How Do I Find The Best Qui Tam Lawyer For Me?
There many issues involved in this decision aside from basic ones, like has your lawyer ever filed a case under this law’s special procedures before?
More important even than that, you need a lawyer who can figure out what kind of a case you really have.
If you have a case at all, chances are that you are an expert in your field. You may not think of yourself this way. Experts come in all shapes and sizes. Maybe you are in sales, but you have been selling a particular kind of product for ten years. Maybe you are an accountant, but you are the accountant who knows just exactly how the bill is supposed to be prepared. Maybe you are a clerk, but you are the clerk who knows just exactly how the hospital is supposed to bill for certain procedures. Maybe you work on a construction site and you are the one who knows which specifications are being willfully ignored.
You are the expert and you are the expert with the inside knowledge of what went wrong. You need a lawyer, first and foremost, who can take the time to learn and understand what it is you are complaining about. Then that lawyer has to figure out how or if it is a violation of law. Then that lawyer has to be able to make your many years of experience and technical knowledge understandable to other lawyers who may not have the time to spend learning your case from scratch.
This sounds simple, but it really will not be simple until you and your lawyer go through the difficult process of learning about your job and learning about what exactly went wrong.
It is especially difficult because what happened to you or what you think is very important may not affect the bottom line of how the government was defrauded. Maybe, you worked for a company for ten years. If you worked at a place for a while chances are you remember many events that are particularly offensive to you personally. You have to be able to work with your lawyer to figure out what is actionable and what is not. It is possible that some events which may be very offensive to you, are not actionable under the law and yet some other fact you remember which may have seemed more obscure to you at first, is actually key to making a stronger case.
This process takes time. This process is very important. When you present your case to the Department of Justice, they want to be able to understand what it is about easily and quickly too. So, work with your lawyer. Be sure the lawyer is someone you can work with to make your case make sense. They do not put this in many guides to picking lawyers but the fact is your ability to work with your lawyer may be just as important or more any other consideration in choosing counsel. The cases in this area of law are complicated and require your expertise and your lawyers working together to prepare.