What Should Happen After a Law Firm Receives Your Settlement Check?
After the law firm receives your settlement check from your personal injury claim, you may wonder what the next step of the process is. How does the law firm earn its fair share, and how do you know where the money is going? If you’ve been injured in a car accident near Colorado Springs, knowing what happens after the law firm gets your settlement check is beneficial.
Read this guide to learn about the process once a law firm receives your settlement check:
What should happen after a Colorado Springs law firm receives a settlement check?
So this will be at the end of the case—the case is settled, and the check comes in. This is what we call in our firm the disbursement stage, where we’re going to go through and find out who is owed money out of your settlement.
First, we create a spreadsheet that you sign off on. The spreadsheet shows where all the money is going. For example, if you hire a personal injury attorney, most of them will charge about a third of your settlement amount, which will be a line item on the spreadsheet. So you have what you pay the attorney out of the settlement and what costs the attorney has. This cost is different from the attorney fee. Costs are what the attorney has to pay other people to advance your case. For example, the hospital will always charge to request your hospital records. Typically, the attorney will pay that, and then you pay the attorney back for that service at the disbursement stage.
So in the disbursement spreadsheet, you will have the attorney fee line and the expenses that the attorney has advanced for you. Next, you will have the liens, which are treatment providers or health insurance companies that have to be paid back out of the settlement. Liens can include Medicare, Medicaid, TRICARE, Humana, Cigna, Anthem, or whoever paid for treatment related to your accident. There will be a line item for each lien because you need to know, as the client, where all your money is going.
This is a very fair question, and the attorney should show you where all the money is going in the disbursement spreadsheet. And then the last item, the most important one, is how much are you, the client, getting?
At our law firm, we don’t take more than what the client should receive. So if the attorney fee is larger than what you would get, then we’ll reduce our attorney fee. This allows you to take more after all the liens have been paid.
So that’s what happens after the settlement check is received: the attorney will prepare the disbursement statement, so you know exactly where your money is going. While we can’t speak for all law firms, that’s how we do it at Springs Law Group. Then, we’ll have you come in and sign the statement, along with a check from the insurance company and deposit it. Finally, we’ll give you your check for the remainder. So that’s how it wraps up at the end of the case.
Once the law firm receives your settlement check, you will want to know how the money is distributed. So it’s essential for the law firm to create a disbursement statement that displays where your money is going and how much of a remainder is left for you. If you have further questions, visit our website or give us a call today.
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