For the non-lawyers, I’d add that two of the factors you may not be thinking about are (A) the cost of the attorney gathering enough information to make even a semi-reliable estimate of expected costs; and (B) the risk of client error from various sources.
As a general matter: Client officials are not lawyers and may not understand what information is relevant to bring to the lawyer, even with some guidance they will need to err on the side of overproduction. So the lawyer often needs to review a lot of irrelevant information to better ascertain the actual risks involved, which raises costs.
Second, client officials have their own motivations which may run at cross purposes to the lawyer making an accurate risk assessment. Let’s say—hypothetically—that an employee did something that is in retrospect really inadvisible and that exposed the organization (and possibly themselves) to significant liability. That the attorney represents the corporation and not the employee, and should be explaining that to employees if there is any risk of a conflict of interest between the employee and the corporation. How likely is it that the employee is going to ’fess up with minimal prompting?
For the non-lawyers, I’d add that two of the factors you may not be thinking about are (A) the cost of the attorney gathering enough information to make even a semi-reliable estimate of expected costs; and (B) the risk of client error from various sources.
As a general matter: Client officials are not lawyers and may not understand what information is relevant to bring to the lawyer, even with some guidance they will need to err on the side of overproduction. So the lawyer often needs to review a lot of irrelevant information to better ascertain the actual risks involved, which raises costs.
Second, client officials have their own motivations which may run at cross purposes to the lawyer making an accurate risk assessment. Let’s say—hypothetically—that an employee did something that is in retrospect really inadvisible and that exposed the organization (and possibly themselves) to significant liability. That the attorney represents the corporation and not the employee, and should be explaining that to employees if there is any risk of a conflict of interest between the employee and the corporation. How likely is it that the employee is going to ’fess up with minimal prompting?