once they know those things, they know how to pitch their fees to you.
It’s exactly like dealing with a car salesman. A car salesman asks what monthly payment you’re looking for so he can work the levers behind the curtain: give you more or less on your trade-in, adjust the interest rate, stretch the loan term, get you with add-ons, adding gross price but keeping your monthly payment emotionally comfortable. The number you end up paying has less to do with the car’s value than with how much the dealer figured out you’d tolerate.
The military lawyer sizing you up on the phone is running the same grift. They want to know where the pressure points are: how frightened you are, how much you can afford, and how far they can push before you end the call.
Firms that use an hourly-billing model do it to soften the shock of unpredictable costs that can run into hundreds of dollars per hour with no ceiling. Flat-fee firms do it for different reasons. If their numbers were public, they’d lose predatory flexibility over their clients. They can’t charge one person ten thousand and the next twenty for the same kind of case. Transparency on prices would remove that leverage. And if their rates were public, a competing firm could undercut them by whatever amount is necessary to poach the case.
Your rank and years of service tell them what you make and what you stand to lose, so they can do quick math about how much pressure you’ll tolerate. If you depend on a housing allowance, worry about losing medical care, or face separation that would cut off retirement or education benefits, those are pressure points. If you have family obligations, a clearance, or a civilian job waiting for you after you leave the service that will vanish with a conviction, those are pressure points. The goal of that first conversation is often to find psychological and emotional vulnerabilities.
To be fair, this approach works because the jeopardy you’re in justifies the price of a good lawyer. The danger is real for a service member facing the loss of a career, retirement, healthcare, and freedom, and maybe a lifetime on the sex offender registry. The danger is real. The math that turns your fear into motivation to hire makes emotional and financial sense once you grasp what’s at stake, after the lawyer lays it all out for you. It’s manipulative, but not inaccurate or (technically) unethical. The problem isn’t in the price; it’s in how the conversation is staged to reach the price.
But Gagne, Scherer & Associates believes the cost would still be justified even if the fees were publicly available before the call and without the scare tactics. Those gimmicks aren’t necessary.
There are four main reasons that even firms that use flat fees will refuse to disclose their fees publicly.
Charging Different Clients Different Fees
They want to be able to charge different clients different fees, depending on how much they can squeeze out of them. It’s a combination of ability-to-pay and how-deep-the-shit-is.
Avoiding Being Undercut by Competitors
We know that when Gagne, Scherer & Associates puts its fees on the website, other firms can offer to do a case for less than what we charge; if they didn’t know what we charge, they couldn’t use that angle. They don’t want to be in a vulnerable position like that, so they keep their amounts hidden.
Preventing Sticker Shock Before the Call
They also know that if people see how much it costs for quality representation, many of them will get sticker shock and back out of the website before making that phone call.
Controlling When the Money Conversation Begins
They are afraid of losing control over when and how the money conversation begins.
Gagne, Scherer & Associates publishes fees for a simple reason. We want anyone who contacts us to know their financial commitment in advance. Nothing ends a good consultation faster than a number the caller can’t afford. It’s uncomfortable for the caller and attorney. Our military lawyers would rather talk with fewer people who already understand the cost than cast a wide net only to have calls end with disappointment. When someone reaches out to us, we want to talk about their case, not break bad news about money. Transparency up front spares everyone that awkward moment.
And your vulnerabilities are none of our business. In more than two decades of consultations, we have never played the game of emotional arithmetic: adding up your pay, benefits, or medical coverage to frighten you into hiring us. We don’t need to. Anyone facing a UCMJ allegation already knows what they stand to lose.
Transparency is a form of respect. When money is discussed openly, it builds trust on both sides. Clients who know the terms before they call can focus on what really matters: whether we’re the right lawyers for the fight.
Why Some Firms Don’t Give Free Consultations
Some military law firms charge a consultation fee to filter out calls that would be a waste of their time. Most people who call civilian military law firms can’t afford to hire them, so charging for the meeting weeds out callers who aren’t likely to come through with a fee. These firms want to spend their time talking to qualified buyers only, not tire-kickers.
Civilian military attorneys learn quickly that firms spend a lot of time fielding calls that have no real chance of landing a fee:
- Callers who can’t afford a military attorney at any price
- Callers who are price shopping
- Callers with legal issues unrelated to the firm’s advertised practice
- Callers who “just have a quick question”
- Callers looking for free advice who lie about being in the market for a civilian lawyer
Military firms that charge for a consultation are trying to spend time talking with military members who are funded and have an interest in what the firm does, and not wasting unpaid time on other calls.
It’s understandable. And from a business perspective it’s probably wise. UCMJ Lawyers considers consultation fees ethical, especially when a firm rolls the consultation fee into the costs of services if they get hired, but we don’t use them.
The goal of a consultation is to help people understand their situation, not test their ability to pay. And people looking for help with a UCMJ case are already in distress when they start looking for an attorney. We find it’s easy to filter out the unserious calls without chilling the conversation before it begins. We absorb it as a cost of being in this line of work.
What Marketing Books Teach Lawyers to Say
We’re sharing these trade secrets, but they’re not really secrets. This stuff is also in books you can get at Amazon. One best-selling manual for lawyers instructs readers to “build trust, rapport, likeability, and authority in a prospect’s mind BEFORE you reveal your price.” The logic is simple: once the client feels safe, the number sounds smaller. The same book describes the goal as making the lawyer “cheap in comparison to any and every other alternative.”
