Payment Plans and Financing for a Texas DWI Lawyer

Flat Fee, Retainer, or Hourly

Three structures exist in criminal defense, and knowing which one you are being offered tells you what you are actually committing to.

A flat fee is one agreed price for a defined scope of work. You know the total on day one. This is the usual structure in Texas DWI practice, because a DWI is a reasonably predictable body of work and a fixed number lets a client plan.

A retainer is a deposit. The lawyer bills hourly against it, and when it runs low you are asked to replenish it. The total is not knowable at the start.

Straight hourly billing, with no deposit, is uncommon in criminal defense and rare in DWI work.

The practical question to ask is not which label a firm uses but what the number covers and what it does not. See What a DWI Lawyer Costs in Texas.

Payment Plans: How They Are Usually Structured

A payment plan in a criminal case usually means the same total fee, paid across a schedule rather than in one transaction. It is not a discount and it is not financing in the lending sense. It is the same number, divided.

The common shape is a payment at signing followed by scheduled installments on set dates, with a card kept on file and charged automatically when each date arrives. Two conditions typically come attached. The card has to keep working, because a declined payment usually ends the plan. And plans are ordinarily offered on new cases rather than on probation revocations, because a revocation moves too fast for a payment schedule to run its course before the work is done.

It is also worth understanding that a payment plan does not change when the fee becomes earned. Those are separate things. The fee is earned as the lawyer passes defined points in the case, and that can happen well before your last installment is due.

Credit Cards and Third-Party Financing

Two different things get called financing, and the difference matters to you.

Paying by card is just a payment method. You owe the firm, and you are paying with a credit card instead of a check. Whatever interest your card charges is between you and your card issuer.

Third-party financing is a lender in the middle. A finance company pays the firm, and you repay the finance company on their terms. The advantage is that representation can begin immediately without you having the full amount. The thing to read carefully is the lender’s agreement, because the interest rate, the term, and what happens if you miss a payment are set by the lender and not by the law firm.

If you are offered financing, ask which of the two it is, and if it is a lender, ask for the lender’s terms in writing before you agree to anything.

When Someone Else Pays

Parents pay for their adult children constantly in these cases. Spouses, partners, and employers do too. It is permitted and it is ordinary, and a standard Texas fee agreement expressly allows a third party to pay the fee in whole or in part.

What it does not change is who the client is.

If your mother pays your fee, you are still the client. The lawyer’s duties run to you. The confidential information is yours. The decisions that belong to a defendant, whether to accept a plea offer and whether to go to trial, belong to you and not to whoever wrote the check. And your lawyer cannot discuss your case with the person paying unless you agree to it.

That last point surprises people on both sides of it, and it is worth settling out loud at the start. If you want a parent kept informed, say so and your lawyer can act on it. If you do not, that is your call and it holds.

Paying for the License Case Separately

There is a narrower option that people in a genuine cash squeeze rarely know about.

Your license case is a separate proceeding from your criminal case, with its own 15-day deadline that starts running when the notice of suspension is served on you. It can be engaged on its own. If you cannot put together the full fee for the criminal defense right now, protecting the license is the piece that cannot wait, because the criminal case will still be there in a month and the license window will not.

Whether a given firm takes license-only engagements varies. It is a specific question worth asking rather than assuming.

See The ALR Hearing and The 15-Day Rule.

Costs That Are Not the Attorney Fee

When you are budgeting, remember that the fee and the case expenses are two different bills. Experts, transcripts, laboratory discovery charges, subpoena service, and court filing fees are ordinarily billed to you on top of the fee, and they usually are not part of a payment plan.

The full list, and what a fee does and does not include, is on What a DWI Fee Does and Does Not Cover.

If You Cannot Afford Any of It

If none of the above is within reach, you have not run out of options and you should not simply go to court alone.

You can ask the court to appoint a lawyer. Appointment depends on the court finding that you cannot afford counsel, and the standards are set county by county. It is worth knowing up front that appointment covers your criminal case and generally does not cover the license hearing, which means the license side often goes unhandled.

That whole question, including how to make the request and what self-representation actually costs you in a case built on laboratory evidence, is covered on Court-Appointed Counsel, Public Defenders, and Going It Alone.