| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
We’d like to welcome you to this month’s issue of the Lawyers Stink E-mail Newsletter. As it always the case at Power-of-Attorneys.com, we certainly hope that you are doing well and are enjoying a lawyer free day. Keeping lawyers out of your life and even more importantly, out of your wallet, is growing exponentially more difficult with each passing hour. Like it or not, lawyers are virtually impossible to avoid anymore. No matter where you look or where you turn, lawyers are here and there and everywhere. With hundreds of thousands of lawyers looking for somebody to sue, staying out of range or out of sight of these lawyers is a lot easier said than done nowadays. Without question, frivolous lawsuits filed by greedy personal injury lawyers pose a very real and present danger to each and every American family today. From a statistical standpoint, chances are pretty good that you or someone in your family will eventually get hammered with a lawsuit. And when that happens, the lawsuit could potentially land you right smack dab in the poorhouse. Which leads us to today’s topic: the proliferation of personal injury lawsuits being brought forward by money grubbing personal injury lawyers. These personal injury lawyers are a different breed, although a breed of what could be debated for hours. They are always gunning for trouble, looking for their next cash cow to bludgeon. Your best strategy, as we mentioned earlier, is to stay out of their way if at all possible. But with hundreds of thousands of lawyers filing tens of millions of lawsuits annually, chances are good that your ticket will get pulled sooner or later. And when that happens, you had better be ready to fork over some serious cheese, regardless of whether you have done anything wrong or not. Litigation in America is a prohibitively expensive proposition, which works heavily in the favor of the plaintiff and the lawyer bringing the lawsuit. With lawyers, especially the personal injury variety, it’s always about the money. Since lawsuits are relatively inexpensive to file but very expensive to fight, the lawyer bringing the lawsuit has a lot going for him. An enterprising personal injury lawyer will play the odds and attempt to extort some sort of settlement out of the person or company being sued. Hey, we need to face the music here. Lawsuits are very expensive to fight and even if you win, you still lose. You lose time, and you lose money; not to mention losing your mind as well. Lawyers are well aware of these facts and use then to their distinct advantage. Many a defendant has ultimately prevailed in court only to find that they have lost their entire life savings in the process. When the lawyers turn up the heat, many individuals and businesses alike routinely run up the white flag and toss the plaintiffs a bone to just go away and leave them alone. Which naturally leads to even more and more frivolous lawsuits being filed (to find out more about personal injury lawsuit abuse, click personal injury lawsuit lawsuits and legal information). Personal injury lawyers have this routine down pat. They solicit clients by the droves and then sling lawsuits at every imaginable target. We all know about personal injury lawyers because everywhere we turn, there always seem to be one in our face. Driving in our cars, we see all sorts of cheesy personal injury lawyer advertisements littering billboards on the side of our highways. I’m sure you have their basic message memorized by now. “Have you been injured?’” they ask (their inquiring minds need to know). Then these personal injury snake oil salesmen then follow up that question with the clinching “you may be due compensation!” proclamation. At home, we turn on the television, hoping to unwind from a tiring day at the office only to see some half crazed personal injury lawyer screaming at the top of his lungs about how he’ll “fight for your rights”. He tells us that he could get us mountains of money by suing just about everyone under the sun. All we have to do dial up his toll free injury hot line and riches will soon be on the way. These lawyers, who are jumping all around the screen like they’ve got fire ants in their pants, look like they’ve had a few too many cups of coffee. If there was ever a group of screwballs who should be heard and never seen, then these guys should take the cake. And I don’t even know about the “heard” part of the equation either. Then there are the mind numbing radio commercials, the rhetoric laced newspaper advertisements and the obligatory full page ads in the yellow pages. These personal injury hucksters shamelessly and relentlessly pound home their message – over and over again. Does this tasteless, tawdry advertising work? What do you think? Of course it does. People are stumbling all over each other to get to the phone to give these lawyers a call – and help them strike it rich. Good grief. With a new lawsuit filed on average about every two seconds of every day of the year, frivolous lawsuits haunt millions of American citizens and businesses; costing each of us thousands of dollars annually. All of us pay more for virtually everything we purchase, a direct result of the costs associated with frivolous