Under a Contingency Fee Agreement the client is not charged an up front fee or ongoing for the lawyer’s time, services and financial expenditures. This includes the time the lawyer spends investigating, developing and prosecuting the client’s case as well as the substantial out of pocket costs that are normally incurred. Even in the less serious personal injury cases, costs advanced by the attorney can range between $3,000 – $10,000. This includes investigation costs; court fees; deposition costs; meeting with the medical specialists and the cost of expert witness testimony at trial. The time a lawyer spends on any one case can range anywhere from ten to hundreds or more of hours or more if the case goes to trial.
A contingency fee agreement is usually the only way that an injured victim can get the keys to the courthouse door. If an injured person (often unable to work and in debt) had to pay an attorney up front for his or her time and expenses, he or she would not be able to proceed with a legitimate claim for the harms and losses sustained due to the carelessness of others.
Under a contingency fee agreement, the attorney only gets paid if he or she is successful and recovers money on behalf of the client. There is a real and substantial risk in every case (no matter how good the case), that the client may not prevail. If this happens, the attorney loses his or her time and all costs incurred.
Contingency fees charged by an attorney can run anywhere from 25% – 40% of the recovery depending on the complexity, risk and time required. This may at first seem high but you must understand that although in some cases, the attorney may obtain a large fee for his or her time and effort, there are also many cases where the opposite occurs You must also realize that the attorney is taking a risk with every case and may, no matter how good the case is, not be able to successfully recover any monies even when the client has been unfairly harmed.
In all contingency cases, an attorney must make a business decision regarding what cases to take and which not to take. Plaintiffs’ attorneys are always very careful to take only cases that they believe are meritorious and stand a substantial likelihood of success in front of a jury. Otherwise they would go out of business.
In some cases, an attorney may make a large recovery on a case but this must be balanced against the other cases in which the attorney spends significant time and money reviewing a case for a potential client at no charge only to tell him or her that there is not a case. I spend anywhere from a fifteen minute phone call to many hours of investigation on each person who contacts me with a potential case. They are hurting and confused and need to be heard.
Virtually no injured person would ever see the inside of a courtroom if it were not for contingency fee agreements and attorneys willing to bear the risk on behalf of their injured client.
