We are experienced Chicago workers compensation lawyers who help with cases everywhere in Illinois. For a FREE consultation, please call us any time at 312-346-5578. For more information on attorney fees, read on.
I recently had a call with an injured worker who was being lied to very badly by the insurance company. He was told that he was not eligible for Illinois work comp benefits which was a shameful and blatant lie. The employer had done a lot of shady stuff too.
For some reason none of that bothered him. His sole focus during our call was “What is this going to cost me?”
I explained how attorney fees work in Illinois job injury cases multiple times and he thought it was too good to be true and that I must be trying to scam him. Eventually I believe he realized we were being honest.
Lawyer fees in almost every Illinois work comp case are 20% of whatever settlement you get. In other words, if the attorney secures a settlement for $50,000.00, their fee would be $10,000 and you’d get $40,000. If they think it’s a great case and do a ton of work, but somehow you lose the case or stop it, you’d owe them nothing.
No attorney can come after you and say that they did a bunch of work and you owe them something. This is the whole point of a contingency fee. Our pay is contingent on us making a recovery for you.
Some lawyers try to take 20% of the medical bills too if those are in dispute. In my opinion, that shouldn’t happen unless your case goes to trial. Other lawyers will try to take 20% of your weekly TTD pay. This also shouldn’t happen in my opinion unless those benefits were denied and the lawyer had to put forth a lot of effort to secure them for you. Even then, they shouldn’t take 20% of future pay, just the past disputed pay.
In some cases your settlement is so large that there’s actually a cap on how much a lawyer can receive. That’s a whole other blog post, but generally speaking if your settlement is over $300,000, you will be getting close to the point where the attorney fee will actually be less than 20%.
The only other thing you could owe an attorney for is expenses related to the case. That’s for stuff like subpoenaing medical records, paying a court reporter, etc. In most cases expenses are less than $200 and they almost never exceed $5,000. You should talk about expenses and how that works before signing with a lawyer and verify that they won’t go after you for the expenses if the case doesn’t work out.
Beware any law firm that asks you to pay up front for the expenses. That’s a huge red flag in my opinion. I don’t know of an established firm that does that.
The bottom line is that hiring an Illinois work comp lawyer is nothing up front and the lawyer fees are cheaper than in any other injury case. If you have any questions about it, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
