Cases I Take

I compete both on quality and on fees — high quality work, at fees lower than those of most other attorneys with comparable expertise.

I am licensed in New York, Georgia, and South Dakota. I practice in all those states. For appropriate cases, I can practice in any other state by retaining a local attorney to assist. (Remote work is seamless for most things in legal work. For the rest, there are airplanes.)

While I am independent, I work with a number of excellent attorneys and am of counsel to the firm of Hovland Rasmus & Brendtro in Minnesota and South Dakota.

I manage my case load carefully, to avoid getting over-extended. I’ve seen too many attorneys take cases they don’t have capacity to handle properly. If I can’t give a case the attention it deserves, I won’t take it.

Business Disputes Generally

I handle most types of business disputes affecting small businesses — contract disputes, intellectual property infringement, employment issues, etc. For general business disputes, I represent both plaintiffs and defendants.

Fees for Business Disputes

I am open both to hourly fee arrangements as well as non-traditional arrangements. The fee structure can be customized for the case. Depending on the case, I may work on a pure hourly fee, a pure contingency fee, or on a hybrid fee structure.

However we structure the fee, I will adjust it to be substantially below the prevailing hourly rates for the market in which the case arises.

Insurance Bad Faith

Insurance bad faith cases are a special type of business dispute. These cases involve insurance companies failing to honor their obligations to the people or businesses they insure. For insurance bad faith cases, I represent only plaintiffs.

Fees for Insurance Bad Faith

For insurance bad faith cases, I only work on a pure contingency fee — meaning that I get paid only if we win, and if we win, I get a percentage of the amount we recover.

Currently, in bad faith cases other than those involving a liability insurer that failed to protect a civil defendant, the prevailing contingency fee in insurance bad faith cases is 45% of the recovery plus expenses. I charge 40% plus expenses.

In bad faith cases against a liability insurer, my fee varies according to the circumstances of the case.

Catastrophic Injury Generally

I handle any type of catastrophic personal injury. Because of capacity constraints, I only take cases that involve severe, permanent injury.

Fees for Injury Cases Other Than Medical Malpractice

For injury cases, I only work on a pure contingency fee. The prevailing contingency fee is 40% of the recovery plus expenses. I charge 33% plus expenses.

Medical Malpractice

Medical malpractice is a special — more difficult — category of personal injury, and my criteria for taking medical malpractice cases are higher.

The awful truth is that the legal system provides no help for most victims of medical malpractice. There’s a popular myth that huge numbers of frivolous lawsuits get filed against healthcare providers. The reality is the opposite. The obstacles to a successful medical malpractice suit are so high that experienced attorneys have a very high threshold for cases. The obstacles include very high costs — both in time and out-of-pocket expenses. For comparison, an attorney handling car crash cases might be able to handle 100 or more cases at a time. A medical malpractice attorney typically can only handle 5 - 10 cases at a time. And each case can easily require more than $100,000 in expenses (not including trial).

Additionally, medical malpractice cases face steeper odds, because in the eyes of a jury at trial, a healthcare provider starts out with a halo. Furthermore, the issues in medical malpractice cases are inherently complicated, and it’s usually easy for defendant physicians, nurses, etc. to find expert witnesses to confuse (or simply lie to) the jury. Professionals tend to close ranks, and however absurd or indefensible a deception, it seems there’s always some defense expert willing to swear to it in court. (This is not to say that all defendants or all defense experts lie. Some don’t. They vary in integrity the same as people generally. Nor is this to say that all plaintiffs or plaintiff experts are paragons of integrity. Again, people vary.) In any event, the likelihood of success is lower in medical malpractice cases than in most other types of cases.

For all these reasons, attorneys can afford to take only a small percentage of meritorious medical malpractice cases.

Like most experienced medical malpractice attorneys, I only take cases involving (a) serious, permanent harm that (b) was clearly caused (c) by conduct for which there is no reasonable excuse. It’s not fair, I hate it, and it can be agonizing to decline cases that do not meet these criteria. But for practical reasons these are the criteria I have to apply.

Fees for Medical Malpractice Cases

As with other injury cases, for medical malpractice cases, I work only on a pure contingency fee (so I get paid only if we win).

Because medical malpractice cases require significantly more time and money, the prevailing contingency fee in those cases is 45% plus expenses. I charge 40% plus expenses.

Cases I Do Not Take

Generally, I do not take cases involving anything other than business disputes or personal injury. For example, I do not take ordinary residential landlord/tenant disputes or divorce or family-law cases.