Personal and professional service:
We strive to offer personal and professional legal representation to our clients and to be the most accessible law office in the Kansas City area. With that in mind, we provide our cell phone numbers to our clients. We provide our personal email addresses to our clients so they may call or text at their convenience. We don’t instruct our staff to screen phone calls. We are happy to meet with our clients at our office or in their homes.
Feel free to call or text me on my cell phone (913)406-0732, call my office (816)531-4600, or send me an email to verify. I may not be available due to a court hearing, meeting, etc., but I will call you back once I am available.
- J. Johnson
Contingency Fees
What is a contingency fee?
At their most basic level, the term “contingency fee” means an attorney’s fee that is “contingent” on the outcome of the case, meaning it is a percentage of the case recovery whether the case is settled or goes to trial. In practice, different injury and wrongful death law firms have significantly different contingency fee agreement terms.
This law firm handles Kansas City, Missouri, & Kansas personal injury and wrongful death cases on a contingency fee basis that is different from most law firms. Our attorney’s fee depends on the timing of the case - our fee percentage for cases that settle quickly is usually less than half of the attorney’s fee percentage for cases that are filed in court and go to trial.
Some firms charge a flat 1/3 percentage whether the case is settled in 30 days or through trial 3 years later. It is our belief that a “flat” contingency percentage makes many cases “unprofitable” if taken to trial which can result in a failure to properly prepare a case for trial or an attorney pressuring the client to settle.
Other firms require clients to pay for expenses up front, as they accrue, and/or regardless of the outcome of the case. This firm has never asked a client to front our office’s case expenses, nor do we ever require reimbursement of expenses in cases where there is no recovery.
It is our belief that our varied contingency fee percentages and policies regarding expenses are advantageous to the client and allow us to more effectively pursue Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas serious injury and wrongful death cases.
