Who we are ?
Cordes & Partners is a law firm working mainly in the field of indirect taxation: VAT, Payroll Tax, Customs Duty, Excise Duty, Indirect Taxation and Various Taxes on Consumption.
Cordes & Partners is ranked among the best law firms in France in its field by the magazine Décideurs – Strategy Finance Law (Leaders League)
Know-how and “Savoir-être”
We are committed to the development of close working relationships with our clients, combining the highest levels of expertise with the highest standards of ethical behaviour. We place the emphasis on values of excellence, dialogue, and ethics, in order to build a relationship of trust within the framework of a long-term partnership. This personal partnership drives us to exceed clients’ expectations, in terms of quality, timeliness and the costs of our services.
We respect the essential principles of the legal profession, acting with independence, probity, humanity and conscientiousness. As lawyers, we are bound to respect client confidence, and we guarantee the strictest confidentiality of the information entrusted to us.
Our fees policy
As we are concerned to offer a service tailored to your needs in terms of quality and costs, we attach particular importance to the transparency of our fees, whether calculated on the basis of time spent, or on a fixed price basis. The principle is to reflect as closely as possible the value represented by our services to our clients in each particular case, so ensuring that we deliver value for money.
When our fees cannot be precisely determined at the outset of our involvement, we undertake to keep you informed of the foreseeable evolution of our fees as and when the case progresses.
Fees for time spent
The principle is to charge for our services on the basis of the time we spend dealing with your case. This is the most usual way of calculating fees, as it allows them to reflect a certain number of objective factors, such as the degree of complexity of the case, the number of tasks to be carried out, the ease of access to information on the case, time spent on research and the nature of the “deliverable”, which may be a letter setting out an opinion, and/or a meeting or slides etc.
The principle of calculating time spent does not necessarily exclude the possibility of offering you an indicative estimate of fees based on the information and documents provided to us, or of agreeing to a budgetary envelope on the basis of determined tasks. Subscriptions are one of a variety of ways of applying the time-spent approach to fees.
Fixed price fees
In some circumstances, when it appears that the measure of time spent would not reflect the true value of our services in the view of our clients, the fees may take the form of a fixed price.
The fixed price fee may include a variable element established with reference to the expected outcome of our work – for example, in relation to court proceedings of which the outcome is uncertain.