Can You Really Not Pay A Lawyer Unless You Win?
Michael Babboni
Personal Injury
One of the things that many people worry about when it comes to lawsuits is the drain on financial resources. This is a legitimate concern as a good lawyer is not cheap. Those “billable hours” can add up if a lawsuit is long, protracted, and challenging.However, while those legal fees apply when it comes to conventional court cases, such as a divorce dispute or suing a business for failing to honor a contract, a different set of rules applies when people get hurt. You’ve probably read the literature or seen the legal ads that say, “You only pay if you win,” but how does this even work in Florida?
Contingency Fees Are Real
The first and most important thing that people should understand is that, legally speaking, this idea of “pay only if you win” is 100% legitimate in Florida and throughout the USA, and it is not a scam. Other types of legal cases will have lawyers keeping track of billable hours. Whenever they work, they take account of how long they work and add that to your fees. They will also charge you for any expenses that they need to spend on your behalf, such as acquiring, filling, and submitting paperwork, or even hiring experts for research or witness testimony, such as talking to an engineer about why a building’s structure doesn’t fulfill a construction contract’s demands. All of this will eventually come due for the client to pay.
Personal injury cases, however, waive all of these fee requirements. The lawyers working for you will still need to do research, acquire and submit documents, and sometimes even refer people to medical specialists for specialized evaluation and diagnosis.
However, the client doesn’t pay for any of this. This is known as a “contingency fee,” in that the payment the lawyer receives is contingent on actually winning the lawsuit and collecting damages from the defendant.
Minimizing Waste
So why does the contingency fee idea apply to personal injury lawsuits but not other kinds of legal cases, such as a breach of contract or a child custody case? One of the reasons personal injury lawsuits have contingency fees is to reduce the amount of time everyone would waste on a pointless court case. As long as a lawyer is being paid, they will continue to work a case, even if it’s clear that no satisfactory outcome can be achieved.
However, if the lawyer is only paid should the case be won, this ensures that lawyers will be very selective about the cases they take on. They don’t want to go to court on a frivolous case that wastes everyone’s time when it’s clear the situation is not worth pursuing.
Giving People A Chance
The other reason contingency fees are implemented is to give people a fighting chance to get what they deserve if they don’t have the resources for it. One tactic wealthy individuals and companies employ is “waiting out” opponents who don’t have the money for a sustained legal case. It’s not unusual for someone, even with just cause and the law on their side, to give up a lawsuit they should rightfully win because they don’t have the funds to pay a lawyer for the amount of time it would take for the case to be resolved.
Wealthier individuals understand that their expenditure on legal fees to stretch out a case can often save them more money than losing the case or settling out of court on a fair amount. Personal injury cases can circumvent this obstacle with their contingency fees. This allows those injured to only pay after they win, giving them a chance at justice even if they don’t have wealth.