litigation. That’s right! Even if you have never been sued (don’t feel left out, chances are good that they’ll get you eventually), you still pay for these abuses of America’s legal system. Businesses and individuals alike simply can no longer protect themselves from avaricious personal injury lawyers looking to hit the lawsuit lottery jackpot. As we cover in our highly acclaimed book, It’s Time to Wake Up and Smell the Lawyers (click book chapter summaries to read excerpts from the book), America has become litigation crazy. We are suing each other in record breaking numbers. Sue onto others before they can sue onto you seems to be our revised golden rule. And the lawyers are laughing all the way to the bank. This nonstop propaganda does occasionally land a genuine victim in the laps of the personal injury lawyers. The injured party, having little if any knowledge about the law or the intricacies of the legal system, is at a distinct disadvantage when dealing with the well schooled personal injury hotshot. The injured individual typically enters into a contingent fee arrangement with the personal injury lawyer, simply because he or she doesn’t know any better. The contingent fee agreement stipulates that the lawyer will receive anywhere from thirty to fifty percent of any settlement or award collected plus expenses; thereby jacking the lawyer’s likely overall take to upwards of seventy percent in many instances. Although the personal injury lawyer assumes some risk with the contingent fee arrangement, since the lawyer will receive a fee only if some money is recovered, the personal injury lawyer’s risk in many cases is minuscule in nature at best. Many unscrupulous personal injury attorneys will routinely insist that their clients enter a contingent fee arrangement even when the client’s case is a slam dunk winner and liability has been admitted by the other party. An hourly rate arrangement would no doubt better serve the client’s financial interest in these instances, but most personal injury hacks won’t hear of it because this fee arrangement wouldn’t adequately serve their needs. Come on, is taking advantage of the client and putting the lawyer’s financial concerns above that of the client the right thing to do? Of course not. But as we have repeatedly stated, right and wrong have very little to do with lawyers. Some states are making attempts to protect the rights of injured victims when dealing with personal injury lawyers by having the personal injury lawyers provide the injured party a disclosure statement prior to entering into a fee agreement. Some suggested provisions have included the following:
These types of disclosures would allow the injured party an opportunity to select the best fee arrangement for the lawsuit. So what are the chances of this kind of legislation getting passed? Slim and none – and slim just left town. Personal injury lawyers, who by and large won’t take a contingent fee case unless the potential for a cash settlement of some sort is a virtual certainty, aren’t about to give their clients choices if it can be avoided. Keeping their clients in the dark keeps the cash rolling in. Lawyers, who by the way have the strongest and most influential lobby in country and dole out millions of dollars in contributions to politicians nationwide (most of whom are lawyers as well), are not about to let this kind of logical legislation see the light of day. So personal injury lawyers will keep suing the hell out of everybody who can fog a mirror, keep extorting ungodly sums of money from businesses, insurance companies and individuals alike and keep the majority of any money recovered. Another day, another million or two for the lawyers. As always, we wish you a lawyer free day! Hey, if you’ve got a goofy lawsuit you’d like to pass on to us, simply click Stupid Lawsuits and Other Funny Stuff and we’ll add yours to our ever growing list of stupid lawsuits. And while you’re at in, why not take a few moments and check out our growing collection of Funny Lawyer Quotes, Jokes and Cartoons? It’s Time to Wake Up and Smell the Lawyers Book: If you haven’t read our highly acclaimed book, you’re missing out on a load of information about America’s legal system – and a load of laughs as well. You can read excerpts taken from the book by clicking book chapter summaries here. You can sign up for our FREE newsletter by clicking subscribe in the box on the left of the page. Please tell your friends, relatives and business associates about our Lawyers Stink E-mail Newsletter. They can subscribe at our web site: http://www.power-of-attorneys.com (of course you can e-mail this newsletter to them!). If you would like to review past issues of our Lawyers Stink E-mail Newsletter, simply click view back issues of our newsletter. We always respect your privacy and will not share your e-mail address with anyone. If, at any time, you decide that you don’t want to receive this newsletter any more, simply click the unsubscribe link within the body of your newsletter. Thanks for reading this issue of the Lawyers Stink E-mail Newsletter and we’ll see you next month. As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions about our newsletter.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
