Originally Posted by The Boz View Post

Florida appears to be a hotbed of these guys with 50% of the commercials on the morning news (yea I’m old) from personal injury lawyers including many National firms with offices here. They all show claims of $750,000, $1.5M wins and other victories in bold with some people shouting how they got them the money.

However in the fine print it shows what the client actually received. On a $500,000 victory the client actually received $211,000 after attorney fees and costs. So less than 50% of the award.

We can argue the “good” these people do for “victims” but the reality is they only take the cases they feel they can win, and win big on from people that in most cases can’t afford a lawyer so they give up more than half the money. And in the end everyone of us pays for it in the form of higher insurance rates and cost of goods.

Not saying there is isn’t some people out there that got screwed over in an accident but these guys have the shitty reputation they do for a reason. And the name “ambulance chasers” didn’t come out of thin air.
The whole thing is really just a microcosm of how fucked the overall system is, but even with that, there's not really a better system that I could propose. It seems like all of it is just a necessary evil no matter how you look at it. The good news for the clients is, if the attorneys are taking the cases on a contingency fee basis, that they don't actually have to pay anything if they were to somehow lose the case.

I'm not sure what percentage a Florida attorney can charge in contingency fees. I think 33% is common and there's one law firm in this area that makes a big production out of being, "Only 25%," and they claim that some other law firms charge 40%. The fact that they only charge 25% does make me wonder how aggressive they are in trying to get the clients a strong settlement, though...which is to say that I have an unfounded theory that they might just resolve the cases (or encourage the client to settle) as quickly as possible and on to the next, but I don't know.