Right from the very start, I authorized, in writing, the firm to release any information whatsoever to my wife. So, the office does know to whom I have deemed it appropriate to release confidential information.
Thanks for pointing out my problem right there, though. I appreciate it.
you’re welcome
No, although I did consider them; their TV ads are so compelling. Actually, it is Pappas & Gipe, with Mr. Gipe being my attorney of record. I do hope that naming them doesn’t violate some rule of the SDMB.
Please, don’t nobody deluge me with horror stories concerning my attorney; I like the guy and I believe everything will turn out okay. I’m just impatient, that’s all.
Yes, this is a contingency case, just for the record.
How inconvenient for you that stonewalling and dragging cases out is the modus operandi of every insurance defense attorney.
waiting 2 years is nothing. this is assuming you’ve even hit MMI, btw.
OK, let’s assume that’s correct. Is there some reason a lawyer expecting $167,000 or $250,000 out of a case cannot spend a bit of his underlings’ time to keep the client up to date?
I find it interesting that of the bevy of lawyers trying to explain things to Stoid earlier, there is a dearth of them defending your and askeptic’s view on this point.
I haven’t asked my attorney to do anything for free, nor have I asked for any service other than what was agreed to in the contract with him that I signed. So I don’t understand your comments re Home Depot and pressure treated 2 x 4s and building plans. I think you are possibly attributing to me comments made by others.
You massively overestimate what the attorney’s fee is in a typical run-of-the-mill car crash case. And if you’ve got a moderately successful practice, you could hire a paralegal who does nothing but answer and deal with clients’ incessant questioning about the status of their cases, which I pointed out above, tend to drag on for relatively long periods of time.
Keep in mind, I have NO problems with keeping clients informed and sending them file copies of pleadings and relevant correspondence. My problem was with the notion that 2-5 page customized reports are somehow justifiably expected by clients, and that an attorney’s failure to provide these is a good reason to dump an attorney.
Because this point doesn’t have the trainwreck enjoyableness quality to it. And also because not every lawyer deals with “ordinary” clients on contingent fee bases, whereas all of us are regulated by the same ethical rules.
Your post asked for what you missed, and I told you; it was “Really Not All That Bright’s” assertion that a client ought to expect a 2-5 page status letter on demand from their attorney.
How do defense attorneys get paid for cases? Having them drag on for long periods of time. How do insurance companies wind up paying you less than you deserve in an injury? The time value of money operating on your 2 year old claim.
Contingency fees are not, in general, 33-50% of the claim?
Pardon me, I thought the implication was obvious - three quarter of a million dollar settlements are hardly the norm. 33% is the maximum contingency fee usually charged (unless it goes to appeal when it then gets bumped up to 40) but i’ve never heard of 50%
Yeah, it is inconvenient as hell; I don’t have all that much time left to me. Even though it is the modus operandi of “every” insurance defense attorney sure as hell doesn’t make it right.
What is MMI?
Maximum Medical Improvement - I am not acquainted with the facts of your case but an attorney would be doing you a wondrous disservice if he settled a case with your adversary before you had stopped accruing medical bills. This is part of the reason why PI cases drag on - you need to be as-close-to-100%-cured before settlement negotiations begin
No, it doesn’t make it right, but that’s what it is. Even if your attorney filed a complaint the day after you first came to him, a defense attorney would be dragging that thing out for just as long.
I passed the edit period so,
Also, making a demand for the policy limits is not an indication of what the claim settles for; it is further a sub-optimal negotiation strategy for you to make an initial demand of anything less than the policy limits (if the case warrants it)
The implication was obvious; you think I can’t do simple math.
You must not have read LouisB’s posts closely. He stated that his attorney asked for $500,000 dollars, in which case 33% is $167,000, yet I’m overstating. It doesn’t require too many payoffs like that to pay for a paralegal, who would not, in any case, be devoted to one client.
Yes, I recognize that contigency lawyers win some, lost some. If I paid a lawyer for time incurred in a personal injury case, would I reach anything like $167,000?
If you didn’t see my edit… demanding $500,000 != settling for $500,000. Not even close.
OK, what is the norm? What is the average take for a lawyer who subsists on contingency personal injury cases, and how many such cases does such a lawyer settle in a year?
You can’t easily derive “final settlement” as a percentage of a demand on the policy maximums - it’s totally dependent on the underlying injury.
You understand how personal injury suits work, right? If I crash into you, and I only carry $100,000 in third party liability coverage, that is all the insurance company will ever be on the hook for. You are suing me, not my insurance company.
So whether I turn you into a quadraplege or I break your arm and you require a cast and some physio would completely change the amount the insurance company would settle for.
So unless it’s a clear case where the suit is one that will have a very high certainty of a plaintiff’s verdict for 100%+ of the policy limits, they won’t settle for anything close to their policy limits. Because they can always try their hand at trial, knowing that they have a set downside risk.
If I had to conservatively guess, I’d venture a guess about maybe halfway between the opening demand and 0. Again, that’s a ROUGH estimate. So for a 500k demand, that’s 250k settlement. Take out litigation expenses (expert witnesses, deposition feest, etc), 240k. Now that’s 80k to the attorney. This has to cover all the non-chargeable expenses, office overhead, etc. Probably, at the end of the day, the attorney profits 40k on this case. This is after 2-3 years of litigation, btw. And, again, you grossly overestimate how many policy max cases walk in a door. Most would probably settle for far closer to 50k.
Plaintiff’s side PI work is much unevenly distributed. There are a few players who make significantly more than an average attorney (indeed, they make the most of all attorneys) but many cannot subsist on contingency cases alone (indeed, this takes a large capital reserve to fund multiple litigation expenses for many years).
I would think that for every one settling case a PI attorney has, there are 5 cases that wound up costing a fair bit of time and effort that result in low settlements that wind up paying for the overhead associated with that case.
You’re not very informative, or very certain, for someone who insists that I’m wrong. Also, you’re still trying to spin as if that lawyer spends his full time for two or three years on the case.
Nice try though. You use your keyboard prettier than a twenty dollar whore.
Ooohkay, yes, you think that attorney X writes a demand letter to insurer X for 500k and the insurer will bend over and pony up. riiiiiight.
no, in no way did I say that they spend their full time on the case; just that if you’re going to apportion out fixed overheads to a percentage of revenue, you may want to look at a time variable and how it affects the fixed costs.
sure, I could do the research for you and find out what the average revenue of a PI firm is, but I’m not that nice.