How Much Does it Cost to Hire a Personal Injury Lawyer in Tallahassee?

Most people in Tallahassee know that if you’ve been hurt in an accident that was not entirely your fault, a personal injury lawyer may be able to recover substantial compensation to cover your bills and offset your pain and suffering and general damage to your life. But you know that attorneys don’t work for free. If an attorney invests the time and effort into building a legal case to enable you to recover damages, that attorney will need to be paid.

How much does that cost? Do you have to pay some in advance? Are you better off saving the money if you’ve already been offered a settlement? These are all important questions. While we can’t speak for all personal injury attorneys, we can explain how we operate at Searcy Denney. When you understand how the fee structure works, it enables you to make an informed decision about legal representation, and that’s good for both attorneys and clients.

Our Fees are Regulated by the Florida Bar

The first factor to understand when it comes to hiring a personal injury lawyer is that the Florida rules of professional conduct govern our fees and the way we handle them. Before we start working for you on a car accident, truck accident, medical malpractice, or other injury case, we review all the details of our fee arrangement in a written agreement that you have the option to accept or reject. That means you will understand obligations up front. The amount personal injury lawyers can charge is limited by law, so essentially, that means the fees charged by most personal injury attorneys are comparable.

We Only Collect Payment if We Recover Compensation for You

With our team, you only pay if we’re successful. That means a few things:

• You cannot lose any money on attorneys’ fees. If we don’t recover compensation, the amount you owe in legal fees is zero.
• We have an incentive to work hard for you. Otherwise, we would be wasting our time.  
• If there are court filing costs or other expenses, we generally only require you to pay those costs if we succeed with your case. If the arrangement will be different, you will know that up front because we will have discussed it with you before signing the fee agreement.

We are paid on a contingent fee basis, which means that our fee is contingent on recovery. That also means that we review the circumstances carefully before taking on a case, because we need to ensure that we have legal grounds to succeed. 

Our Fee is Based on a Percentage of the Recovery

While many attorneys charge an hourly rate and others prescribe a flat rate for each service they perform, our contingent fee is based on a percentage of what we are able to recover for you through a settlement or litigation in court. The percentage is limited by law, but it can vary depending on the type of case, whether it settles out of court, and whether we need to litigate through the appeals process.

Since the fee is based on the amount we recover, we won’t know in advance how much it will be. But it gives us an incentive to work our hardest to recover as much as possible. A higher recovery means we all receive more money in the end.

The percentage method of calculating fees also means that you have nothing to lose if we spend more time working on your case. You don’t have to worry about getting hit with an extra fee if you ask questions or we call to update you on the progress of your case. Some lawyers charge a fee for every conversation they have with a client—but that’s not how we work.

Our Fees Aren’t Paid Until the End

If you’ve ever hired a lawyer to handle a divorce or traffic ticket, you know that you usually need to pay a large amount up front. Those lawyers won’t work for you until they’ve been paid, and that’s their method of doing business.

We are different. We do the work first, and then we get paid at the end based on our results. We think that’s a fair business model.

So, you don’t need to scramble to collect money before you hire an attorney, and you don’t need to worry about how much it will cost because it all comes from the money you receive at the end of the case.

Does it Make Sense to Skip the Attorneys’ Fees If You’ve Already Been Offered a Settlement?

We’re not going to try to hide the truth. The percentage you pay to a personal injury attorney who succeeds in recovering compensation for you can be substantial. You can find some of the details in this pamphlet put together by the Florida Bar. So, if you can recover compensation on your own, without paying an attorney, it might seem like you’d come out way ahead.

However, it is important to realize that when an insurance company offers you money to settle your case, their initial offer is usually far below what your case is worth. Only when they know you’re represented by an experienced injury lawyer will they start to offer a fair amount, and even then, it usually takes several rounds of negotiations and the presentation of evidence and legal arguments that demonstrate how your case would succeed in court before an insurance company will finally propose a fair settlement deal. Even when you deduct the legal fees, the amount you can recover with the assistance of the right injury lawyer is likely to be much higher than the amount you’d be offered on your own.

Learn More About How the Fee Arrangement Would Work in Your Case

Although we have been able to provide some basic information here, we can’t give a specific answer to your questions without the details of your case. So we invite you to contact us for a free consultation where we can review the specifics and evaluate your case with no obligation to hire our team.

To learn more about what may be possible in your case and how legal fees would be structured, call Searcy Denney at 888-549-7011 or contact us online now.