Canadian consumer law. Invoiced for a fee I didn&#39;t agree on
<p>I signed a contract with lawyer. In this contract, some fees were specified to be paid at agreed conditions. Any other fees, beyond the scope of a contract, were to be negotiated and agreed on in a separate agreement.</p>
<p>At some point, lawyer suggested that he could perform some action on my behalf (let's call it &quot;service&quot;). The service was outside of the scope of the agreement. He did not inform me about fees, costs, anything. I agreed. After the service was successfully done, he demanded a substantial fee for the service and he sent me an invoice.</p>
<p>This is of course, the short story. I talked to him about this, but it seems that we've reached a impasse, at which point I received an invoice.</p>
<p>Do I have to pay the fee that I wasn't informed of, and didn't agree on beforehand?</p>
<p>I know this is not really a place to ask this question, but perhaps someone can point me in the right direction. And, if possible, be so kind and use english-english, not law-english, as it is not my native language.</p>

<p>From your account, you seem to have entered into a verbal contract for this extra work to be done without agreeing a price.</p>
<p>According to <a href="https://www.mondaq.com/canada/contracts-and-commercial-law/459426/can-a-court-imply-terms-in-a-commercial-agreement" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this article</a>, Canadian courts will assume that a contract contains &quot;implied&quot; terms &quot;<em>on the basis of the presumed intentions of the parties where necessary to give business efficacy to the contract</em>&quot;. To put that in English, these are terms that must be there because otherwise the story wouldn't make sense.</p>
<p>In this case the implied term is that the lawyer will be paid a reasonable amount for his work, as it would be unreasonable to expect him to do this for free. Lawyers generally bill by the hour, so a reasonable amount would be the time he spent multiplied by his usual hourly fee. If that is what he has billed you, then I'm afraid you owe him the money.</p>

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