A lawyer has charged a monthly fee of a sixty year-old woman for the past four years. She may have been awarded $101 per month for her disability claim, but she now pays the lawyer a huge percentage of that. One miner, who was disabled, has payed his lawyer monthly for over ten years now. The lawyer collects a big portion of the $134 the miner gets each month.
These are people who needed representation but could not afford exorbitant legal fees. The woman mentioned above is on welfare, and her husband’s Cancer has made him bedridden and unable to work. But the poor are the only ones affected by large legal fees. The middle class suffer in their pocketbooks just as much, if not more, than the lower class.
According to one author, because the middle class have a little money and they really have no power when it comes to things like legislative decisions, they have become one of the most common victims. What’s crazy about this fact is the middle class also produces most of our lawyers, which the author states should be subject to psychoanalytic interpretations.
Hourly fees are charged by a lawyer. One lawyer who concentrates on compensation cases argues that doctors and plumbers are paid on an hourly basis, so why shouldn’t attorneys be paid hourly? While it is general concensus that attorneys should be paid for their time, there is still the argument that perhaps they should not be allowed to charge such high fees for compensation-type cases where the payments are over a lifetime. Some middle class clients have taken on lifetime payments for legal services rendered during their personal injury lawsuit, divorce proceeding, real estate transaction, and even drafting their Last Will and Testament.
There have been instances of attorneys who were appointed trustees of estates or trust funds, where they have stolen the money from the very people for whom they were to keep the money safe. Rather than actually steal the money, other lawyers just charge outrageous amounts for their services. One partnership charged legal fees over a five year period of up to approximately 60 per cent of one six figure estate. The court had ruled the man incompetent and unable to manage his own affairs, so the attorneys were appointed to manage them for him. In this particular case, the lawyers had to return the money. The attorney who brought the partners to court was considered eccentric by his peers and constituents. Other lawyers would have nothing to do with it.
Media sources contribute to this issue because they use the courts as only sources to get more content. Though the information is on file at the courts and readily available to the public, the media pay no attention to the newsworthiness of attorney and guardian fees. Bar associations also place a lot of pressure on attorneys and subversively encourage devious behavior. They are vehemently against any kind of regulation of the client/lawyer relationship. Whenever the legal profession comes under fire in the media, they are right there protesting and denying any type of negative relation to the legal field.
Some lawyers will only take a percentage of the settlement as payment, though it is common practice to charge an hourly fee. The bar associations usually allow the imposed minimum fee agreements. These contingency fee agreements state that the attorney can take a percentage of the money awarded if the case is successful. For personal injury and accident cases, these fees can range from 25 percent to 50 percent of the award amount.
Americans created this kind of fee, just like they invented poker. Europeans are not fans of contingency fees, and won?t allow them. Injured workers were first helped in the US in 1848 with contingency fees. In order to begin a civil suit, you needed the money up front, and a contingency arrangement was the only way to do that.
Expert resources on accidents at work are located on that site. Expert resources on tac claims are located on that site.
