The client retainer is the contractual source of legal-fee liability.
WA Court of Appeal: Huntingdale Village v Corrs Chambers Westgarth [2018] WASCA 90 [143], reaffirmed in Gray v Lavan [2024] WASCA 147 [16]–[17]. Distinguish the retainer from the costs agreement; test actual work against client instructions and binding safeguards. The Law Society model attachment requirement is published guidance and should not be mistaken for an enacted automatic-invalidity rule.
WA Parliament is conducting an inquiry into the Legal Practice Board. Find out when it started, who's conducting it, and who sits on the Board and complaints committee.
View the inquiry and members →Have a legal costs agreement?Upload or paste it into our WA costs-agreement preview to identify pricing terms, statutory rights and possible excess payments. No CourtRecord upload endpoint is used; PDF/Word extraction uses an external parser.Check my agreement →
Search an exact section or legal principle, see verified judgment passages and cases cited, or explore lawyers’ decisions.
Results are drawn from published judgments and reported appearances, not every case conducted. A lawyer may have an independently verified professional profile without any indexed public judgments. Firm-only and historical references are not personal wins or losses.