People who have been hurt and need legal help are often at their most vulnerable. The legal system can seem confusing and mysterious. What’s more, people are often concerned about how much it will cost them to hire a lawyer. Worried that they will be charged hundreds of dollars an hour, some people put off talking to a lawyer, or even seeking legal help at all, if they have been wrongfully harmed.
But some lawyers, like the mesothelioma attorneys at Baron & Budd, don’t get paid for their legal services unless their clients receive compensation. Instead, they receive a “contingency fee”—a percentage of the total recovery from settlements or a court judgment. Contingency fees are sometimes the only way many people who could not otherwise afford an attorney get the legal help they need and deserve.
Under a contingency fee contract, your attorneys will file your case for you and pay all the costs associated with litigating your case (like filing fees, expert witness fees, etc.). Only if you recover money, the attorneys receive payment for their services as a certain percentage of the amount recovered in the lawsuit. Your attorneys would also be reimbursed the expenses of the litigation that they paid on your behalf. Depending on state law, if you do not recover money through your lawsuit, your attorney may even agree not to be reimbursed for the money they spent on your case. In this way, a contingency fee agreement allows you to hire an attorney without any out-of-pocket cost to you.
The contingency fee has a long and respected history in this country as a way to level the playing field between injured people and mammoth corporations. Judge Michael Musmanno of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, who also served as a judge in the Nuremberg trials, wrote over 40 years ago about the importance of contingency fees in protecting the injured from the powerful and wealthy:
If it were not for contingent fees, indigent victims of tortious accidents would be subject to the unbridled, self-willed partisanship of their tortfeasors. The person who has, without fault on his part, been injured and who, because of his injury, is unable to work, and has a large family to support, and has no money to engage a lawyer, would be at the mercy of the person who disabled him because, being in a superior economic position, the injuring person could force on his victim, desperately in need of money to keep the candle of life burning in himself and his dependent ones, a wholly unconscionably meager sum in settlement, or even refuse to pay him anything at all. Any society, and especially a democratic one, worthy of respect in the spectrum of civilization, should never tolerate such a victimization of the weak by the mighty.
Richette v. Solomon, 187 A.2d 910, 919 (Pa. 1963).
Contingency fee agreements help keep the courthouse doors open to everyone who has been injured or wronged, regardless of their financial circumstances. The mesothelioma lawyers at Baron & Budd are proud to represent our clients under contingency fee contracts so that they need not fear that protecting their rights is beyond their means.
mesotheliomanews.com/blog
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