What forms do I need to sign to hire your office?

Before you hire our office to help you with your personal injury case, we will need you to sign several forms.  This is true if you are working with our firm or any other firm.  Watch this video to learn more.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: ​All right, so the first thing you're going to find when you download the forms is the contingency fee agreement, which is the contract between the attorney and the client. We will fill out all this top part here regarding your name and the date the incident occurred. You will find the services to be performed by the attorney. You will note that there is no guarantee, of course, as to the result.  There is a section on litigation costs and expenses that will be deducted from the settlement. This is outlines our typical one third recovery from the total seller settlement for attorney's fees and the right for either party to withdraw from the case...arbitration of fee dispute. Very standard stuff here.  Read it very carefully and then please date, sign your name and print your name where indicated. Now there's room here for three clients to sign, but if it's only one person, of course, just do the first three lines right here.

Now at the bottom of the form, if it's not too much trouble, please put your best mailing address, your best phone number, and any email account you regularly check (Not one you check every few months), and then a birth date, for this form.

The next form on the list is something called the "Agency Authorization." This basically allows my law firm to represent you. Once again, we will fill out all the top section and all you need to do is date, sign and print your name on the bottom.

The next section here, the next form is the Authorization to Provide Information. This one here is used by my firm if we are dealing with your employer regarding lost earnings or to obtain a copy of the police report. If we already have a copy of the police report, then of course this form is not necessary and it won't be necessary for lost earnings either, if you don't think that that's going to be a an issue. Okay.

The next thing is the HIPAA compliant authorization form. So what is this? This allows your medical providers to provide my office with copies of your health care documents. Without this form, they're not going to give me those documents. Now, some facilities will have their own documents and that's fine - but we have found that this one works relatively well for most medical providers. Once again, like with all the forms, only where you see an X, please sign and provide the information only where you see an X, we will fill out the rest of the form. Okay.

Finally there's something called the Client Responsibilities form. And basically this is just a whole bunch of tips that we offer our clients. We try to keep it to one page so it's not terribly overwhelming - but basically read over all of these tips and if you have any questions about them, please call me to discuss them. It's pretty straight forward stuff.

And then please sign, print your name and date at the very bottom of this last page. Once again, thank you very much for the opportunity to assist you and I hope you found this video to be helpful. Take care.