I received a letter today from one of my clients, and from reading posts I see many of you out there have received a similar communication.  As they have with all of you, they are attempting to dictate to us the ridiculously low fees they want to pay for our services (ex:  $15 for a document retrieval in a county that I have to drive 90 miles just to look up the book and page.  It is not cost effective for me to  even start my car for a $15 fee!) .  I have received similar "dictations" from clients in the past and have NEVER accepted their outlandish rate reductions. 

My response to this particular letter was to ask the client to remove me from their vendor list.  I would never encourage any of you to fire a client, but I would encourage you to carefully weigh the benefits of silently accepting this arbitrary fee slashing.  I for one cannot afford to lose money for the simple privilege of having something to do with my time.  In my eyes that is tantamount to paying someone for the privilege of working for them.

If you are looking for other abstractors to discuss this situation with, you have come to the right place on Source of Title.  You can also look for discussion forums on LinkedIn . . . I know NALTEA has one for instance.   If you do join the NALTEA discussion group, look for the newsletter that they publish once a month . . . you may just find a more detailed article on this subject in the next newsletter which will come out the middle of March. 

Good luck to all of you, however you decide to handle this totally ridiculous and completely unacceptable fee slash.