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Charles Flaxman, who is with Flaxman Law Group, is a personal injury lawyer who has been practicing in Florida for over 37 years. Find out much it costs to hire a personal injury lawyer to fight your case and what a contingency fee is.
Doesn’t it cost money just to talk to a lawyer?
Most personal injury lawyers will start you off with a free initial consultation. In this meeting, the lawyer will sit down with you and ask you all sorts of specific questions about the incident to find out if your case is worth it for them to take on and possible to win. In these consultations, it is important to be as accurate and factual as possible. If you don’t remember something clearly, state that outright rather than throwing about loose information. You must give the lawyer as much info as needed so he can decide who is at fault and what the case is roughly worth.
If you do decide to go with the lawyer, and he decides to take your case, what you end up paying is called a contingency fee. A contingency fee is a percentage of the damages that are awarded to you, the defendant, when you win the case. They usually take 25% to 45% of the recovered damages, but the average and most popular percentage is 33%.
Do I have to pay the lawyer even if I lose?
No, the contingency fee is only taken from the damages awarded. You don’t pay the lawyer unless you win the case. Some lawyers will, however, charge costs, fees and expenses. Huge expenses can be racked up over a long drawn-out court case. These go from the simplest basic court fees of several hundred dollars to thousands of dollars to fly in and pay expert witnesses. With some cases, there may be next to no fees, while with some cases, fees can be in the hundreds of thousands. My firm pays all fees out of our own pocket. We spend our own money to assure that our clients win the case.
One of our recent cases cost over $300,000 in fees. It was with someone who was incredibly hurt and disabled and whose life was extremely damaged. We hired a vocational expert, a video production team to make a day-in-the-life video to show how this man now lives, we had accident reconstruction experts make computer graphics to show what happened, plus our lawyers spent months doing legal research. In the end though, we won the case and got a $56 million verdict.