One bill a 60 year old lady has been paying each month is a lawyers fee, and she’s been paying it for four years now. She was awarded $101 per month for a disability claim, and now the lawyer takes a big percentage of that amount. A disabled miner has paid his lawyer a monthly fee for the last ten years. The miner receives a monthly pension of $134, and his lawyer has racked up on the fees.
These cases clearly show how the poor can?t afford legal fees. They certainly are not unusual. In one case, a woman and her husband were receiving welfare. He was bedridden because of his cancer. Legal fee issues don?t just affect the poor. The middle class suffer from high legal services bills.
An author states, in his book about lawyers, that the middle class is the biggest target and victim of the lawyers because it has money and property, but is not well represented in government. Since the majority of lawyers come from middle class households, it is a great psychoanalytic study to see if there is self-loathing or covert cannibalism involved, says one author in his book about lawyers.
Usually, lawyers fees are calculated on an hourly basis. According to lawyers, plumbers and doctors get paid for their work, so why shouldn’t they? While it is general concensus that attorneys should be paid for their time, there is still the argument that perhaps they should not be allowed to charge such high fees for compensation-type cases where the payments are over a lifetime. Lifetime payments from clients are not unusual for divorces, injury suits, will probates and real estate investment.
There have been cases of lawyers who steal from their victims, like orphans and widows who have money that is trusted to the lawyer. Instead of just stealing the money, some lawyers just overcharge for their work. In one case, two lawyers acquired almost 60 percent of a huge estate over a five year period in legal fees. The man who owned the estate had been ruled incapable of managing his money by the court. The good news is, both lawyers were ordered to return the money they had taken for fees. Another lawyer who had a reputation of being eccentric took them to court over it. No one else would even look at the case.
News stations and newspapers do not help the legal fee problem, and actually almost encourage the shady dealings by behaving as if the court system is not a news source. The information on fees paid to attorneys and guardians is generally available for inspection in the court’s files, but the media ignore this information because it does not seem newsworthy to them. The bar associations also do not discourage these types of practices within the field. They are vehemently against any kind of regulation of the client/lawyer relationship. If something hits the paper that looks damaging to the legal profession, they will quickly protest.
Most of the time the lawyers will only accept the percentage arrangement, even though their fees are based on hours spend on the case. One lawyer is an ardent proponent of set minimum fee agreements. Another term for the percentage agreement is contingent fee, and the lawyer will gain a certain percent of the total compensation if the case is won. In most cases that involve accidents and personal injury, the contingent fee can range from 25% to 50%.
America is the country that invented the contingent fee. A lawyer is not allowed to take a fee only if he wins for the client in England and almost all of Europe. First used in the United States in 1848, contingency fees were designed to helped injured workers. They didn’t have any money to file a civil suit, so the contingency fee solved the problem.
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