Site NavigationPrinciple and Agent Theory: Beware of Lawyers
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Over the past four years, one sixty-year old lady has paid a monthly amount to a lawyer. Her attorneys fees added up quickly when she was fighting with the state compensation fund office to receive her $101 monthly disability payment. Another lawyer has collected a monthly payment from a disabled miner for the last ten years. The miner was awarded $134 each month. The lawyer takes a large share of it.
These aren't the only cases like them that illustrate the detriment of legal fees. 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 population is just as affected by the monthly fees the lawyers charge.
According to one author, because the middle class have a little money and they really have no power when it comes to things like legislative decisions, they have become one of the most common victims. The irony is that the majority of our nation's lawyers come from middle class backgrounds, so perhaps they are subconsciously targeting the middle class with these high fees.
Lawyer?s fees are determined by an hourly rate. The argument is that they are only mimicking the other professional fields in this hourly fee assessment, as doctors and plumbers charge by the hour for their services, too. There isn't anyone who would claim that lawyers shouldn't be paid for their hard work, but the problem lies in how much they are paid and for how long? Sometimes a lawyer will charge lifetime payments to their clients who needed representation through a divorce, because of a probate will, or in order to buy or sell real estate.
There have been instances of attorneys who were appointed trustees of estates or trust funds, where they have stolen the money from the very people for whom they were to keep the money safe. Some lawyers don?t actually steal the money; they just charge exorbitant amounts for their hourly fees. One partnership charged so much in fees, it took approximately 60 per cent of an estate worth six figures! The case was from the estate of a man who was ruled unable to tend to his own affairs. Luckily, the attorneys were ordered to repay the estate all the money it had taken in legal fees. Another lawyer, who many in the system thought was crazy, brought the case against the crooked lawyers. While others refused to file a claim against "one of their own", he took the case all the way to court.
Media sources contribute to this issue because they use the courts as only sources to get more content. The media usually will not report what the lawyers are getting paid for the case, even though this information is readily available for them to see. The bar associations also do not discourage these types of practices within the field. They strongly encourage attorney-client privilege and outwardly object to interference by third parties. They also keep on the defensive about anything negative that may be said in the media about the legal profession.
Some lawyers will only take a percentage of the settlement as payment, though it is common practice to charge an hourly fee. The bar associations usually allow the imposed minimum fee agreements. This is known as the contingent fee, which is a percentage of the case winnings. For personal injury and accident cases, these fees can range from 25 percent to 50 percent of the award amount.
This contingency fee arrangement is an American invention. A lawyer is not allowed to take a fee only if he wins for the client in England and almost all of Europe. The reason the US accepted the contingent fee was due to the amount of workers who were injured on the job. These workers had no money to hire legal counsel, so the contingency fee arrangement was created so the workers could begin a civil lawsuit.
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