Something About Hiring a Lawyer I Don’t Understand

People in Southern California must be very accident-prone. I don’t know what other parts of the country are like, but you can’t pass a bus or a row of billboards without seeing an ad for an attorney who promises “to fight for you” with a 95% or higher ratio of won cases.

Excuse me, but don’t lawyers get to keep a hefty chunk of what they earn by fighting for you? I see a lot of people who were injured in auto accidents praising their hired bad-ass lawyers to the skies, but I wonder how much of that money actually finds its way into the pockets of poor slobs who have been victimized on the highways of SoCal.

I know you want to hurt the party that injured you, but what do you really get out of it?

It’s a lot like the lottery. If you win a jillion dollars, unless you opt for a payout over so many decades, you only get what is called the present value of a jillion dollars, which might be 0.5 jillion. And then there is the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) and your state and local income tax authorities, which might lower your winnings to 0.3 jillion dollars.

But, after all, this is America. Everyone wants to hire a bad-ass to handle your case, but that bad-ass, being a bad-ass, is probably more intent on enriching his own coffers.