One question that is popular on our Facebook page is about attorney’s fees. How do they work? How much are they?
In contingent fee contracts, the client doesn’t pay the attorney by the hour. That means if we accept the case, all the risk of the case is on us. In a Hurricane case, we typically assign experts who we pay time and expense to assess the damages and complete a forensic analysis of the claim – from the structure, repair costs, moisture, to contents to business income loss experts. Those experts cost money and we advance that. The typical expense in investigating a claim is between $3,000-$5,000 depending on the number of experts we hire. If we never recover any additional money for you, we absorb those and any other expenses.
In addition, we don’t get paid unless you get paid. In cases like Laura, money may come in supplements. Depending on the amount of work we had to do to get a partial payment, our fees range from 15% to 40%. The less work and less time we spent to get payments for you, the less fee we charge. As the case goes on and our workload and investment in your case increases, our fee generally ranges from 1/3 to 40%. If there are not coverage issues that we are evaluating, we are happy to fix our fees at 1/3 but we do look at each case on its merits.
We also represent large commercial clients and for them, we structure different fees as they want to carry the expenses, thus reducing our risk.
So, the bottom line is it depends on the case and we make sure our clients are satisfied and happy with the fee arrangement as we want our focus on the insurance company. We would love an opportunity to work for you. Let our team, with its combined 35 years of property damage litigation help you on your claim.