Practice Areas - Baton Rouge Personal Injury Lawyers

In general, you have one year from the date of your injury only if you were injured before July 1, 2024. For those injured on or after July 1, 2024, they have up to two years to properly file a lawsuit. Earlier is always better, as an improperly filed or served lawsuit may not protect your rights even if its filed in time. Always call an experienced, successful injury lawyer as soon as possible following an injury.

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The standard in our business in injury attorney business or the personal injury business is one-third of the recovery plus cost. In most cases that fee can go up to as much as 40% as you approach trial and the reason that it goes up is because it reflects the additional work, effort, risk, etc. that’s involved in preparation for trial in trail for trying the case. Some states have statutory limits on how much an attorney can charge in a case for example the state of New York tells us that in any claim the most an attorney can charge is one-third of the recovery. Other states have limitations on the amount an attorney can charge you on a particular type of case so for example Louisiana, Texas have limitations in the amount that the fees an attorney charge in a workers compensation case. So the starting point is a third and there may be some differences based upon contract, statute, law, the state in which you reside, etc. But the important point to remember is this, is what do you get from your money right? So what a good, experienced, resourceful, capable, reparable injury attorney does for you is takes care of all of the financial responsibilities associated with the case, that means medical care, that means as necessary advancing money for lost wages, helping you to keep yourself and your family going, getting you transportation to and from the doctors and in additional it takes all the risk. So a good, reputable, qualified injury attorney will advance or spend a lot of money on a case getting it prepared for trial. Sometimes in our circumstances we’ve spent over a million dollars preparing a case for trial. If we go to trial and we lose that case we absorb that loss, you don’t. We don’t come looking to you for that money so we take a lot of economic risk and that’s great because it puts you and I in the same boat right? If you win, I win. On the other hand if you don’t win, I lose. And that’s what you want, you want a community of interest. So the important thing to remember about an attorney’s fee in an injury case is that you want to pick the attorney that’s going to give you the most bang for your buck because every injury attorney is going to charge you the same fee so pick the one that can give you the best results.

So the value of a case is probably the most difficult part of this business. It requires that you have a lot of experience, that you’ve done this for a long time and that you’ve handled a lot of cases. It requires that you’ve gone to court and tried cases. It requires that you do the legal research in order to look at what other courts have awarded other juries and other judges have awarded for similar injuries. But it also requires a lot of other subtle things. You have to hire the right experts to help evaluate a loss and a perfect example of that and one that many lawyers do not do is retaining the services of a certified life care plan and what a certified life care planner does is in the case of a serious injury evaluates your injury and the effect of that injury on your life not just today, not just tomorrow, not just next year but for the entire remainder of your life throughout your entire life expectancy and then qualifies the future medical costs, the future lost wages, the need for additional future support services maybe something as simple as a house keeper maybe something like skilled care within the home, the need to have reserves in case there is new developing experimental medical treatment that might help someone that’s been seriously injured in an accident. So the value of a case is something that the lawyer looks at based upon his experience and his research and knowing your case intimately knowing it as well as you know what you lived through determines. A good lawyer is going to tell you what the value range of a case is. When I meet with my clients we actually do a mathematical distribution what’s known as a normal distribution of potential outcomes and we tell them what the possibilities are that the outcome of this case will be in a particular range say within a million dollars and a million and a half dollars and we allow them to make a decision based upon those proportionate weights and those respected values and decide for themselves if and when an offer is made within that range whether it’s a good deal.

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First, call for help. Notify the police if someone’s injured, call 911 and ask for an ambulance or for medical care or a first responder. Then you should cooperate with the investigation by the police. After that’s happened you need to take some time to assess the situation and determine whether or not you need to see a lawyer.Not everyone who’s in an accident or a car wreck require a lawyer. But if you have suffered an injury that require medical care then you almost certainly need to call an injury lawyer and at least consult with to evaluate what to do next.

No.  An offer from the insurance company is almost always less than you are due and will receive with the help of an experienced injury lawyer.

Yes. As of January 1, 2026, Louisiana follows a modified comparative fault system with a greater than 50% bar. This means you can recover damages only if you are found to be 50% or less at fault for the accident. If you are greater than 50% at fault, you cannot recover compensation.