About Contingency Fees
Personal Injury Cases
You pay no attorney’s fees, court costs or litigation expenses unless we recover for you. Once a recovery is made on your case, court costs litigation expenses and medical bills are paid from your share. Either your insurance company or you are expected to pay your medical expenses as your treatment progresses. However, under special circumstances, The Law Offices of Vic Feazell may advance payment for medical expenses which will be reimbursed to us later from your share of the recovery. You never owe us any money, even for medical payments advanced by us, unless and until we recover for you.
We will take your case on a 1/3rd contingent fee if we can resolve your case without having to file a suit in court. Most cases resolve this way unless there are serious disagreements with the other side as to who was at fault. This involves obtaining all your records, doing an investigation, drafting a demand package and negotiating with the insurance company or their representatives and lawyers. It also often involves preparing for and attending mediation. Your case can not be settled without your informed consent.
If we are required to file suit in court, the contingent fee is 40%. Once the suit is filed, we will conduct discovery, do a more detailed investigation, take depositions, hire experts and pay your treating doctors for their time to give depositions and testify on your behalf in court, prepare trial exhibits, prepare you and the other witnesses for trial and take your case to a jury for a full blown trial.
A case is seldom appealed, but if it is, the fee increases to 45%. This fee is for preparing your appeal, advancing all court costs including the cost of the verbatim transcript of the trial, if necessary, writing the brief and arguing your case to the Court of Appeals and possibly to the Supreme Court. In the event your case is appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, you are not charged any additional fee by the Law Offices of Vic Feazell.
We believe in our clients and in their cases. Therefore, even if we spend hundreds of hours on your case, fight it all the way to the Supreme Court and even invest One Hundred Thousand Dollars or more of our own money in court cost and litigation expenses and then for some unexpected reason lose the case or fail to recover for you, you still owe us no money at all. That is the risk involved for us in taking your case on a contingent fee and that is a risk we gladly accept for you.
Business Cases
Our business clients pay no attorney’s fee until we make a recovery for them. This allows your company to pursue its legal claims without the headache and worry of hourly attorney’s fees stacking up. It assures businesses that their cases are being handled efficiently and promptly without delay or unnecessary action being taken by a law firm that charges by the hour. We never bill you for letters, phone calls, research, legal assistant time, motions or discovery disputes because we never bill you. We become partners with you on your case and if we don’t recover for you, we simply do not get paid.
Every case is different; therefore we consult with our business clients about the nature of their case and the amount in controversy prior to giving a contingent fee quote. However; most cases are taken on a 25 to 33&1/3 percent contingent fee if the case can be resolved short of filing a law suit and taking depositions and 33&1/3 to 40 percent if a suit is filed and discovery commences. Forty percent is our maximum fee even if we have to take your case all the way through a jury trial and post verdict motions. All fees are negotiable depending on the nature of the case and the amount in controversy.
Most of the time we expect our business clients to pay court costs and litigation expenses as they accrue. These costs include our direct out of pocket expenses for court filling fees, deposition costs, expert fees and out of county travel expense. Significant costs are cleared with and approved by the client prior to the expenditure. However, under certain circumstances and at the client’s request, we may advance payment for court costs and litigation expenses which will be reimbursed to us later from the client’s share of the recovery. This is one of the ways in which we partner with our clients to help them through difficult times that may have been caused by the very wrong we are working to redress rather than adding to their burden with expensive legal fees.
