Welp fellas, big mile stone for me today as I settled my first 7 figure case. It was a commercial vehicle wrongful death claim. Settled for $1,150,000. All day settlement conference with federal magistrate. Had a $313k comp lien to deal with. Meds were $548k. The decedent was 80 years old and we have a $1M cap on general damages. My home run number was a little over $1.6M. $125k of it was a lost wages/lost military pension/lost SSI claim. They completely wrote that off , said it was legally impossible since the children were adults and not dependents (they are wrong on that) , and that we'd look greedy asking for lost wages and military pension etc for a guy that they didn't even depend on or live with. Thus they considered my home run as $1,548,000. Liability wasn't really in question. I was hoping to get $1.3M or $1.2M. The guy lived for 23 days after the wreck with a laundry list of fractures and internal injuries and surgeries. He was conscience and coherent even though he was on a vent. He was able to pass notes to family members and respond to commands. They tried to argue that he died of a PE , not the wreck. And of course they argued he was only a few years away from his life expectancy anyways. Multiple lawyers told me that they thought it wasn't guaranteed that I'd get the $1M cap on generals just because I had a dead client. I felt like with the injuries he had , the time he suffered, and his children's' suffering, I would get the $1M in generals. We were able to get the comp lien down by 25% which was around a $79k reduction. Comp is statutorily entitled to their lien dollar for dollar so I felt like that was a solid reduction. I'm pretty pleased with the settlement.
Congrats. Sounds like a good day at the office. I’ve got a possibility for 2 7 figure licks set for trial at the end of March. Keeping my fingers crossed.
I've had a lot of $200k, $300k, some $500ks, and a $750k, but the 7 figure cases have proven elusive.
Yeah, it all evens out. I’m in a much more generous venue than you, but my case load is lower, so have to make them count. One of the two I’m going to have to try is probably a two week trial, and should’ve settled. Not looking forward to it.
Jealous of you plaintiff guys and your contingency fees. Let me know when you need consultation on securities law issues and threading a needle through ~70 contracts executed simultaneously in a deal closing.
My 1099 for my old firm said 890 hours. With my other clients and work I was probably between 1,100 - 1,200. Fucking perfect.
My old firm in Alabama had the most ridiculous hours/bonus policy. To be eligible for a bonus, you had to bill "100 more than the previous year." It was regular for associates to go to docket call for 3-4 cases and, if it was a different carrier, bill 3-4x for driving to/from Courthouse for each case. Easy way to bill 8-9 hours before noon. Was especially beneficial if the docket call was in the sticks.
There are times that I wonder if I made the right choice in what type of practice I do. Then I read y’all billing 2,000+ hours. I’m not even in the office for 2,000 hours a year. That just sounds awful.
I've got several stories like that. I've had partners at both the firms I've worked for encourage unethical billing tactics. On the flip side, when I was clerking a partner received a letter from a carrier stating they were cutting all attorney's bills by 15%, no matter what. Like, WTF? It's just an endless, cynical cycle. The carrier is going to cut your bills, sometimes for perfectly valid work. That will then make the lawyers overcharge on pretty much everything. Every 0.1 becomes a 0.2 and so on. This spawned an entire industry of bill auditors and non-lawyers questioning a lawyer's work. Capitalism at its finest.
that’s straight up fraud. We had a lot of folks with some questionable “value billing” tactics, but we fired someone for doing what you described.
I worked with a big firm for almost 15 years, and I never heard of anybody actually doing that. Any sort of internal or external file audit should immediately flag that. I will say that I did see some year end numbers from associates and partners that strained credulity, but we would’ve fired folks immediately for shit like that.
We had a client that would only pay .1 for any written documents. The only things they would pay more for were hearings and review. But you had to state the specific document which you could only review once through the life of the case.
I was always 2200 to 2400. The trick with insurance carriers is that most will not complain about entries for updating them. So, I reported every single thing I did, and I got pre approval for most things people would get their time cut. When I had 80+ matters, it wasn’t unusual to send 40+ emails to adjusters a day.
My last partner used to bill over 600 hours a month. Never could figure out how he got away with it for decades.
I'm horrible at tracking non-billable time, but I probably had ~1,900-2,100 hours in total last year across billable and non-billable matters. I also took off probably about 5 weeks over the course of the year, so wasn't all bad. Went to Italy for 2 weeks in September, and the time leading up to the trip and the time afterward completely killed my billable hour "momentum," so I had a pretty bad 6-8 weeks around the trip. Just increased my rate for the third time in a year so that I can go visit Nug in Mexico and not really have to worry about it so long as I get my shit done
There was a dude in Birmingham who had a really good book of business and did similar. He got notified of an audit by one of his big clients, “decided to retire,” withdrew his equity from an operating account, and is now involved in a lawsuit with his other partners now that the firm dissolved. So, be glad you left.
I think often about switching to plaintiff's work but the most I know about civ pro is that 12(b)(6) is something relevant to something
It’s litigation, so I had the luxury of some “easier” hours (e.g., travel, defending depositions, discovery nonsense). But it wasn’t great.
67 cases settled. 1.6 million in my clients pockets. Plaintiff's attorney life Was proud of that number until I see some of you PI guys getting 1.5 million in one shot.
Our associate bonuses have an objective and subjective component. For a subjective bonus, you have to be nominated. For an objective bonus, if you hit certain thresholds you get paid the bonus.
I'm jealous of the plaintiff's guys with great cases. I spent most of my morning getting screamed at by some guy with a 10k case because he didn't understand how to use his rental car reimbursement.
The less hurt they are the more they complain. people who are hurt don’t have time to complain because they’re trying to get better.
It would be interesting to see if gender or race play a factor in the subjective components for systems like this.
We have a chief diversity officer as part of our management team whose job it is to see that it doesn’t.
Some of my coworkers just got a $1.3mm verdict in a car wreck case in one of the traditionally most “defense friendly” venues in the state. Inflation, anger with authority, hatred of insurance, whatever it may be — verdicts are getting bigger across the board.
sounds a lot tighter than what i'll be doing next two days with a hard cap of 30k of what we can recover
I'm defending a CDL driver's depo, Pltf lawyer has never taken a depo of truck driver before. Does not understand the difference between independent contractor or employee, spent 30 minutes on this alone. Thought our driver was trying to get out of the insurance coverage, even after I went off the record and tried to explain it to her. She is now fascinated by going through her first driving e-log. We're 1.5 hours in and haven't gotten to the accident yet. Oh well. I'm about to take my shirt off on Zoom.