No lawyer pisses me off more than the one who advertises everywhere, but isn’t even licensed to practice law in Illinois. Instead he’s trying to brand himself and hires attorneys (often young ones) in various states to handle the cases for him even though his face is all over the ads.
A close second are work comp attorneys who talk about having collected hundreds of millions of dollars for their clients. Illinois workers’ compensation cases can be worth a lot, but when these attorneys brag about all of the money that they have “recovered” they are also including payments for medical bills and lost time from work. That’s really misleading.
If you get hurt today and shatter your ankle and then hire me tomorrow, it’s a smart idea because we can protect you from dirty insurance company activity. But at the same time, if you end up with a surgery within a week that costs $100,000.00, I didn’t recover that money for you. It’s not going in your pocket. It probably would have been paid anyway and if it wasn’t you’d still never see a penny of it most likely. Yet some law firms include this in their advertisements to make it seem as if they are getting way more for their clients than they are.
Some of these lawyers are the same ones who will tell you your case is worth a ton of money when you first see them even though there is no way that they could realistically know that because you just got injured and they have no clue what your ultimate recovery will be. But they don’t care about that or morals or anything other than their bottom line.
My advice is that if it seems to good to be true then it probably is. If your radar goes off that a lawyer is a little too slick then you should trust your gut.
Fortunately most law firms aren’t run by scum bags. But the ones who are give the rest of the good ones a bad name.
