Frequently Asked Questions in Nursing Home Neglect Cases

Kacy Hagerty: Well, the folks at The Higgins Firm handle many nursing home neglect cases. Their clients have a lot of questions when they first hire them to pursue their cases. Attorney Jim Higgins recently stopped by to go over the most common questions that they get asked. Take a look.

Jim, great to have you back.

Jim Higgins: Thank you.

Kacy Hagerty: All right, I know you’ve been on the show for years and you guys handle a lot of nursing home neglect cases. You’ve talked about a lot of those on the show. So, today, we’re covering some of those most common questions you get from clients.

Jim Higgins: Sure.

Kacy Hagerty: First one, how much does it cost to hire your law firm to pursue a nursing home case?

Jim Higgins: Right.

Kacy Hagerty: It’s probably usually the first question they ask.

Jim Higgins: Sure, everybody wants to know that from a lawyer, right, once you call us. This is the easy one, it’s nothing. We don’t charge you anything for us to take the case. The only way we get paid is if you win your case. We take a contingency out of what’s recovered. You know, and I’ll tell you, we really are serious when we do take a case. We don’t take it unless we think we can win it because they’re expensive.

They are hard. It gets a lot - it’s hard to put a family through litigation, a nursing home litigation, because you’re going through a lot of feelings and what your loved one went through. So, we’re careful on the ones we choose. We try to give people a good answers to why we take it or why we’re not, but they don’t just to review the case, to take the case, they don’t pay us anything unless we win.

Kacy Hagerty: OK. I know another question people often want to know is how long will the case take.

Jim Higgins: Yes.

Kacy Hagerty: So often we think they’re going to take sometimes longer than they actually do.

Jim Higgins: Oh, yes. So, that one is so hard. It can take - here’s the good thing about it, we have a division in my office that this is all they do. So, we already have experts that we work with. They know how to get a chart quickly. They know how to review a chart quickly and we know how to get the case started quickly. So, I think we move it faster than somebody who doesn’t know how to handle these cases.

Now, fast in the legal world still isn’t fast on a lot of times. You know, we may resolve one as early as a few months, if we’re able to get the records, have a good review. We’ve had cases with the other lawyer. We can all come to what we think is fair. We’ve had them take two to three years or more. Or, sometimes if we, for instance, have to go the Court of Appeals and argue if an arbitration clause is in effect or if we have to go to a jury trial and that gets appealed.

So, it’s a broad spectrum, you know, people have to be patient in these cases, but we push on as fast as we can when we could still do a good job on the cases. You don’t want to be reckless with it.

Kacy Hagerty: Yes, that makes sense. And, then the question you were telling me that people often ask is how is this case worth.

Jim Higgins: Yes, that again is all over the board. I will say in Tennessee, there are some legislation that came through that really cut down values. So, we’ve got a maximum of 750,000 cases’ worth for motional value. So, we know that’s - that pain and suffering limit in Tennessee for the most part. But, you know, there may be medical bills for recovery, rehab, all sorts of things, but that’s something that we just have to talk on a case by case basis as to what we think the value will be.

Kacy Hagerty: OK. Well, a lot of great info. Jim, thank you so much.

Jim Higgins: Thank you.

Kacy Hagerty: Hey, The Higgins Firm is serving Tennessee. You can give them a call at 1800-705-2121 or go to the higginsfirm.com.