Paying for your lawyer and for other fees

This is a question that comes from a YouTube comment. And so this question is “how do you pay for a lawyer for these cases, if you want hire me or someone else, and what are common arrangements or costs?”. 

So on the personal injury side most personal injury lawyers charge what's called a contingency fee. You may see on billboards where lawyers say, we don't get paid unless we win that kind of thing. What personal injury lawyers do is they take a percent of the money that they get for you. But if they get no money for you, then you don't have to pay them anything. 

It's kind of like shark tank, where personally lawyers are investing their time and money into your case, and if the investment turns out to generate money than everyone gets paid. But if it's a bad investment then the lawyers get law. The lawyer gets stuck with the bill. Most lawyers charge a third until there's a lawsuit. And then if there's a lawsuit, that number increases to 40%. I've seen some lawyers start at 40% and some charge as much as 50%. I would really be hesitant to pay that kind of money unless the lawyer that I'm hiring is very experienced or it's a very specialized kind of case. So, for an auto wreck case, I probably would not charge. I mean, I would not pay that amount of money if I were the client. And I don't charge that amount of money I charge a third and then 40% if we have to sue someone. But if I were looking for some... If I was looking for a medical malpractice lawyer for example then I might expect to pay that because those kinds of cases are more expensive and more risky than other cases. 

 For criminal defense stuff, for a criminal appeals, I charge money upfront. And it depends on the amount of materials that we'll have to review, the amount of time that I think it'll take to read all the transcripts, research the issues write the briefs, or prepare for oral argument. To some extent, it depends on the complexity. There are some cases where I know that the issues involved in the case are gonna be pretty straight forward. There's other cases where I know it's going to be pretty complicated and then I'm gonna need to charge more so that I can spend the time that I need to spend to put the best case forward. 

The real risk in hiring a cheap appellate lawyer, is that they just don't do that much work on your case. You don't wanna hire the appellate lawyer who charges bargain basement prices and has 50 or 60 appellate cases that they're working on because they won't be able to spend the time needed to really work on your case. 

For the criminal appeals cases, I will generally take payment plans depending on the type of case. Depending on how much time we have generally I'll take some amount of money upfront to pay for my time and starting to review everything. Then I have to get paid the full amount before I start filing things in the case because once I start filing things, then you know we're kind of committed to doing the work. 

So, that's how lawyers get paid. That's how we structure our fees here. It's a great question thanks for asking it. If anyone has any other questions please leave them in the comments. I always appreciate reading comments shoot me an email if you'd like to shoot me a question that way I'd be happy to answer it.