Attorney’s Fees in California
A big motivator in lawsuits is expense. One of the primary expenses for smaller lawsuits, and when I say smaller lawsuits, I’m referring to something that’s between 50 and a $100,000 or less in sums. The big factor is attorneys’ fees. Attorney’s fees are incredibly expensive. They’re prohibitive. They’re why attorneys have a bad name sometimes, but, to be honest, all the attorney has to sell is his time. And so an attorney deals with your matter for 12 minutes, 6 minutes, 18 minutes, they have to bill somebody for that time. Sadly enough, the clients are at the receiving end. What we do is we make sure that the client gets value for those attorney’s fees, and the time is spent. At the end of the day, these attorney’s fees are noted in a row by row, detailed accounting each month, as far as what you’ve spent and why – what value did you get for it as a client. The explanation is kept that way, not just for your benefit, and also a Dear Diary of what’s happened through the month, but also at the end of the lawsuit there is in many cases either a statute or by contract a provision that someone is going to pay the prevailing party their attorney’s fees – either an insurance company, a defendant, someone else is going to pay. The main kicker there is make sure your defendant or your opposing party is not judgment-proof – either bankruptcy, have they filed bankruptcy in the last six, seven years? Do they have property that has equity in it? Those kind of background research reports are available and those are things we can do during these courses of litigation to make sure that we do our best to predict, because there’s never any assurances, but you want to do your best to predict what’s going to be the outcome of litigation, and if you do win, do you have something more than a pretty piece of paper on your wall, but actually money that’s going to go back in your bank account to refund you the attorneys’s fees you’ve spent.