How To Choose The Best Personal Injury Lawyer*
Hey, what’s up?
You want to know how to choose the best personal injury lawyer, do you?
Well, logically, there are only two ways to choose any personal injury lawyer. So let’s start there.
By yourself.
By getting help.
“By yourself” is pretty simple. First, you will contact a law firm. Second, you will hire the first one you talk to.
The chances of you hiring the first law firm you talk to are around 72% based on a large FindLaw** study from 2014.
Oh, I get it. You are going to do it differently. You have a list of questions. You are going to talk to at least 3 different law firms.
I hate to break it to you, but you will still probably hire the first law firm you talk to because you will be unable to do the most important thing:
You can’t compare the firm you are talking to with any other law firm on the one metric that matters.
Yep, you’ll go to their office. You’ll meet some nice people, they will make you feel good. And then you will hire them. Statistically speaking, that’s what will happen.
Because somewhere along the way you will realize you can’t actually compare law firms on the most important metric: who will get you more money on your case.
No shame in it, the system is rigged against you. It’s not like shopping for a TV or a car. There are no comparison shopping sites that tell you which lawyers get what results on what types of cases. There are no agreed standard case types, there are no standard severity injury levels.
If you are outside the system, you really can’t compare law firms or lawyers. It just isn’t possible.
Here’s why not having a way to compare law firms is bad for you.
Here’s what’s going on in the background at the law firm. The law firm is a marketing machine. It requires a constant flow of new cases: its “inventory.”
The law firm sizes up every case that comes in the door.
That’s what they do. Maybe they are nice people, they probably are nice people. But it does not change the fact that they are thinking: “how much is this case worth?” (Since they get a percentage if you hire them, they are thinking: “how much revenue is this case going to generate for the firm?”
What’s wrong with that? Nothing. They couldn’t stay in business if they couldn’t tell what a case is worth.
There’s a hidden conflict of interest. The law firm is always going to say yes to cases where it thinks it is going to make the most money.
You are not a number. But your case is definitely a number to the law firm. Don’t get mad. That’s the way it is. Better for you to just know the truth.
Here’s the problem. That law firm you are talking to won’t make any money if you hire someone else, but that law firm also isn’t the law firm that will get you the most money for your case.
Couple this with the fact that most people (72% to be precise) hire the first law firm they meet, and you have most people hiring the law firm that will make that law firm money, but will leave money on the table for the client.
Isn’t there a better way? Yeah, and it’s so simple it’s almost dumb:
Get Help.
Here’s the alternative to DIY.
Get an experienced lawyer to agree that they will help you retain another law firm, and get them to share fees with the other firm and also to agree that you won’t be charged more than if you would hire the other firm directly.
The idea here is pretty simple. An insider with financial incentives aligned with yours is going to do their best to bring in the big gun for cases just like yours. So long as you don’t pay a bigger overall percentage, it’s a no brainer.
Yes, this can be done. It is called co-counseling.
Law firms usually won’t discount fees to retail (that’s you). But they will share fees with other firms in co-counsel agreements. This means you can get the best of both worlds. The same fee, but financially-aligned expert help in finding the best law firm.
In this way you can get the help of an experienced lawyer to help you get what they believe is the best firm to handle your case (and their financial incentive is to get the best firm because they will also have a fixed percentage of the recovery), and not pay any more than you would if you hired the same handling firm directly. Sometimes you even can pay less.
*The best personal injury lawyer means the lawyer who will in all likelihood get the most money on your unique case.
**https://natlawreview.com/article/legal-marketing-stats-lawyers-need-to-know
