I’m an attorney and the times I’ve had to hire an attorney and pay them up front I haven’t been happy about it. Their service was great, but just like anyone else, if I don’t have to spend money for an attorney I don’t want to.
Once every other week or so, someone calls me who has been hurt on the job in Illinois, but doesn’t think they can do anything because they can’t afford a lawyer. Some will ask me if I know any free work comp attorneys. What I would tell you if you are worried about this, is the same thing I tell them. You’re in luck.
Not only don’t we charge anything up front to represent you in your case, nobody does. It’s against the law to take money from a client for an Illinois work injury.
Beyond all of that, we only get paid if we make a recovery for you and that is at the end of the case. By State law our fees are capped at 20% of whatever we can get you for a settlement. If we spend hundreds of hours on your case and go to trial and lose you will owe us nothing.
This is how we work, this is how all good firms work and this is even how the bad firms do it. Well, some bad firms will try to take 20% of your weekly benefit checks even when they’ve done almost nothing to earn that. We don’t do that and nobody we work with does either.
The value of a lawyer is of course to make sure that your case goes smoothly and if you are already getting benefits to make sure it stays that way For example, the insurance company might try to send a nurse to talk to your doctor and interfere with your treatment. We wouldn’t let that happen. If benefits do get cut of at some point or are late, having a case filed allows us to get before an Arbitrator sooner and make things right.
Even with the fee in the end you will almost always end up with more when you have a lawyer than when you don’t. Insurance companies don’t have to make settlement offers and when they do, if you aren’t represented it’s common for them to cut 25% off the top and quite often they will only offer half of what the case is worth if you don’t have an attorney.
Bottom line though is that you don’t need to pay a penny out of pocket to get an Illinois job injury law firm. If you have questions about that or a case you can contact us for free at any time.
