So unfortunately we had a specialist lawyer for construction law for 5 years and never had to pay an advance once, despite a EUR 250 hourly rate and a significantly higher bill than 10k.
The lawyer is allowed to issue an advance invoice, that is not illegal. Of course, he does not have to. But in our case, he probably wanted to make sure he would get his money without much effort. It would have been okay if he hadn’t referred us, as the 3rd general contractor, to this lousy company that is now insolvent. The lawyer is now of course denying everything, although the managing director of the lousy company confirmed it to me:
Dear Mrs. Z.,
I hereby want to confirm to you the accuracy of the information in this list.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me.
Dear Mr. K.,
Since Mr. RA xxx now denies any referral of your company for the completion of our construction project as well as any communication between you and him, I would like to summarize again the information you provided.
1. It was not me who contacted you, but Mr. xxx called you himself and asked whether you had any capacity available.
2. He told you about our construction project and the problems so far and gave you my contact details.
3. You then called me and inspected the construction site together with me. I handed you the two TÜV reports. Based on these and the on-site visit, you calculated a quotation price, which you communicated to Mr. xxx before I was notified.
4. Mr. xxx then called again and said that the price was too high (especially for the roof repair/replacement), whereupon you lowered the quotation amount according to his instructions. You communicated this final quotation amount to Mr. xxx.
5. This offer was the basis of our construction contract, which we concluded on 8.07.2021.
6. It is not true when Mr. xxxx claims in his letter dated 16.12.2021:
"The contact with the company YYY was made by you by telephone. I was neither verbally nor otherwise involved in the contract negotiations."
Great lawyer! I want to claim that he tricked us both (me and the managing director).