What does a personal injury lawyer cost?
Typically, personal injury lawyers earn a contingency fee on the success of the case, similar to how a realtor earns a commission if the house sells. If the house doesn’t sell, the realtor doesn’t get paid. Likewise, if your case does not settle or if you lose at trial, the personal injury lawyer doesn’t get paid either.
The percentage a personal injury lawyer usually charges ranges from 1/3 to 45% of the case outcome. Why so high you ask? Well, that’s a great question and one I hope to explain to you here.
There’s a lot more to a personal injury case and fee arrangement than just the contingency fee and a lot more to a personal injury lawsuit than there is when a realtor sells a house. A realtor doesn’t have to pay experts — you do that. A personal injury lawyer does.
In order to advance a personal injury claim against an insurance company, the lawyer will often have to come out of pocket to pay for medical treatment, liability experts, medical experts and economic loss experts. This gets expensive really fast.
A personal injury lawyer can spend anywhere from $10,000 to $1,000,000 or more out of pocket to advance your case to the point of settlement or victory at trial. If the lawyer loses, the client doesn’t owe any of that money back and the lawyer is out all of that money.
As you can see, there’s a lot of risk in taking on a personal injury case considering that the insurance company will fight tooth and nail to avoid paying the claim or to substantially reduce what they do pay.
While personal injury attorney fees can seem high, once you know more about how a case actually works, the fee starts to seem more reasonable.
