On October 11, 2019, an Alabama jury returned a $9 million verdict for the family of Hope Johnson in a wrongful death medical malpractice case. This verdict breaks records for Lee County, Alabama.
Attorneys have a unique opportunity, not available to others who earn professional fees, to take their contingent legal fees and invest them on a pre-tax and tax-deferred basis to smooth out their income. This article answers some frequently asked questions about attorney fee structures and deferral of contingent legal fees.
A Special Needs Trust is a trust that can be created pursuant to federal law whose corpus or any assets held in the trust do not count as resources for purposes of qualifying for Medicaid or SSI. These trusts are an indispensable planning tool for making sure your clients remain eligible for means-based benefits like Medicaid after receiving a settlement. But there are several types of special needs trusts, including a standalone (d)(4)(A) Special Needs Trust, and a (d)(4)(C) trust, commonly known as a pooled trust. What’s the difference, and what’s right for your client?
Trial Lawyer View host, Jason D. Lazarus, Esq., Orlando, FL, Amazon best-selling author of “The Art of Settlement” and nationally recognized settlement compliance expert, was recently recognized in the 2021 edition of Florida Trend’s Florida Legal Elite™. The list of 1,263 honorees represents just over 1% of the active Florida Bar members, including attorneys in private practice as well as top government and non-profit attorneys who practice in Florida.
Structured settlements utilizing life insurance annuities as their funding mechanism have been around for four decades. Over half a million injury victims receive benefits from structured settlement annuities. Each year, life insurance companies that provide structured settlements receive more than $6 billion to fund new structured settlement arrangements and an estimated $156 billion has been paid in total to fund structured settlements in force since the seventies.
Structured settlements are commonly utilized in the settlement of tort claims because of these seven crucial advantages they offer personal injury victims.
Jason D. Lazarus was recently featured on Grow Your Law Firm podcast with Ken Hardison of PILMMA.
Medicare is complex, to say the least. Medicare Parts A, B, C, and D all cover distinct but overlapping services. Meanwhile, Medicare eligibility is connected to Social Security Disability Income, and the Medicare Secondary Payer Act is a series of statutory provisions that would make even the most detail-oriented person’s head spin.
When personal injury victims win a settlement, it can be life-changing. They have costly medical bills to contend with, as well as the fact that they often aren’t able to live or work the way they used to. To victims, settlements aren’t just money; they’re an assurance that the victim will have their needs met and will be able to get on with their lives as best they can.
Once you’ve already identified someone as a Medicare beneficiary (or someone with the reasonable expectation of becoming one within thirty months), the easiest way to make sure you’re compliant is to follow the acronym “CAD.”
Heidi Ahlborn was injured in a very serious car accident in January of 1996. At the time, she was a nineteen-year-old college student pursuing a degree in teaching. She suffered a catastrophic brain injury that left her incapable of finishing college and unable to care for or support herself in the future. When the Arkansas Department of Health tried to assert a lien against Ahlborn’s settlement, she sued, and the case went all the way to the Supreme Court, who found in her favor.
As of April 1, 2011, a Responsible Reporting Entities/insurers (RRE), (liability insurer, self-insurer, no-fault insurer, and workers’ compensation carriers) must determine whether a claimant is a Medicare beneficiary (“entitled”) and if so, provide certain information to the secretary of Health and Human Services (hereinafter “secretary”) when the claim is resolved. This is the so-called Mandatory Insurer Requirement, MIR for short.
Consider this scenario: you represent a current Medicare beneficiary in a third-party liability case. As part of the workup of the case, you determine the client will need future medical care related to the injuries suffered, and you settle the case. Since the client is a Medicare beneficiary, the defendant will report the settlement under the Mandatory Insurer Reporting law as it is greater than $750 in gross settlement proceeds.
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