Lawyer Fees and Costs in an Oilfield Injury Case

Worried About Paying a Lawyer? How Oilfield Injury Lawyers Commonly Charge

A contingency fee arrangement is a way of paying a lawyer in which the fee is a portion of any recovery. The arrangement is set out in a written agreement, and the fee is owed only if there is a recovery. The word "contingency" means the fee depends on an outcome. If a case resolves through a settlement or a verdict, the fee is taken from that money. If there is no recovery, no fee of that kind is earned. What happens to other expenses in that event is a separate question, covered below.

The specific terms come from the written fee agreement, not from an industry habit or something a friend heard. Two agreements can look alike and still divide money differently. For an injured worker, this means the agreement itself shows whether a case can move forward without paying a lawyer before anything happens. Nobody can tell from a website.

Our attorney's own terms, like anyone's, are found in a signed agreement. This page gives no percentage and no amount. Fee terms vary, and the only reliable source for the numbers in a given matter is the document a person is asked to sign.

For a family deciding whether to look into a claim after a rig or well-site accident, the practical takeaway is simple. How the lawyer gets paid is a term to read, not something to assume. The rest of this page explains what to read for.

Case Costs That Arise in an Oilfield Injury Matter

An oilfield injury case has two kinds of money moving through it, and they are easy to blur together. The attorney fee is the lawyer's pay for the work. Case costs are the out-of-pocket expenses the case itself generates, whatever the fee arrangement is.

Case costs in an oilfield matter can include:

• obtaining medical records and bills from hospitals and treating doctors
• court filing fees when a lawsuit is started
• court reporter charges and transcripts for depositions, which are recorded question-and-answer sessions under oath
• fees for expert witnesses in engineering, safety and medicine
• inspection and testing of equipment such as a valve, a hoist, a pressure line or a piece of a drilling rig
• accident reconstruction work

These expenses are real whether a case settles in months or goes to trial. Someone has to pay them as they come up. A fee agreement typically says who advances these costs, meaning who pays them first. It also says whether they are subtracted from a recovery before or after the fee is calculated. The agreement's own language controls on both points.

For someone weighing a case, the amount that comes out of any recovery depends on two things. One is the fee. The other is the costs that have built up, as the agreement defines them. Looking only at the fee leaves half the picture out.

What the Fee Agreement Actually Sets Out

A written fee agreement is a contract. Once it is signed, its terms govern the relationship between the lawyer and the person hiring them, including how money is divided at the end. Reading it slowly is not distrust. It is how a contract is meant to be read.

Several provisions carry most of the weight:

• How the fee is calculated. Some agreements apply the fee to the gross recovery, the full amount before costs come out. Others apply it to the net recovery, the amount left after costs are repaid. The same recovery can leave a different amount to the injured person depending on which one the agreement uses.
• Which costs are included. The agreement may list the kinds of expenses that count as case costs and how they are tracked.
• When costs are deducted. Timing matters because it interacts with the gross-or-net question.
• What happens to advanced costs if there is no recovery. The document itself answers this, so this page makes no promise either way.

For an injured worker or a grieving spouse, reading the agreement before signing is the only way to know the exact terms that will apply. A summary, even an accurate one, is not the contract.

Some terms can be hard to follow on a first read, especially in the weeks after an accident. A conversation with an attorney can walk through each provision in plain words, so the reader knows what each clause means before signing it.

Questions Worth Asking Before You Sign a Fee Agreement

A list of questions can help a person who has a fee agreement in hand, or expects to see one, and wants to understand it. These are not instructions. They are the points a clear agreement, and a clear explanation of it, can be expected to answer.

• Is the fee calculated before or after case costs are deducted?
• Who advances the case costs while the case is going on?
• What happens to advanced costs if the case does not result in a recovery?
• Are there circumstances where the fee percentage changes, for example if the case goes to trial or an appeal follows?
• What kinds of expert witnesses does a case like this typically require, and how are their charges handled?
• How will costs be reported, and when will the client see an accounting of them?

