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Court records do not lie.
Search for the individual partners in the state and federal courts of the general geographic area in which the firm practices. Especially partner 5.
That way you can see if the type of cases that you want to avoid are a trickle or a flood.
That’ll aid your decision making.
Be less than ten percent of my practice and they do some rogue title work/ foreclosure work. And unfortunately he said he’d want specifically me to work on the PI stuff because I’ve done general liability. The firm itself seems to be more oriented toward business disputes, which is what I want. But I’m nervous I’ll sign on for that and the ten percent this guy said is going to end up being 60,70% instead. I’m not sure what to do here. Is this normal? Or is it code for “you’re about to be bait and switched”. It’s a good salary and it does seem like they have sophisticated work and zero insurance carrier work, but this was a huge glaring red flag. I cannot end up back in GL.
I made this switch and have done a couple slip and falls, a couple auto accidents, and a couple catastrophic explosion cases in the 3.5 years at my firm. I’ve also done tons of low to high complexity business litigation worth $50k-$150million. The slip and fall type cases are actually kind of fun now since they’re so few and far between, the plaintiff lawyers tend to be so goofy, and they can be low stakes compared to high stress high value business litigation (I hated GL when that’s all I did). That being said, I’d research on LinkedIn and find whoever you’re replacing or other attorneys who left that firm, and reach out to them to ask them. That’s what I did and I was way more comfortable depending on their information, which turned out to be true.
It checks out. I’ve done commercial litigation for the last few years and what the partner is saying sounds accurate. We always have one or two cases that are slip and falls, or somebody was injured at one of properties for our real estate investor clients.
This likely won’t turn into a place where you will always be doing that type of work, but you will be the firm’s subject matter expert in those cases because as commercial litigation attorneys sometimes we don’t know how those cases are supposed to go.
Another reason why you likely won’t be handling general liability much at all is because the law firm does not have a relationship with insurance carriers. They are charging the clients the normal commercial litigation rate and not the low insurance carrier rate. The firm is not trying to swap out insurance carrier defense appointed law firms, nor do they really want to. Clients are advised to carry insurance policies however sometimes something gets messed up like an insurance agent doesn’t realize the insurance policy was canceled or the client forgot to get insurance.
Yeah they're probably right and I wouldn't be worried unless you're also seeing signs that the firm as a whole is deceitful or heavily into ID.
One of our partners actually does insurance defense so I occasionally get asked to help as an associate on a case, but it's maybe 2% of my work and I do it voluntarily if I'm light on work because it's easy deposition practice etc. I can also say no and there's no blow back.
I occasionally handle a PI type case when one of our regular commercial lit clients gets sued. It's completely different than ID work! It's much more like regular commercial lit. I bill my regular rate and work with the client just as I would normally without having to worry about insurance adjusters and what they consider acceptable/billable/necessary for the case.
I made the switch as well but my firm refers PI cases for a fee. The only time we deal with insurers is when they pay our rates on corporate officer/director liability cases. Great for the client and the firm because you get to bill the shit out the file at your normal high rate and the insurers don’t even question the bill with no control over decision-making/strategy.