New Study: The Free Consultation Matters Less Than the Unprinted Fee

"Free consultation" is not a feature

67 of the 71 firms offer one. It appears in hero headlines, in sticky banners, in the phone number's alt text.

It is presented as a reason to choose one firm over another, and it cannot be, because it is what everybody does.

In a contingency practice the first call is a sales conversation. The firm is deciding whether to take your case at least as much as you are deciding whether to hire it. Charging for that would be strange.

So the field is nearly unanimous. The same is true of the 44 firms saying they work on contingency: in New York personal injury, contingency is the model, not a differentiator.

39 of the 71 also serve clients in Spanish, which is a real difference if you need it.

What nobody publishes

Here is what we found when we looked past the banner. Of the 71 firms:

The written statements exist, and most of them say a version of the same sentence: you pay nothing unless we win. That sentence is true and it is worth saying.

It is also not a fee disclosure. It tells you the structure of the arrangement and nothing about the size of it.

27 firms publish no fee terms at all on the pages we crawled, not even the contingency sentence. That is recorded as not stated rather than as an assumption, and it costs points in the score. We crawl a firm's own public pages and honour its robots.txt, so it is always possible a disclosure lives somewhere we did not reach; if it does, those firms can tell us where and we will read it.

Why expenses are the real number

New York regulates contingency fees in personal injury matters, and the standard arrangement most firms use is one third of the recovery, with a sliding scale required in medical malpractice cases. So the percentage is fairly predictable even when nobody prints it.

What is not predictable, and what no firm in this set puts in writing, is the order of operations on expenses.

A personal injury case costs money to run: filing fees, deposition transcripts, medical records, and expert witnesses, who are the expensive part. The firm advances that money.

The question is whether the fee is calculated before or after those costs come out of the settlement.

Take a $300,000 settlement with $30,000 in case expenses and a one-third fee. Deduct the expenses first and the fee is charged on $270,000: the firm takes $90,000 and you receive $180,000.

Charge the fee on the gross instead, then subtract expenses, and the firm takes $100,000 and you receive $170,000.

Same settlement, same percentage, same firm. A ten thousand dollar difference in what reaches you, decided by one line in a retainer nobody advertises.

Four questions to ask on the free call

Since the consultation is free everywhere, the useful thing is to arrive with questions the website did not answer. These four are the ones that move money.

• Is the fee calculated before or after case expenses come out? Ask for the number on a hypothetical settlement, as above. A firm that handles this comfortably is a firm that has answered it many times.
• Does the percentage change if the case goes to trial? Many retainers step up when a suit is filed or when trial begins. Ask what the steps are and what triggers them.
• What happens if we lose? "No fee" usually means no fee. Whether you owe the advanced expenses is a separate clause. Ask to see it.
• Who is actually handling this, and will they return my call? Not a fee question on its face, but in a high-volume practice the person you meet may not be the person you speak to again. Ask for a name.

Get the answers in writing before you sign. A retainer is a contract, you are entitled to read it slowly, and a firm that would rather you did not is telling you something.

How the score treats this

Fee transparency is sub-factor E1 of the LFL Certification Score, inside pillar E, which covers accessibility and client care, and it is worth 4 points. A firm earns one for offering a free consultation, two for stating its fee model plainly, and one for publishing a fee statement a reader can actually quote.

None of the 71 firms scored so far has the full 4.

We are saying that about our own methodology because the alternative is to quietly keep awarding the points. E1 is a candidate for a revision that separates mentioning fees from disclosing them: likely a point for the percentage and a point for the treatment of expenses, which nothing in this cohort would currently earn. Any change to a sub-factor is published with the methodology version and rescores every firm at once, which is why it is a note here rather than a silent edit.

Four points out of a hundred is a small weight either way, and deliberately so: a firm that writes a clear fee page is not thereby a better lawyer. But it is the cheapest four points on the board, it takes an afternoon, and unlike almost everything else the score measures, it directly improves the thing a client came to find out.

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. Nothing on this page is a quote of a retainer agreement, none of which is public.