Oilfield cases can involve several companies on one site: an operator, a drilling contractor, a service company and equipment makers. They can also involve technical liability questions and heavy expert work. Each of those features can affect how costs build up, and so how the fee agreement plays out in practice.

Clear answers to these questions before signing let a person make an informed decision rather than one based on guesswork.

Why Expert Witnesses Drive Much of the Cost in Oilfield Cases

The technical nature of drilling and well work is the reason expert costs loom large. Liability in an oilfield case often turns on questions a jury cannot answer from common experience. Was a piece of equipment defective? Were safety procedures followed during a pressure test or a pipe-handling job? Was a condition on the site unreasonably dangerous? Answering those questions usually takes opinion testimony from people trained in the field.

The experts oilfield cases commonly involve include:

• petroleum engineers, on well operations, drilling and pressure systems
• safety engineers, on procedures, guarding and industry safety practice
• industrial hygienists, on exposures to gases, chemicals and air quality
• physicians in the relevant field, on the injury, its cause and future care
• accident reconstructionists, on the sequence of events

When equipment is at the center, such as a failed component or a hoist that released, the case may follow the questions described in our guide on defective oilfield equipment. Those cases often depend on inspecting and testing the item itself. A head injury may call for medical opinions on symptoms that showed up later, which our page on oilfield brain injuries describes.

None of this suggests that any particular company did anything wrong. Whether a duty was breached, or a product was defective, depends on the facts and the evidence.

For a family reading a fee agreement, expert work is often central to showing what happened and who may be responsible. That makes it one of the largest cost categories to understand in the agreement.

Already Receiving Benefits? How Workers' Compensation and a Third-Party Case Can Both Apply

You may be an injured worker who already receives benefits and wonders whether that ends the matter. It may not. Two separate legal tracks can exist side by side.

If you are receiving workers' compensation, those benefits come from a state-administered system that pays workers injured on the job regardless of fault, usually through the employer's insurer. A third-party claim is different: it is a civil lawsuit against someone other than the employer whose conduct may have contributed to the injury. That might be an equipment manufacturer, another contractor on the site, or the property owner or operator. Our guide on oilfield contractor injuries describes how this often arises on multi-company sites.

The two are legally distinct. A fee agreement for a third-party case covers that case's fees and costs. Workers' compensation is a separate system with its own rules.

State law governs how workers' compensation benefits and a third-party recovery interact, and the rules differ from state to state. No single state's rule applies everywhere. That includes whether benefits must be repaid from a recovery, and in what way. This page does not describe any state's approach.

Whether and how a workers' compensation benefit affects what a person keeps from a third-party recovery depends on the state and the facts. If you have questions about how the two tracks fit together where you were hurt, you can request a case evaluation and discuss it with our attorney.

What Damages Categories the Law May Allow in an Oilfield Injury Case

Damages are the categories of loss a civil claim asks a court to recognize. Knowing them helps explain what a case is trying to recover, and so how costs and fees relate to it.

For an injured worker, some losses show up on paper. These economic damages include:

• medical expenses, past and future
• lost wages and lost earning capacity
• rehabilitation costs

Other losses are just as real to the person living with them but harder to put a number on. These non-economic damages include:

• physical pain and suffering
• emotional distress
• loss of enjoyment of life

For a family that has lost someone, a wrongful death claim is the civil claim surviving family members may bring when a person dies as a result of another party's conduct. The losses the law typically recognizes for those families include funeral and burial expenses, loss of financial support, and loss of companionship and consortium. Consortium means the relationship a spouse or family shared. Who may bring the claim, and what it may include, differ significantly from state to state. Our page on fatal oilfield accidents covers this for families.

Damages rules differ by state. No state's cap, formula or category list is the rule everywhere, and the same is true of limitation periods and fault rules.

The categories the law allows set the outer boundary of what a case can seek. What any individual case may recover depends on the facts, the evidence and that state's rules. Our overview of oilfield and energy legal services gives a broader view of how these cases fit together.