Lawyers are allowed ethically to expend money on behalf of the client if it’s a disbursement in their case. It’s pretty specific, it has to be used to move the case forward.
We can buy medical records which costs 75 cents a sheet from your medical provider. We can hire an investigator to go out and get pictures or interview witnesses. We can buy the police report which municipalities make money on by charging folks for. We can go out and acquire narrative reports from doctors and they charge for their time of having to sit down and read the record and dictate a letter to me. It usually consists of “Dear Mr. Binko, thank you for the chance to review patient ‘so and so’ and here’s what I…“ and they sit down and they look at the care and treatment & will give you opinions, and those things charge.
If we start a case, we will meet with the client and will explain all these fees that are going along. There’s two hundred and ten dollars just to file the lawsuit, & 95$ to get a judge assigned. If we need to make a motion to ask for something, compel something, or ask the court to do something for us, that will cost forty-five dollars.
There’s a lot of fees that go into building a case. We’re ethically allowed to advance all of those. What we’re not allowed to do ethically is to give money to the clients. We can’t borrow money to you, we can’t lend it to you, we can’t pay for your house, we can’t pay for your mortgage, or we can’t pay for your medical bills. That is unethical and that’s a line you cannot cross.
However, there are groups that advertise on TV and we can refer folks to them for funding; It’s called case funding and since their corporations, it’s legal. What they do is make an investment in the case and they will lend money to folks. That’s fine, as long as the lawyer has nothing to do with that business.
For example, I can’t set one up and then start sending my clients there. Our firm has nothing to do with any of these lending folks. We will give their names to our clients if they want to go and make that business decision, as that’s up to them. We will advance what we ethically can and at a loss or draw, the client will have to pay that back.