2 of 1,113 Injury Firms Publish What They Charge (13 States)

The question one state could not answer

When this directory covered New York alone, we found that no firm published its contingency percentage. New York is a state that regulates the number, so one reading of that was obvious: nobody prints what the rules already fix.

That reading has a test, and it needs more than one state. If regulation is what keeps the number off the page, then firms in states where the percentage is genuinely negotiable should publish it more often, because there it is a real difference between one firm and another.

The directory now covers 13 states, so the test can be run. It comes out the other way.

The free consultation in that count is doing less work than it looks like it is doing. It is near unanimous here because every firm on this page bills the same way, and counting it across every practice in the directory shows it collapsing the moment the work is not paid out of a recovery.

What the states actually do

Two of the 13 set or scale the contingency percentage for injury work through their bar rules. In the other 11 it is a matter for the retainer.

PA leads at 76% and IN trails at 31%. Neither is a state that scales the percentage, and the two that do sit between them.

The average distance between the two groups is 6 points. The distance across the states inside the larger group is 45.

A difference ten times smaller than the noise it sits in is not a difference. Whatever moves this number, the state's fee rules are not it.

The comparison that looked like an answer

There is a pair of states in that chart that tells a very good story, and it is worth showing because it is the mistake this piece nearly made.

Texas puts no cap on the percentage, and its firms name a fee model more often than any other state's. New York scales it, and its firms are well below. Two states, opposite rules, opposite behaviour, and a tidy conclusion about disclosure following negotiability.

They are the two ends of a spread that has 11 states in it, and picking the ends of a distribution is not a finding.

The group averages are what settle it, and they are 6 points apart. We are showing the wrong version because a reader is owed the reasoning, not only the result.

The one thing that is the same everywhere

Across 13 states, 18 markets and 1113 firms, one number does not move.

171 firms publish a written statement about fees. Most of them say a version of one sentence: you pay nothing unless we win.

That sentence describes the shape of the arrangement and never its size. It is the same sentence in Chicago, in Houston and in Miami.

And 5 of the 1113 say whether the fee is worked out before or after case expenses come out of a settlement. On a mid-size recovery the order of those two operations is worth five figures to the client, and it is settled in a retainer nobody sees until they are sitting in an office.

If it is useful to have the questions in front of you on that call, the four worth asking are set out here, with a worked example of what the expenses answer is worth.

How this was measured

Fee language is collected by crawling each firm's own public pages, honouring robots.txt, and is stored with the source URL and the date it was read. Every profile shows the statement we found and where it came from.

A percentage counts as published when the firm's own fee statement contains one: a figure with a percent sign, or a third written out. An expenses explanation counts when the statement names costs, disbursements or expenses and says how they are treated.

A firm that publishes a fee page we could not reach is counted as publishing nothing, and that is a limit of this method rather than a finding about the firm. If a disclosure exists somewhere we did not read, tell us where and we will read it.

The split between scaled and negotiable states is declared in this page's source rather than derived from our data, because it is a fact about bar rules and not something a crawl can measure. It covers the states this directory publishes in and nothing wider.

Nothing here is a quote from a retainer agreement, none of which is public. Fee transparency is sub-factor E1 of the LFL Certification Score, and the New York piece explains why we think that sub-factor currently measures the wrong thing.