Does Your Lawyer Tell You What You Want To Hear?

I was recently talking to top car accident attorney at another law firm about a case I sent him. It was a driver of a Lyft who had been broadsided and injured.  He hurt his leg and went to the hospital.

He had told the attorney I recommended that he wanted to sign up, but didn’t pull the trigger.  That lawyer followed up and the client said he was stressed because “all of these law firms have been calling me out of the blue” and he didn’t know what to think.  For the record, he called me and any attorney who calls you unsolicited is a scumbag and probably breaking the law.

One of the things confusing him is that he was hearing different things from different law firms.  He has no money coming in and wanted to know if he could file for work comp.  I told him know because he’s with Lyft and so did the attorney I suggested.  But an ambulance chaser said sure you can file for work comp even though they must know it’s not true.  It’s either that or it’s a “runner” for the firm who isn’t a lawyer, but gets paid to act like one and chase down these clients.

This happens a lot where a lawyer tells you what you want to hear.  We’ll never do that.  We always tell the truth.  And it has cost us business.  That’s OK.

Some attorneys though figure that the best thing to do is get you signed and then deal with their lies later.  Instead of saying, “We lied, we knew you can’t get work comp if you drive for Lyft or Uber” they will say some b.s. like “After we signed you up the law changed.”

The biggest tell them what they want to hear lie we encounter is when someone gets hurt on the job and immediately wants to know how much the attorney can get them.  One Chicago work comp law firm is infamous for telling people their case is worth at least 100 grand no matter what the injury is or if they know that there’s no way to tell yet what it’s worth.  They end up with pissed off clients down the road, but that moral dilemma doesn’t seem to bother them at all because I keep hearing about them doing it over and over.

The bottom line is that you don’t want an attorney who tells you what you want to hear.  These firms will sell you out in the end and aren’t the types that fight for you. If you talk to five lawyers and four say your case is worth at most 40k and another says 100k, you can bet the 100k firm is full of it.