Yes. No matter your financial situation, you can afford a personal injury lawyer, and it doesn’t require any scrimping or saving. Unlike other types of lawyers, who often have high hourly rates, you don’t have to pay anything out of pocket with most personal injury lawyers.

This is because many personal injury lawyers, including the team at Tyler Mann Injury Law, are paid through a contingency fee. Read on to learn what this means, and how it benefits you if you’re injured through someone else’s negligence.

What Is a Contingency Fee?

Unlike hourly rates, a contingency fee is contingent—or dependent—on you winning your case. If you don’t win, you pay us nothing, and our legal team will take on all the costs of filing the compensation claim or lawsuit ourselves.

If you do win your injury case, your lawyer’s fee will be paid out of your settlement or jury verdict. This means no part of your lawyer’s fee will ever come out of your own pocket.

Because personal injury lawyers do not get paid if their clients don’t win, they are highly motivated to ensure that you get the money you deserve, and won’t back down just because an insurance company is aggressive or non-cooperative.

How Much Will I Need to Pay in Attorney Fees?

The exact amount you may pay your lawyer after a successful injury claim will depend on the specifics of your case. Contingency fees are not a flat rate; instead, they are a percentage of the settlement or jury verdict you receive.

Your exact contingency fee percentage will be negotiated between you and your lawyer when they agree to take on your case, but is usually around 33%. This percentage may be higher for cases that go to trial, since they take more time and expense on the lawyer’s side to litigate.

Because the percentage is agreed on at the start, you don’t have to worry about the percentage changing later without your knowledge or permission.

The more money you get, the more money your lawyer gets. This means your lawyer will be motivated to help you secure the maximum compensation possible.

Will There Be Enough Money Left for Me Afterward?

After an injury that wasn’t your fault, your settlement is meant to compensate you for the cost of your medical bills, lost wages, and pain and suffering.

Some injury victims may hesitate to hire a lawyer because they are afraid that after paying the lawyer’s fees, there won’t be enough money left over to completely pay all their medical bills and make up for their other financial losses as a result of their injury.

Don’t worry—your lawyer should include the estimated cost of their own fee when calculating how much money to demand from the insurance company in compensation for your losses. Our goal is to ensure that all of our clients leave our firm better off than when they entered, even after paying back all medical costs and attorney fees.

Do I Really Need a Lawyer?

Research shows that even after paying attorney fees, injury victims get substantially more money in insurance payments after accidents than those who go it alone.

The Insurance Research Council found that the average settlement with a lawyer is 3.5x larger than those received by injury victims without legal representation.

This is due to a few reasons:

  1. Your lawyer knows how much your case is worth. They have seen similar cases, and can use their years of experience to get you the amount you will need to cover all your accident-related expenses.
  2. The insurance company is banking on you NOT knowing how much your case is worth. If you suffer severe injuries, the insurance company may offer you a settlement right away. While it may look big, it’s often not nearly enough to cover all the expenses you will continue to face. They do this because they know that injured people need money fast to pay their medical bills. However, once you accept a settlement, you sign away all rights to more compensation later, even if the check runs out while your medical bills are still piling up.
  3. It probably isn’t including pain and suffering. Pain and suffering are called “non-economic damages” because they can’t be easily tallied with a dollar amount, but they are a very real consequence of any serious injury. Insurance companies will often not include any compensation for pain and suffering unless a lawyer makes sure to press them to include it.

Get a Free Consultation Today

At Tyler Mann Injury Law, we firmly believe that everyone should be able to access the legal representative they need to put them on an even playing field with the big insurance companies, regardless of their financial means.

This is especially true when innocent people are already being burdened with huge medical bills, lost wages, and other expenses due to a car crash that wasn’t their fault!

Not only do we never charge anything unless you win your case, we also never charge for your initial consultation. So don’t let yourself be pushed around or intimidated by the insurance company into not reaching out for the help you deserve. Contact us today to speak to one of our lawyers for free.