In Florida Nonbinding arbitration, the prevailing party is entitled to reasonable legal expenses (lawyers fees).
IANAL so I do not have a sense or experience as to what is / is not reasonable.
Any "rules of thumb" are also appreciated
The starting point of an analysis of reasonable fees is to calculated the "lodestar" which is a reasonable hourly rate times a reasonable number of billable hours devoted to the task.
A reasonable rate is a function of the state and/or metro area, the type of practice involved, the sophistication of the work involved, and the experience and partner v. non-partner status of the lawyer. Where I live, a bar association committee conducts and publishes an economic survey of lawyer compensation in the state every few years broken out with many details which is a benchmark for this analysis. If the lawyer's usually billing rate is in the reasonable range it will usually be honored. In practice, the most common adjustment is to downgrade the hours of a lawyer with little staff that bills a typically fully staffed lawyer rate for paralegal type tasks to a typical paralegal rate. Rate needs to be evaluated on a lawyer by lawyer basis. Often a senior partner will do more skilled tasks like negotiation and trial appearances at a higher rate, while a junior associate or paralegal will do less skilled tasks like organizing client documents and marking them up for disclosure to an adverse party.
It is customary for U.S. lawyers to bill by the tenth of an hour in itemized time statements for each professional billing on a case with a date and description of each task done.
A reasonable number of hours is very difficult for a non-lawyer to establish. Lengthy documents with legal research and analysis, whether or not presented to a court, typically take multiple hours per page. Preparation for depositions, trials and important meetings will often be 1-2 hours per anticipated hour of the event. Meetings, mediations, telephone calls, hearings, depositions, etc. take what they take, plus a little additional time for follow up notes, calendaring deadlines that arise during them or giving someone instructions to do so, updating people not present about what happened, etc. Typically, certain brief tasks like short phone calls, with have a minimum base amount of 0.1-0.25 hours. Charges for working lunches and travel are sometimes controversial.
Once the lodestar analysis is done, reasonable fees may be adjusted up or down for various considerations (more often down than up), on a global analysis basis. A lodestar may be adjusted down for being unreasonable by comparison to the amount in controversy (but not below an amount necessary to avoid malpractice), for securing a particularly poor result, or for being exceptionally inefficient to the point where it appears that lots of time is really just learning how to do an area of practice for the first time. Lodestar is typically adjusted up only for an exceptionally efficient very positive result (e.g. walking into a meeting early on in the case and securing a full settlement in an hour or two avoiding dozens of hours of litigation time later). Time spent correcting mistakes or addressing billing issues typically isn't billed, nor is social conversation with clients.
There is a long literature on the full range of adjustments commonly seen. There is also a global understanding developed by senior lawyers and judges over decades of practice of what an overall case will typically cost or how much work goes into a task. Drafting a deed shouldn't cost $15,000 absent very exceptional circumstances. Preparing and efiling a routine motion for extension of time shouldn't involve $3,000 in fees absent very exceptional circumstances. A routine debt collection case should usually not involve much more than about 50% of the amount owed unless the amount owed is very small indeed.
The average hourly rate for legal services in Florida according to Statista was very close to 300 USD between 2020 and 2023. This does not reflect the price of any case though.
The Clio Legal Trends Report delivered very similar numbers and claims that in 2024 the average legal representation in Florida cost 328 USD per hour. However, that is the grand average over all types of cases and billing items, as shown below. As one of the large software suppliers for legal billing software, the Clio report seems to be based on what their customers (or a subset of them) bill for certain items, though the numbers that appear on the bill can vary widely, depending on who is included in the sample size.
One of the most relevant cost factors is the expertise of a lawyer when it comes to pricing: Where a beginning lawyer might bill much less than the average market rate (or is only able to bill far less than the ~80% of the hours worked as billable), a very prestigious law firm or partnership can bill their customers 1000 USD/hour or more. This number stems from the average 961 USD/hour that LegalDive cites from the 2024 Brightflag Report on the Am Law 100®, a direct competitor to Clio. The AM Law 100 is the ranking of the 100 largest law companies, so is more the "cream of the crop" than the average, though also a good indicator for how wide the field is.
Do note that there's also, an increasing number of legal services that don't bill by the hour (and thus the complexity of the matter) but price a flat rate for specific services, and others work on contingency.
Taking the average of all lawyers that practice in Florida in a certain field is listed as follows in the Clio Legal Trends Report 2024: Elder Law was the most expensive item listed with 520 USD per hour, followed by Immigration (453 USD/h), Trusts (422 USD/h), Will and Estates (420 USD/h) and Intellectual property (419 USD/h). On the other end of the spectrum, Juvenile cases are billed at less than 89 USD/hour.
But, those averages are not the sole reason for pricing and only depict the average rates over the whole state. As ohwilleke points out, different towns might have different pricing, based on the availability of legal counsel to the general population and the cost of living in the area. In general, a Miami lawyer will have a higher rate than someone in Midway Florida.
While the ABA points to the Bureau of Labor statistics, indicating that the average lawyer is paid a salary of 87.51 USD over all the USA, and 70.83 USD in Florida on average, those wages only make one part of the costs a client pays for their legal representation: the lawyer's office is not free, they might have a secretary that they can't put on the billing and neither can they charge the client directly for their billing systems, and legal research services such as Westlaw are pricy: According to a reddit user, a westlaw subscription can be more than 1000 USD a month!
Depending on the area and specialty of the lawyer, as well as the expertise, 400 USD/hour billable is between "pricy" and "not out of the ordinary."
