Let The Lawyers Fight Amongst Themselves

This post is sponsored by Blogitive.

It's the law of survival of the fittest when disaster strikes, but it doesn't help when those that are supposed to help you, try to take advantage of you. This story by simmons jannace & stagg is a good example. A widow of 9/11 hired a lawyer to represent her in a 9/11 Victim's Compensation Fund hearing and subsequently was served a 2 Million dollar bill for the contingency fee. Simmons Who knows if she even had 2 Million or if that's what she got as compensation and they wanted the entire thing. The point is: There she is, a widow no less, suffering a traumatic loss and her lawyer then serves her with 2 Million dollar fee too. Exactly what did he do to earn such an exorbitant fee?

Jannace & Stagg was retained to dispute the declaratory judgment the lawyer was seeking in Federal court on the grounds that the Federal courts did not have jurisdiction. The court agreed and the case is now back to the state's Surrogate court. They also said pointed out there was no precedent for such exorbitant fees for having representation from the Victim's Compensation Fund.

So, at least she was smart enough to let the lawyers fight it out amongst themselves...