After you hire an experienced lawyer in Fort Lauderdale, you need to focus on lawyer communication, competence, ethics, fees and many other things!
Your Ft. Lauderdale personal injury lawyer should give you advice about your legal situation, keep you informed about your case, tell you what he thinks will happen in your case, allow you to make certain decisions regarding your case, provide you with an estimate about what your case should cost, notify you of any changes, or setbacks, give you the information you need to make good decisions etc.
Here are some of the basic things that you can expect after hiring a lawyer:
Lawyer Communication
Lawyer communication includes the correspondence and communication between a client and his attorney. In case you face a problem related to lawyer communication, it might force you to wonder whether you ended up hiring a bad attorney who is not diligent enough. The truth is that there are many states that have laws regarding when and how a lawyer must communicate with clients. Usually, you need to be able to expect to get a general overview of your case at the time when you request it from your lawyer.
Also, your Fort Lauderdale attorney must call you back or return your emails just in time. In case your hired lawyer does not respond within a business day, he should give you a reason why they failed to answer your question. This might happen if your lawyer is working on many cases. In such cases, your lawyer is likely to be burdened with court work.
If your personal injury lawyer does not communicate effectively, you are likely to worry. It is alarming if your attorney fails to keep you updated on what is happening with your case. Your repeated phone calls must be answered. If there is no response for over the course of a week, you must discuss your lawyer communication problem with your lawyer. In case your attorney does not show any sensitivity to your worries, you might need to go for another legal representative to help yourself.
Lawyer competency
The lawyer communication problems are the most common ones. However, apart from that, you may also have problems with the competency of your lawyer's work. Competency implies the core knowledge and expertise of a specialized PI lawyer in handling a client's legal issue. Lawyers are humans. You must not forget that! They might just make a mistake. There is nothing like flawless work! After your attorney passed your state's bar exam, he probably has not had to take a test. In fact, passing the bar exam does not really guarantee that your lawyer is competent to represent you in court! Sad but true!
There is a bunch of bar associations that claim that they deal with various issues regarding the competency of lawyers. However, you will not get any proper response if you complain about your attorney's work. This is mainly because the State bar associations are understaffed. Thus, they fail to lead proper investigation on whether attorney is working in a competent manner.
But, you may claim for legal malpractice if your attorney makes a mistake that no reasonable attorney would make, under normal circumstances. This error might cause you to lose money or even get harmed in some manner. In such cases, you can sue your attorney. You can go forward and claim that he did not act in a reasonably competent manner. These mistakes can be procedural in nature as well. These might include not filing your lawsuit on time. Some mistakes are ethical in nature. You must know that there are plenty of malpractice lawsuits that are pretty expensive to pursue. These might even be very hard to win. So, you cannot always blame the attorney for losing the case.
Ethics
Every state has their own bunch of ethical rules. By these rules, attorneys need to conduct their business.These usually have certain common themes that run throughout all of them. The lawyers are required to maintain the attorney-client privilege, perform their duties well, represent their client's interest with utmost loyalty and integrity, work within the bounds of the law, maintain separate bank accounts for client money, prioritizing their client's interests no matter what etc.
Every state has an agency that is responsible for disciplining attorneys and other legal professionals in Fort Lauderdale that sway away from the ethical rules and regulations. These disciplinary actions can give way to paying fines, returning stolen money, suspension from the practice of law, revocation of a law license etc.
Amount of fees
Most of the disputes related to attorneys' fees are the most common type of problem that arise. Fee disputes can come up due to multiple reasons. The most common reasons might include:
- Complaints about bills that are regarded to be too costly
- Disagreements over what type of fees would be charged to the client
- Disagreements over whether an itemized bill would be provided
- Concerns that a lawyer took a really long time to get done with an easy task
- Argument that since an attorney did a job unsatisfactorily, the bill should be lowered
- Billing at an attorney's rate for work done by a paralegal
- Complaints associated with charging more for time given to a case
After you hire a good PI attorney in Fort Lauderdale, you need to make sure that you get the fee agreement in writing. This will help you to understand the cost factor. In case a term in the fee agreement is not that clear to you, do not shy away from asking the attorney to write it again in a way that is clear to you in every possible way. If your state does not require a written fee agreement, you should still have one. In case you do not want to have your fee dispute end up in court, you must ensure that a mandatory arbitration clause is included in the fee agreement. This way the dispute can take place in front of a neutral, third party in the most rightful manner.
