Most Illinois lawyers are great or at least good. But some are terrible. And there is one Chicago workers’ compensation lawyer that I think is probably the worst of all of them.
I get more calls from unhappy clients of this firm than anyone else. Maybe more than all other firms combined. It’s always the same story, although the actual problem can be one or more of the following: He doesn’t call back. He promises the moon, but can’t deliver. The case gets re-assigned to a new lawyer every few months. They don’t know the case. They lie. They don’t answer questions.
Recently though this lawyer did (allegedly) the worst thing I’ve seen.
On a Sunday, within 30 minutes, I got two e-mails from clients of his. That’s not unusual, but it made me laugh. The first one wanted to switch lawyers because she hadn’t received a TTD check in a month and this law firm told her it could take up to six months for the first check to arrive (not true at all). The second one was also not getting TTD checks even though her case was accepted, but the lie they added on to her case was even worse.
When she found this law firm, they sent an investigator to her house to sign her up. They had her sign a bunch of paperwork and told her that they would give her copies. That never happened. She’s trying to get a copy because one of the papers apparently said that she’s not allowed to fire them and if she did she’d have to pay them a lot of money. She’s broker than broke right now and while she wanted to fire them, she was too scared to do so because she was worried about the possible fees.
While we tell callers to stick with their lawyers if they have a good one or it can be worked out, let me be 100% clear:
It costs nothing to switch lawyers in an Illinois workers’ compensation case!
It doesn’t matter what you signed. Any paper that says you can’t fire them or get a new firm would be illegal as would any attempts to charge you an hourly fee or anything else for switching. Again, they can’t do that and they would never try to enforce it. It’s just a scare tactic because they are scumbags and have lost a ton of clients over the years because they do a bad job on a lot of the cases.
I’m not naming the lawyer because I haven’t gotten a copy of what she signed yet, but if I get a copy I will put it out there. I can tell you that on multiple occasions over the last few years I’ve heard nightmare stories from callers and correctly guessed that they hired this firm. It’s crazy too because if they just did a good job on the cases they’d keep the clients and make more money which presumably is their goal.
Instead they pull nonsense like this. It’s incredibly pathetic and one day it will catch up to them.
If you have questions about anything related to an Illinois work injury, please don’t hesitate to call us at (312) 346-5578 or fill out our contact form to the right.
