For a case that already has a lawyer
I come in as co-counsel on the part that has to be won in a courtroom — the motion, the hearing, the trial, the collection. Your attorney stays lead on everything else, and stays your attorney.
Why this is not an awkward conversation
Most lawyers do not try cases. That is not a criticism — it is how the profession is shaped. The transactional lawyer who wrote your contract, the firm that has handled your business for twenty years, the solo who knows your family: they are the right people for what they do, and a contested hearing is a different job.
So the usual arrangement is simple. They keep the client relationship and everything outside the courtroom. I take the litigation. Fee splits are agreed in writing per matter and comply with Tex. Disciplinary R. 1.04(f) — which requires your written consent to the arrangement, and you should expect to be asked for it.
The part you can actually do today
The reason co-counsel arrangements go wrong is not fee disputes. It is two firms keeping two copies of a case and discovering in the third month that they are not the same case. So there is one file, both firms are in it, and who can see what is decided by the matter rather than by whoever last forwarded an email.
Not a shared folder and not a link that anyone holding it can open. A seat on the matter, with their own login and their own second factor, that can be granted and revoked — and the revocation is the end of the access, not a note asking them to stop.
A document released into the case file is released to the people on the case, in the file where the work is happening. There is no version that lives in an email thread and no moment where somebody is reading the second-newest draft.
Where a matter has counsel on the other side, what each firm can read is derived from the case and the side — not from a permission somebody set. A conversation among your own lawyers is not reachable by the other side because of how it is built, not because of a setting.
And it is not theoretical
A referring firm sent a post-judgment collection matter across the plug-in, took a seat on the case, and works it from their own login. That is what the mechanism is for and it has been used, which is a different sentence from “we offer this”.
Which parts of the matter I am taking and which I am not; what the fee split is and that it needs your written consent under Rule 1.04(f); and that the client relationship is theirs. If any of that is not in writing before I start, something has gone wrong.
If you would rather I look at it before anybody has a conversation about who does what, that is fine too. Written read, same working day, no charge and no obligation.
Send your file →