For New Clients

First Call

During your initial call to Altera, you will speak with someone who can help provide guidance for the decisions you will face in choosing a law firm and explain the process of becoming a client of Altera.

If you want to hire Altera as your law firm, then an initial attorney consultation will be arranged. At that time, you will begin the substantive aspects of hiring an attorney.

Conflict Issues

Attorney ethics guidelines prevent information that is learned by an attorney while working for one client to someday be used to the advantage of their competitor. Further, Altera never wants a client to feel that their decision to share confidential information with Altera will ever come back to haunt them.

Therefore, before agreeing to represent any client, big or small, Altera conducts a thorough check to ensure that we do not agree to represent someone whose interests are adverse to one of our existing clients.

We will make no exception to this practice unless both parties, old client and new client, agree to our representation after full disclosure, in accordance with the ethics rules.

Engagement Agreements

To protect you as well as ourselves, we clarify exactly what is expected of us and what is expected of you with a written engagement agreement.

We want to have good communication with you about the scope and nature of our engagement. That communication begins with our engagement agreement.

Retainers

Like all law firms, we require the deposit of a reasonable retainer into a Trust account. The amount will vary according to the type of legal work to be provided. Oversight of the Trust accounts is done by the Minnesota Supreme Court.

All interest earned by these accounts goes to the Minnesota Supreme Court and is used for indigent legal services. Any balance in your account that exceeds the price of your project will be refunded to you.

Estimates

Before beginning any legal work for you, we will provide you with an estimate of what your legal work will cost, and what amount government filing fees will be. That way, you know going into your project what your estimated costs will be.