Have you ever had questions about hiring a personal injury attorney or about how the practice works? In this series of Q&A, we are going to tackle some of the most common questions we get at Hill Law Firm.

Transcript:

San Antonio Personal Injury Attorney Justin Hill: Welcome to Hill Law Firm Cases, a podcast discussing real-world cases handled by Justin Hill and the Hill Law Firm. For confidentiality reasons, names and amounts of any settlements have been removed. However, the facts are real, and these are the cases we handle on a day-to-day basis.

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Welcome to this episode of Hill Law Firm Cases. One thing I wanted to do was cover some frequently asked questions we get. We get a lot of discerning clients that come and meet with us, or one of those reasons is because a lot of clients that end up calling us are clients that have done a lot of research into client satisfaction and reviews and looked into a bunch of different law firms. Nobody's going to hire our law firm because we got a slogan or a jingle. We don't carry hammers or other types of tools. We don't have a phone number that's really easy to remember. What we are is a good law firm and does good work for people.

We get a lot of questions from people when they call about hiring us, and a lot of those questions I've tried to keep track of and write down. I'm going to just walk through some of them. This is going to be a multi-part series where I just hit up a bunch of questions that people ask. One of the questions we get is, how do you get paid? Our law firm is a contingency fee law firm. That means that you don't pay us hourly, you don't pay us a flat rate.

A lot of lawyers get paid by the hour. A lot of lawyers get paid by the flat rate. For example, if you get a DWI, you're going to have a criminal defense lawyer say I'll handle your case for $5,000 or $10,000 or $15,000. It's a flat rate, no matter what happens. Our law firm gets hired on a contingency fee, which means we get a percentage of recovery if there is a recovery. If there is no recovery, we don't get any money. We don't get any fees. We don't even get our expenses back if there's no recovery. If there is recovery, we get our fees as a percentage of the recovery, and we get our expenses back.

One thing that makes us a little different, I think, is that our client always makes the decision on when to settle a case. We can tell them we disagree with them. We could tell them we think it's too high or too low, but they tell us what to do. At the end of the day, they get to make the final decision on how to settle their case. We have been asked, have we received honors or awards? I think this is a funny question because if you look, there are so many lawyers that get all sorts of awards.

If you're a lawyer, you get a letter probably once a week or every other week saying you've been named top this or top that, now give us $500 for your certificate. A lot of these awards are made up. There was a famous example where a lawyer bought an award for his pet chicken because he wanted to point out how worthless most of these awards were. Some of the awards are peer vote based.

I, Justin, has been named Texas super lawyer rising star for almost 10 years. Now, that's peer-based in which other lawyers vote on you, and it's done through Thomson Reuters. We've also been nominated for other things and gotten some of these other awards, but I think that's probably the best one in terms of how you gauge things because it's voted on by their attorneys.

We get asked if we offer free and confidential case reviews. The answer to that is always yes, with the caveat that we can't give people free legal advice. I can talk to them about their facts. I can talk to them about their potential case. I can tell them if it's a case we would take or not take or who I would call if I was them. What we can't do is give them legal advice when...