Sounds like you could have used a better lawyer!
Lol...
The insurance I was talking about is the errors & omissions malpractice coverage... not the health/auto types. (Although they're pretty useless much of the time.)
It is funny though, Bodily Injury guys charge around 30-40% of the settlement for their service, PLUS costs. I figured with prices like that I could screw up almost half my case and break even.
Some can be pretty sketchy. If anyone here ever needs an attorney, I'd ask for them to list in the engagement agreement HOW the net proceeds are calculated and applied.
Reputable attorneys will give an exact formula to do so, not just say what classes of expenes are born out by each party. Here's two examples:
Fee agreement says atty gets 40%, plus all costs to be paid by client (filing fees, copy/printing, mailing, experts, reporting fres, etc etc etc) settlement is 100k, all costs were 25k.
Example one: atty takes fee "off the top" - 100k, -fee (100k × .40 = 40k) - costs (25k) means you, the client, are left with 35k of that original 100...
Example two: atty takes costs "off the top" and a fee from "net proceeds" - 100k -costs (25k) -fee ([100-25 or only 75k] × .40 = 30k) means you, the client, are left with 45k of " hat original 100...
Some slippery types tell you it doesn't matter, everything's the same... but the order makes a difference...
As an aside, I'd heard a pretty good lawyer joke at the physical therapy office... can't remember what it was right now though.
