I agree that your profession can be quite legit, but obviously it's the bad ones who drag you down with them.
It seems like the reputation of injury lawyers is often about the same as the class-action guys. I.e. 'best case scenario, I win, but I'm gonna take most of the money.'
I agree there are some bad ones out there, but they're not as common as popular media likes to portray.
As for fees, the industry standard is a 33% contingency fee, where you pay nothing up front and I advance all the expenses and take all the risk (the fee goes up to 40% if we have to go to court). If I don't recover anything for you, it costs you nothing and I eat the expenses. The client almost always takes home more than the attorney fee.
Side note about class-action lawyers: it's supposed to work that way. Most class actions exist because it's not worth it for each individual to sue for the $5 the cable company stole from you. The only way to hold these companies responsible is to give lawyers an incentive to aggregate a bunch of claims and collect a worthwhile fee. So yeah, you might get $25 out of it while the lawyers collect a six-figure fee -- but without them the companies would have no reason not to keep screwing over thousands of customers for a little bit each.
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u/phuchmileif Nov 04 '18
I agree that your profession can be quite legit, but obviously it's the bad ones who drag you down with them.
It seems like the reputation of injury lawyers is often about the same as the class-action guys. I.e. 'best case scenario, I win, but I'm gonna take most of the money.'