Since 2001 Findgreatlawyers.com has been the leading internet resource to find Illinois lawyers and Illinois legal information

Findgreatlawyers.com is a free service, run by Illinois lawyers, to find an attorney or obtain guidance for any Illinois legal matter, including Illinois personal injury lawsuits. Our founding attorneys are Chicago lawyers who have a tremendous amount of experience in helping people with Illinois negligence lawsuits. If you would like our help in finding an Illinois injury attorney, Please call us at (312) 346-5320 or (800) 517-1614 or fill out our contact us form and we will contact you. All inquiries are confidential and there is never a fee to speak with us. For information about what it costs to hire a lawyer for an Illinois personal injury lawsuit please read on.

People sometimes hesitate to contact a lawyer because they fear that the attorney will cost too much. However, hiring a lawyer for a personal injury case is different than hiring a lawyer for something like a divorce in that the attorneys almost never charge upfront fees. Instead, in personal injury cases, attorneys almost always use contingency fees, meaning they are based on the outcome of the case. In other words, your attorney will take a percentage of any settlement or verdict amount that you get for your personal injury case. This means that you do not have to pay your attorney anything unless and until you receive a settlement or verdict in your favor. As they say in the cheesy lawyer commercials that we can't stand, "We don't get paid until you do."

Generally, the contingency fee in an Illinois personal injury lawsuit is between 25 percent and 40 percent of your total settlement or verdict amount. The most common contingency fee amount is around 33.33 percent. To illustrate, if your lawyer obtains a settlement or verdict amount of $900,000 for your personal injury claim, your attorney would receive $30,000, and you keep the rest after any expenses or liens. Total fees can vary based on whether or not a lawsuit has to be filed, if the case settles before trial and whether or not there is an appeal.

Filing a lawsuit costs a significant amount of money, including filing fees, research costs, deposition costs, retaining experts, etc. In personal injury cases, because the attorney generally does not get paid unless you receive a settlement of verdict amount, the attorney usually covers all of these expenses up front. This is the case with just about every attorney that we recommend. However, these fees are reimbursed out of the settlement or verdict amount. If there is no settlement or verdict amount in favor of the plaintiff, then the attorney bears the loss of these expenses.

Because these fees may add up to be thousands of dollars, it is important for clients to know that these fees will be paid back to the attorney after the contingency fee is calculated. So, for example, if you receive a $90,000 settlement on your personal injury claim, and the fees incurred by the attorney in pursuing that lawsuit are $10,000 and his contingency fee is 33%, your attorney will receive $300,000 as his contingency fee, then take $10,000 for the incurred fees, leaving you, the client with the remaining settlement amount of $50,000. Sometimes bills from doctors also get paid out of the client's proceeds.

As you can see, attorneys take big risks when they take cases on a contingency basis. In the example above, if the case was lost and the plaintiff received no settlement or verdict amount, the attorney has personally lost $10,000. As a result of the financial risk involved, as well as the amount of work involved in any lawsuit, attorneys generally do not take cases that are not worth a lot of money. While this does not mean that your claim is not worth pursuing, it does mean that you may struggle to find an attorney to represent you. In general we don't know any lawyers that take property damage only cases on a contingency basis because it would be rare for there to be enough property damage to a car to make the case worth it to a lawyer without an injury having had taken place.

Bottom line is that in most cases, if you are injured in a car accident in Illinois or have any other injury claim from someone else's negligence, you should only hire an attorney on a contingency basis. If you have questions about your possible claim or would like a referral please contact us.