Legal Question in Personal Injury in Massachusetts

: School Bus Accident

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Re: School Bus Accident

I think your main concern is your lawyer does not want to continue with the case and wants you to drop it. He needs your permission to drop the case which you can withhold your consent if you do not agree with his recommended course of action. You do not mention your fee arrangement with your current lawyer. If you are paying him by the hour this is very simple, if you do not have confidence in him then you hire a new lawyer and start paying him and terminate the services of your first lawyer and pay him for his services to date.

If your current lawyer is handling the case on a contingent fee, then you may have difficulty in obtaining successor counsel depending on the value of the case and how much work your current lawyer has done. If you read the standard contingent fee agreement you will see that if you fire him then you have to pay him fair value for his services. What that means, typically, is he is entitled to receive what he would if he charged you by the hour. If he has spent 50 hours on your case at $200 per hour, you would have to pay him $10,000 plus his out of pocket expenses he has fronted if there is a recovery. He can place a lien on your file when it is taken over by another lawyer. If your case is only worth $20,000, then it is hard to see why another lawyer would want to take it over.

The disenchantment with your lawyer may be a function of the fact he is telling you something you don't want to hear: your case does not have the value you expected. Sometimes a lawyer does a poor job in managing the expectations of the client, and to get the client to hire him, rather than other lawyers the client is talking to, he he makes promises that cannot be kept.

Back spasms and neck pain sound like soft tissue injuries (which I am assuming you have an expert witness to state were caused by the accident), are not fetching very high verdicts in Massachusetts courts these days. It sounds like you cannot prove any economic losses because the income reported to the IRS did not decline after the accident. I guess your counsel could try to convince a jury that he would have made more the year of the accident than the year before but for the accident. There are specific ways a skilled trial lawyer could try to prove this, but it might not be accepted by a skeptical jury (it is obviously not being accepted by a skeptical insurance company).

The fact the car was totalled, and the bus driver was really, really at fault does not make your case worth any more money. The value of the case is based on the injuries and damages that can be proven and other intangible factors known to insurance claims people and experienced lawyers.

Good luck with your case. Regards, John Stewart.