I’m not a salesy guy. I hate bullshit. I’m terrible at having fake conversations with people at parties. I like directness and honesty.
Attorneys are business people so we do have to market ourselves. This blog is marketing as well as information for the public. What I don’t do is try to manipulate people or create false hope.
Recently I saw a commercial for a law firm that had splashed on there that they had recovered over $1 Billion Dollars for their clients. If you didn’t know any better, that would sound impressive. It’s not. The reality is that I’ve done that and so have many other good and bad law firms in Illinois.
In the fine print of the commercial was a barely readable note that clarified what the one billion dollars were. In that, they included getting payments for medical bills and being off work. These payments include those made voluntarily by the insurance companies as a regular part of the case. So imagine that you hire me or any other lawyer and get a back surgery that costs $150,000.00. The bills get submitted to the insurance company and they pay them. Did I really recover that for you? Of course not. My presence might have helped, and it’s a security blanket to make the case go smoother, but nothing was recovered.
On average, I help around 1,000 people a year get the best attorney possible for their Illinois work comp case. Over 25 years that would average out to only $40,000 a case. Most claims we get involved with have medical bills alone that exceed that amount. So if I was a really scummy lawyer, I could probably say I’ve helped people recover over three or four billion dollars.
The lawyers who make these kinds of claims are usually up to marketing nonsense. It’s designed to make people who don’t know any better and shouldn’t know any better think that a law firm is something that they are not. It doesn’t mean they are good lawyers or bad lawyers. It just means they’ve been handling cases for a while. It’s not impressive to say you’ve recovered over a billion dollars. It’s just misleading. It also gives no indication as to if they do a good job or not. If I get you a $250,000 settlement when the insurance company would have offered $400,000, that’s not a good job. But of course, you’d have no way to know that.
The bottom line is that whether it’s finding an attorney through us or any other way, don’t just go off what you read or what looks good. Actually interview the attorney, discuss your case, ask questions and make an educated decision about who to go with.