These guides tell lawyers to behave like retail salespeople: warm-up the prospect, delay discussions about price, and reframe the fee as a bargain compared to the ruin that will happen if the lawyer doesn’t get hired. “The end results will be determined by demonstrating that your fee is much lower than the price they would have to pay if convicted,” one passage reads. Another line spells out the psychology: “They’ll realize, ‘I have GOT TO get money to hire this attorney… In fact, I’m saving money by hiring him, not spending.'”
Later chapters call this the “spiel,” a practiced script built around a chart of speculative losses. The author instructs readers to anchor the client’s fear to a number drawn “NOT FROM YOU, but from a third party, authoritative sources.” In his example, the authoritative source is a list of everything a DUI conviction might cost: towing, bail, fines, insurance hikes, probation fees, even a “decreased earning ability due to criminal conviction.” The total at the bottom ($12,771 in this case, a number he made up) becomes the anchor. The lawyer then “steps in to save the day, crosses it out, and puts [his] minuscule retainer fee in comparison.”
Apply that same psychology to a military case. You start with the service member’s rank and time in service, add their housing allowance (dependent rate, ideally), health care, dental care, clothing allowance, tax advantage, combat pay, hazard pay, and the “value” of PME. Multiply it by the number of years left until we hit our twenty. And then the retirement, which is worth over a million, easily.
That’s the “authoritative figure.” Then you step in and say, Look what you stand to lose if this goes bad for you. My fee is a fraction of that.
The book even draws its examples from grocery stores and infomercials. “Your local grocery store uses ‘Saving vs. Spending’ language, and now you know why.”
It’s manipulative, but it’s not inaccurate. Given what’s truly at risk (a career, benefits, reputation, freedom) the math checks out. What’s wrong is doing this with simulated empathy, when it’s an exercise in creating and then exploiting fear.
Gagne, Scherer & Associates: Fees and Travel Costs
Our fees are posted throughout the site, and you can see them below, compared to rates charged by other firms. Based on reports we get from the field, these are market rates for hiring an experienced civilian military lawyer, using a flat fee model as most criminal defense firms do, as of this writing:
Initial/Investigative Stage: Our usual fee is $6,500. Market range of $4,500 to $8,000.
Preliminary Hearing Stage: Our usual fee is between $10,000 and $12,000. Market range of $8,000 to $20,000.
Trial Stage: Our usual fee is $25,000. Market range of $15,000 to more than $100,000.
Administrative hearing: Our usual fee is $15,000 to $20,000. Market range of $10,000 to $50,000.
Travel costs for pretrial hearings, preliminary hearings, trials, and administrative boards are highly variable and billed separately, but they aren’t speculative. They will be discussed in any standard fee agreement.
Tricks and Surcharges to Watch for in a Flat-Fee Contract
Unlike Gagne, Scherer & Associates, many firms use a “flat fee” that isn’t truly flat. The contract language is where the real financial hit happens, often in fine print, and most prospective clients never see it because the trial fee itself is what they’re focused on. A few of the most common add-ons to watch for in civilian military attorney contracts:
The “flat” fee might be for a fixed number of on-site trial days, and additional days are billed at a daily rate when trial runs long.
Hourly overages are imposed on long trial days. The “day” is defined as eight hours, starting when the attorney leaves the hotel, and a trial day that runs ten or twelve generates extra hours billed at the firm’s hourly rate.
Some firms bill their travel time separately from travel costs. Airfare and lodging are one line item; the lawyer’s hours getting there and back are another, often on a per-day rate of several thousand dollars, two days of travel billed in each direction.
You will often get hit with a geographic penalty for cases at hard-to-reach bases: Alaska, OCONUS installations, remote posts.
You need to ask the civilian attorney directly how each of these issues is handled. The answer should be in the contract whether or not they tell you during the consultation. The flat fee for a trial with Gagne, Scherer & Associates covers all work, all time on-site, all travel time, and it’s set in advance. If the trial runs longer than expected, we don’t hit you with additional charges for our time or work, only the additional costs incurred (hotel, etc.).
How Surcharges Raise the Cost for Overseas Cases
Every one of these tricks will likely be triggered for trials at OCONUS locations. Trial days usually run longer than eight hours, and cases will often spill into the weekend or the following week, so witnesses and panel members can be released. And the attorneys don’t want to lose potential billable hours while traveling. For a single attorney, travel time for an OCONUS case can be 50 to 70 hours, round trip, door to door. Measured at $500 an hour as a back-of-envelope illustration, that’s $25,000 to $35,000 of time an attorney could be billing on cases back home. Flat-fee firms recover that opportunity cost one of two ways: by adding day rates for travel on top of the trial fee (maybe $3000 per day, two days in each direction), or by jacking up the trial fee itself to absorb the travel time. Either way, the advertised flat fee on an overseas case is rarely what the client ends up paying.
Gagne, Scherer & Associates charges the same flat fee at Spangdahlem Air Base as at Great Lakes Naval Station; the same for a base 30 hours away from our office as thirty minutes. We’ve represented service members at Sigonella, Aviano, Ramstein, Spangdahlem, Vilseck, Baumholder, Lakenheath, Alconbury, Okinawa, Osan, Kunsan, Camp Casey, Camp Humphreys, and elsewhere, and we’ve been to many overseas locations multiple times. We don’t shift our pricing base-by-base because we don’t think it’s right to penalize someone for serving overseas, and because the work itself is what we want: staying busy, staying current on each branch’s culture, knowing who’s prosecuting and who’s on the bench. That reconnaissance helps our current and future clients.
Now You Have the Knowledge Other Military Firms Don’t Want You to Have
Talk to lawyers who don’t wall you off with bots and call centers and won’t bullshit you about money. Call (224) 935-6172 for a private, transparent consultation.