Transcription:

All right guys, section five of my fee agreement. I know this is a long one, but like I said, it's important that we spend the time to understand your contract. So I'm going to run through parts five through 12, cause these are a little bit shorter. So let's go into them. Part five. The risk of litigation. Everyone wants to know, am I going to own anything from this? So we talked about how the things that I can control are charging you for my time and charging you for the litigation costs that my firm has advanced for you. So those two things are in my control. I can promise you we don't win money for your case, those two things you're never going to owe me for, but I can't control your medical bills. So if we fail to win you money, in your case, your medical bills don't magically go away. And unfortunately, I certainly don't take on your medical bills. They're not mine if we don't win money for you. So one risk is that you still owe your medical bills. Of course you owe your medical bills right now. So it's not like you're really losing anything but that that's a risk that you don't get your medical bills paid. 

The second risk, which is very, very rare, but it is a risk that I like to advise people about is the court has the power to sanction anybody. You may have seen in movies, the court goes, I hold you in contempt. Well the court has the power to fine people and if you break the rules, the court does have the power to fine people. Of course, if you have a good lawyer, you're going to follow the rules and you're not going to get fined. But you have to be aware that sanctions are a risk and litigation part six also talks about sanction. The court may order the defendant to pay sanctions. Of course, this raises a tricky issue of, "Hey, my lawyer is charging a percentage for my case, but the court just awarded some sanctions to me from the defendant. So where does that money go?". So right here we talked about how oftentimes the court will actually specify, the judge will say, I'm going to sanction the defendant $2,000, and that's going to Mr.Clendenin to pay for the extra time that I had to spend because the defendant was breaking the rules. So if the court specifies it's really easy that we just do whatever the court says, or sometimes the court will say, you know, I'm awarding $500 in sanctions to pay for the costs that the plaintiff had to pay because of the defendant bad behavior. So in that case, we spend the money to pay your litigation costs. If the court doesn't specify that, we're going to go ahead and split it 50, 50.

 Part seven. I can associate counsel at no additional cost to you. Lots of times lawyers like to work together. If it's a very large case or if it's a very specialized case, sometimes lawyers will partner up together. And if that's the case, we're just going to split the fees from what we agreed, we're not going to charge you anything extra. We just agree to share the fees between ourselves.