Fees
Most people who call a personal injury attorney have never hired one before. The fee structure can feel murky and confusing, and some firms don’t make it easy to understand. Like everything we do, we’d rather just be direct about it.
Our Fee Is One-Third Of Your Total Recovery
At Ladendorf Fregiato & Bigler, we charge a contingency fee of one-third of your total settlement if your case does not go to trial. That means you pay nothing upfront: no retainer, no hourly rate, no out-of-pocket costs while your case is active. We only get paid if you do.
A one-third fee has historically been the standard in personal injury law, though many larger firms — particularly the ones with billboards and TV commercials — charge 40% off the top. That difference is real money on any significant recovery.
You Pay Nothing Unless We Win
Contingency means exactly that. If we take your case and it doesn’t result in a recovery, you don’t owe us attorney fees. Period.
If your case does resolve in your favor, our fee comes out of the settlement before you receive your portion. We walk you through exactly how those numbers break down before anything is finalized.
We Negotiate Your Medical Bills and Liens At No Extra Charge
This is where a lot of firms leave clients on their own, and it’s something that sets Ladendorf Fregiato & Bigler apart.
When you’re injured in an accident, the medical providers who treated you (hospitals, specialists, physical therapists) often have a legal right to be reimbursed from your settlement. Health insurance companies that covered your care may have one, too. These are called liens, and they don’t disappear when your case settles.
Some attorneys hand clients a check and consider the case closed. The client then discovers weeks later that the money they’re holding is already spoken for.
We don’t do it that way. Negotiating and resolving the medical bills and liens tied to your case is part of how we handle every settlement, not a service we point you toward after the fact.
And we don’t charge an additional fee on what we reduce. Our fee is calculated on the total settlement. Every dollar we negotiate off your bills goes directly to you.
We’ll Never Take a Fee Bigger Than What You Walk Away With
This is a commitment we make on every case we handle.
Here’s how it works in practice: say a case settles for $10,000. Our fee would normally be $3,333. But after attorney fees, expenses, and medical bills, if we can’t put at least that amount in your pocket, we don’t take the full fee. We adjust it, or we split the difference. Whatever makes the math fair for you.
We’ve never thought it was right to walk away with more than our client does. So we don’t.
Why We Work This Way
Cases come to us because a former client told a friend, or because another attorney trusts us to treat the people they send our way fairly.
That only works one way: by actually treating people fairly.
We’re not going to win a five-star review because we settled your case for a big number and you went home wondering where the money went. The number that matters is what ends up in your pocket, after fees, after medical bills, after everything. That’s what we focus on, and it’s been how we’ve operated since the beginning.
If you have questions about fees before deciding whether to hire us, ask. We’ll give you a straight answer.
And if you’re not able to come to us — because you’re still in the hospital, still recovering at home, or just not sure where to start — we’ll come to you. Evening and weekend appointments are available.