Lawyer Is Doing Something Unethical
We're going to talk about: My lawyer found me off the police report and called me up. Is that okay? Another way to say it is, is my lawyer doing something unethical? Is my lawyer doing something unethical to get my case?
This happened to me a little while ago. I got a phone call from a client who called me up and told me that the lawyer that they initially signed up with or I don't think they signed up with them but they agreed to hire him. They called him out of the blue, they didn't know who they were, they called them within a day or two of their car accident.
And told them "oh the lawyer blah blah blah", so it wasn't the actual lawyer. I don't know whether it was somebody from the lawyer's office or somebody who's buying the police reports or finding the police reports and reaching out to people. It's actually unethical to do that. So I told the guy who I knew that it was unethical to do that.
Want To Know Your Injury Case Value? Calculate What Your Case Is Worth For Free...
You Have To Investigate
The lawyer is not supposed to make outbound calls to injured people and you're not allowed to hire a company that does that. And as an attorney, you have to investigate where they're getting their leads from. And if they're showing up with a police scanner at a crash scene that's ambulance chasing. Or if they're buying police reports and they have a call center that does outbound calls to injured people, that is completely unethical for a lawyer to do.
Lawyers are allowed to advertise, lawyers are allowed to give free information, but lawyers are not allowed to go out and hunt down injured people. That's called solicitation and a lawyer can lose their license for it and a lawyer can lose their attorney's fee potentially. In fact they're trying to pass a law right now. I understand right now, they're trying to pass a law to make it a crime to solicit an injury case because that's how bad it's gotten.
Desperate To Sign-Up Cases
Things have really slowed down, the economy has slowed down during the lockdowns and everything. And there are a lot of injury lawyers out there hurting. They're not signing up the number of cases, especially the bigger firms with 30 lawyers 20 lawyers. Those kinds of places are really suffering because every month they've got a massive amount of money flying out of their law firm and they're desperate. They're desperate to sign up cases and evidently it's efficient if you call people who got rear-ended, call them directly after the accident and get them to sign up with you.
Evidently that works. But just because it works doesn't mean it's ethical. The other thing to think about is, do you want to work with a lawyer who does unethical things? Do you want a lawyer to be responsible for holding your money at the end of an injury case if they're willing to do unethical things to get your case? And are they going to pass the cost of buying the police report on to you at the end of the case?
Immorally Against Code Of Ethics
Let's say it cost them a hundred bucks or 200 bucks for a police report and a hundred bucks for the call center, is there going to be a 300 investigation fee when you're signing your settlement breakdown? Showing that it costs them 300 bucks to it. Immorally against the code of ethics and possibly soon to be illegally to get your case? There's a lot of lawyers in Chicago and in Illinois but word gets around about people and what they're doing. And sometimes it's just rumors.
The other thing is, other lawyers don't like lawyers who do that because you're supposed to play by the rules as an attorney. And if you don't and it's obvious and you're flaunting it, that's just bad news. So if a lawyer called you from a police report, somebody called you from a police report, whether it's a lawyer or whether it's a representative from a company telling you that they can find you a doctor and they can find you a lawyer and they found you on the police report, that is not ethical. You should hang up on them, you can give me a call with their information and I can help you. I'll give you the information of who to report it to.
Report It
You can report it to the Illinois attorney registration and disciplinary committee. It's the Illinois ARDC. I don't have their phone number handy but you can look it up. If any lawyer calls you up from a police report, you can report them if you choose to. If anyone does, you can call them up and report them.
On the other hand, you can do whatever you want. If you're not concerned about people breaking the rules. That way you're not concerned that level of dishonesty and rule breaking is going to affect you when the attorney has your money, that's you know that's your option. Obviously I'm kind of bitter about it because I work very hard to help injured people. I represent people in some tough cases, other lawyers don't help them on. Because I believe in giving back and I'm scrupulously honest.
I was just talking to a client I signed up last night, really nice guy. I told him one thing you can count on for me is I'm never gonna lie to you. I'm never going to BS you and in my office we call you back. Which is the number one complaint against lawyers.
Don't Hire Them
If you are getting a phone call after an injury, it's usually after a car accident. I would recommend that you don't hire them. Now look, it might be that you hire them and they're good lawyers and they do a good job. I don't know but good lawyers don't break the rules like that. Every lawyer knows it's against the rules. There's no chance that they don't know, everybody has to take a civics class and in Illinois you have to keep up with your ethics class.
In Illinois we have to keep up with our legal training. When you have to keep up with your legal training, that's the sort of stuff you're eventually going to get reminded of. Because there's a six hour ethics and other specialty classes you have to take every two years so you get reminded of this stuff as an attorney all the time. So anyway, hopefully you are not dealing with that. Every ethical lawyer in Chicago is dealing with that sort of competition.
Help Me Fight Against This
If you enjoy my articles and you want to do me a favor and you want to help me fight against this, you could do me a huge favor by leaving me a five-star review on Google. I'll leave the link in the description. you just cut-and-paste it into your browser, Click Five Stars, say a kind word and hit submit.
It takes you five seconds but it really helps me fight against these people who are doing super unethical things. Because when people realize "oh you know desalvo's legit, he explains things, he's a cool guy, he's a good human being, he's a great lawyer". It helps people decide to pick me and hire my office instead of going with a TV guy or an ambulance chasing guy or a police report buying guy or God knows who.
