The first conversation with a law firm about abuse is rarely billed. That surprises people who have only ever dealt with attorneys over a will or a lease, where the clock starts when you sit down. In this corner of the work, almost every firm takes cases on contingency, meaning the fee is a percentage of what is recovered and nothing is owed if nothing is recovered. So the consultation is free. What is not free is your week: the evenings spent locating a discharge summary from 1998, the phone calls to a sibling who remembers the name of the assistant coach, the hour on hold with a records department that closes at four.
That is the real cost of the first meeting, and it is worth spending deliberately rather than by accident. A household comes to this once. The organization on the other side handles claims like it as a category, with a file-opening procedure and a vendor that pulls records in bulk. Understanding that difference in scale is most of what makes an hour productive instead of exploratory.
What the meeting costs, and what it costs to skip the prep
Assume no invoice for the intake call. Assume also that the firm is deciding something during it. Intake screening exists because a firm can only carry a limited number of cases at once, and each one it takes on it funds out of pocket for a year or more. The screener is trying to answer three questions: what happened, who besides the individual may bear responsibility, and whether the claim can still be brought.
If you arrive with nothing, that hour produces a follow-up list and a second call in two weeks. If you arrive with a dated sequence of events and a handful of documents, the same hour produces a preliminary read on the third question, which is the one that governs everything else. The unbilled hour is cheap. The two-week gap can matter, because deadlines in these cases are sometimes measured against a birthday, a discovery date, or a legislative window that opened and will close.
Week to week, the preparation is not a project. It is two evenings. One to write, one to gather.
The first evening: write the sequence before you look anything up
Sit down with a legal pad or a blank document and put events in order with whatever dates you have. Approximate dates are fine and honest: "spring, seventh grade" is a usable entry. Attorneys work with approximations all the time and would rather have your genuine uncertainty than a firmed-up guess you later have to walk back.
What to include:
- Where you were living and where the conduct occurred, by address or building if you can.
- The institution involved: school district, parish, camp, hospital, team, employer, group home, detention facility.
- The role the person held, and who supervised them.
- Anyone you told at the time, and roughly when, and what they did.
- Any prior complaint you were aware of, whether or not it involved you.
That last two items carry disproportionate weight. Institutional liability usually turns on notice: what the organization knew, when it knew it, and what it did next. A single name of an adult who was told in 1996 can reorganize the entire theory of a case.
Do not attempt to write a narrative essay. Bullets with dates are more useful and considerably easier to produce on a Tuesday night.
The second evening: paper, and where it lives
You do not need a complete file. You need enough to establish that the records exist and can be obtained, because obtaining them is the firm's job and it has a budget line.
| Document | Where it usually sits |
|---|---|
| School enrollment and transcripts | District central office, not the individual school |
| Medical or counseling records | Provider's release form; hospitals often use a third-party service |
| Employment or personnel file | HR at the parent organization |
| Police report or CPS referral | Records division of the responding agency |
| Membership, roster, or camp registration | National body rather than the local chapter |
Add anything personal you still have: letters, photographs from the relevant year, a diary, old email or message threads, and the names and current contact information for anyone who was around. Screenshot rather than describe. Put it all in one folder, physical or digital, and bring a copy rather than the original.
When you make that first call, say plainly what you have. A firm that concentrates in this work will tell you within a few minutes whether the matter fits what they handle, and a practicing sexual abuse lawyer will know which records custodians are cooperative and which require a subpoena before you have finished describing the situation.
What actually drives the money after you sign
The percentage in the fee agreement is the number people focus on, and it is usually a band rather than a single figure, stepping up if the case is filed and again if it is tried. Read that clause carefully. But the variable that moves the total is case expenses, which are separate from the fee and advanced by the firm.
Expenses in an institutional abuse case cluster around a few things: retrieving decades-old records from custodians who charge per page, court reporters and videographers for depositions, and expert witnesses. Experts bill by the hour, and a case involving an institution's supervision practices may need more than one. Filing fees and service of process are small by comparison. Whether these come off the top before the fee percentage or after is a real difference in your net, and it is written into the agreement in one sentence.
Scale explains the rest. A single claimant is one file. A diocese, a university system, or a national youth organization facing many claims has standing outside counsel, a document-retention protocol, and an insurance tower that has been analyzed already. Their marginal cost of defending one more claim is low. Yours is not. That asymmetry is exactly why firms in this area take cases in groups and why preparation on your end shortens the part of the timeline you pay for in patience.
The clock, and who is watching it
Deadlines here are unlike ordinary injury deadlines. Many states have extended or reopened the window for childhood abuse claims, sometimes with a lookback period that runs for a fixed stretch and then shuts. Which state's law applies depends on where the conduct occurred, not where you live now. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is responsible for tracking sexual violence as a public health matter nationally, but the legal deadline is state-specific and an attorney will pin it down in the first conversation if you have given them the geography and the years.
Bring the dates. That is the single item that turns an intake call into an answer.
Most people put this call off for reasons that have nothing to do with paperwork. When the week finally comes that you are ready, having the folder already assembled means the readiness does not have to survive another month of waiting.