About Fees
On new cases accepted after May 1, 2011, if we find your case is appropriate for an early resolution track, if you assist in gathering medical and police documents, and if there is a settlement within 60 days after delivery of a demand package to the insurer for the party at fault, then our fee will be limited to 20% of the gross recovery, plus reimbursement of our out of pocket expenses.
If there is not a settlement within sixty days from delivery of our demand package, then our fee percentage will reflect the significantly increased time and work involved -- 33 1/3% before trial, 40% if we go to trial, and 45% if there is an appeal, with reimbursement of out of pocket expenses.
If the client is willing and able to pay all litigation expenses as the case progresses, the fee percentage may be adjusted accordingly. Occasionally we have handled a tort or insurance case on a purely hourly fee basis, with the client paying an adequate retainer for fees and expenses and replenishing it as the case progresses. However, few injury victims are able to do that.
Why do some people criticize contingent fees?
Imagine the government taking the slingshot away from David and giving it to Goliath. Now you understand "tort reform."
The contingent fee is the "key to the courthouse" that gives injured people, no matter what their financial means, a fighting chance in the courtroom against giant corporations and insurance companies. Small wonder, then, that it has been criticized for many years by corporations and insurance companies that want to deprive average citizens of access to the courts.
Shortly after World War II, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Harlan Stone wrote:
"The most elementary conceptions of justice and public policy require that the wrongdoer shall bear the risk of the uncertainty which his own wrong has created." Bigelow v. RKO Radio Pictures, 66 S. Ct. 574, 580 (1946).Judge Michael A. Musmanno said it best in 1963:
"If it were not for contingent fees, indigent victims of tortious accidents would be subject to the unbridled, self-willed partisanship of their tortfeasors. The person who has, without fault on his part, been injured and who, because of his injury, is unable to work, and has a large family to support, and has no money to engage a lawyer, would be at the mercy of the person who disabled him because, being in a superior economic position, the injuring person could force on his victim, desperately in need of money to keep the candle of life burning in himself and his dependent ones, a wholly unconscionably meager sum in settlement, or even refuse to pay him anything at all. Any society, and especially a democratic one, worthy of respect in the spectrum of civilization, should never tolerate such a victimization of the weak by the mighty. Richette v. Solomon, 187 A.2d 910, 919 (Pa. 1963).
Those who want to avoid accountability to injured individuals oppose contingent fee arrangements in order to disarm opponents in litigation. Of course, such disarmament would be unilateral. Insurance companies and large corporations would still be able to hire top legal talent, with no limitations, while average American citizens would no longer have access to adequate representation. Whether those who oppose civil justice for injured people seek to limit liability or to interfere with fee agreements, its goal remains the same: to deny access to justice to the tens of thousands of Americans who are injured each year due to another's wrongful acts.
However, there is seldom any criticism of contingent fees from injury victims who can only retain quality representation in that manner. But for the contingent fee, people of the middle class or of low economic means would not be able to have their day in court, a constitutional right which corporations and insurance companies fight hard to eliminate.
