scammed by lawyer?

[nikki11369]

What is the name of your state? illinois

Hi, hoping to get someone's take on this.

Let me preface this with what initially took place. Late one Saturday night this past October, the man I was dating and I were coming back to Chicago after visiting friends in Wisconsin. I slept in the front passenger seat of my brand new 300M while he drove us back. I woke a day or two later to find myself having survived a devastating roll over crash in which I'd been airlifted from one hospital to another in critical condition. He had fallen asleep at the wheel on I-90 in Wisconsin around 6am that Sunday morning. He was ejected through my moon roof during the multiple rollovers and walked away with a separated shoulder. I on the other hand was not so fortunate. Half my face was destroyed and had to be rebuilt, (work in progress), 2 fractured vertebrae and one crushed in my neck. The neck injury, amazingly enough that it didn't kill me, didn't leave my paralyzed either. So my neck is all hardware now from the cervical fusion and my face is made up of 6 metal plates and so forth, plus multiple other less severe injuries. Obviously this has been a monumentally life altering experience for me. My whole world as I'd known it to be that Saturday night, completely changed by Sunday morning and life will never be the same. I've been home recovering for nearly 9 months now and adjusting to all my new limitations etc. The first several months after the accident my world was all about pain and recovery and looking for a light at the end of the tunnel. My world now is all about pain, physical recovery, emotional and mental recovery, auto insurance, medical insurance, hospital bills, dr appts, surgeries, arguing with insurance companies, arguing with billing departments, LTD coverages, STD coverages, looking for the light at the end of the tunnel; you get what I'm coming from.

Getting to my question...Around Feb or March during discussions with State Farm, my agent suggested I talk to a lawyer. I got what seems a really good lawyer through a colleague of mine at work. He did what lawyers do best, dig deep into those insurance policies to find more money than what there appears to be on the surface, and he did. What looked to be about $43,000 in monies coming to me after expenses ended up being significantly more. Obviously there's not an amount of money that could ever compensate me for all I've been through and will continue to go through for the rest of my life Quite honestly I'm embarrassed to reveal the final amount I received. Fortunately we both State Farm because it would have been a nightmare had it been two different insurance companies. As it turns out our reps sat back to back in the same office, made the whole process much easier than it could have been. But as is the nature of ins policies, they all have limits. These limits unfortunately only amounted to $300,000.00. They were comprised of three $100,000.00 policies. One of those was a med pay policy in which they paid me cash rather than putting it towards my medical bills, and that was all good because I have medical ins...Out of that $300,000 I received $200,000. My lawyer told me he would not take the usual 1/3 but that it would be on paper as though he had. (red flag?) I didn't really understand most of what he discussed with me really, nor did I care too much at the time really with all I'm dealing with. What he ended up taking was $23,000.00 of the 300,000, I recevied 200, and the remaining $77,000 he said went to a company called Ingenix. Some company that reclaims monies for insurance companies, in this case my medical ins through my work. Now 77,000 isn't going to touch what my medical bills have amounted to so far. Heck, just two weeks in the ICU was over $100,000, add in surgeons, follow-up surgeries etc, My bills were at nearly 1/2 mill by December, no telling where they're at now. So I endorsed the check that was issued by State Farm to myself/Ingenix. I never thought anything of it. It wasn't until recently when mentioning this to people that I've begun to question my lawyer's integrity. No one I've spoken to has heard of such a thing. And when I think of the flood of paperwork and bills I receive on a daily basis, nothing has ever come to me from the name Ingenix or anything having to do with the insurance company wanting to be reimbursed.(red flag?) I have no documentation of that transaction or anything related to it. I work for a large multi facility medical practice and no one I've spoken to there has heard of Ingenix or having to repay an insurance company. I've researched them a bit recently but haven't been able to conclude what it is that they do exactly. Another red flag, (red now, not so red when it was first mentioned,) was when my lawyer suggested that I might not want to let anyone at work know about the monies I've received because it may somehow get back to the insurance company being that I work in that field and they may try taking more money from me, something to that effect.

So my question, finally, (honestly I tried to make this as condensed as possible)...does this sound like I might have been scammed by my own lawyer? Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much.