Cost of Hiring a Kennesaw Personal Injury Attorney

Good morning. This is Roger Ghai and I’m a personal injury attorney. I’m going to do a video this morning a little bit on what it costs to actually hire a personal injury attorney. Now, I’ll have to forewarn you that I’m standing outside here today and you may hear some racket from the neighbor trying to cut down some trees. I apologize for that. Let’s get back to the point and issue and I want to address a lot of the very common question that I get a lot of times.
Which is how much I can’t afford to hire a personal injury attorney for my car accident case or my medical malpractice case or I’ve taken this drug and it just caused me to have terrible physical problems, so that’s what’s holding me back from hiring a lawyer.
The answer to your question is this, that unlike different areas of law, the personal injury law — whether like I said you’ve been involved in the car accident case or any type of injury case, is a situation where the lawyer doesn’t actually charge you anything at all despite maybe 50, 60, 70, 80, $100 of warrant unless the lawyer is actually able to get a recovery for you from the other side.
Normally, what happens is this. You’ll come into the lawyer’s office and you’ll sign what’s known as a contingency fee agreement with the lawyer. That just means what it says. Says that the lawyer doesn’t get paid anything and his fees or her fees are totally dependent — they’re contingent upon getting a recovery from the other side. Typically, the contingency fee in a typical car accident case for example, or a slip-and-fall case where a lawsuit has not been filed would be about one-third of the total recovery.
If a lawsuit actually has to be filed and you go through to a jury verdict and that whole nine yards, then the attorney fees are typically going to be about 40%. The only other cost that might come out of the settlement would be actual cost of litigation. For example, you might have a situation where a lawsuit actually had to be filed. Depending on the county and the particular court where it was filed at the court cost might run $100 to $250.
There might be some cost that are being forwarded. That is, the attorney is writing the checks for these costs as the case proceeds. To call in an expert witness, or to take somebody’s deposition — which is just their testimony, before we get into court. Again, a lot of times people are really reserved about trying to get a lawyer because they are worried about what it’s going to cost.
They’ve been involved in some type of wreck. They’ve been injured by a medical device or something, and they’re really worried about having to hire a lawyer in that circumstance because of the potential enormous cost. Again, it’s a situation where if the lawyer decides to accept the case, then it’s going to strictly be on a contingency fee basis.
If you have any questions — any further questions I should say, about how contingency fee cases work, just call my office at 770-792-1000. I hope you like my hat.