What filing a claim actually involves

The stages, roughly

Cases of this kind, involving many plaintiffs against an institutional defendant, commonly take years rather than months. Anyone promising you a fast outcome is guessing.

The hardest part: your deposition

You should know about this before you start, not after.

At some point in discovery, you will likely sit for a deposition — sworn testimony, in a conference room, answering questions from the defendants’ lawyers, recorded by a court reporter and often on video. Your own lawyer is present and can object, but cannot answer for you.

You will be asked to describe what happened in specific detail. You may be asked about your medical history, your mental health history, your memory, why you did not report at the time, and inconsistencies between what you say now and what any record says. This is not because anyone believes you are lying; it is what defense counsel is retained to do, and it is the standard adversarial process.

People describe depositions in these cases as the single hardest day. Many also describe getting through it as the point at which they stopped feeling like something was being done to them. Both accounts are common.

What it costs

Cases like this are typically handled on a contingency fee: the firm is paid a percentage of any recovery, and if there is no recovery, you owe no fee. Costs — filing fees, records, expert witnesses, depositions — are usually advanced by the firm and reimbursed from a recovery.

Things to get in writing before signing anything:

• The exact percentage, and whether it changes if the case goes to trial
• Whether the percentage is calculated before or after costs are deducted — this materially changes what you receive
• What happens to advanced costs if the case is lost
• Who decides whether to accept a settlement offer (it should be you)
• How to end the relationship if you want to

The emotional cost, stated plainly

Litigation requires you to revisit the events repeatedly and on someone else’s schedule — in an intake interview, in written discovery, in deposition preparation, in deposition, potentially at trial. For some people that is grounding and gives shape to something that had none. For others it means an event they had contained becomes a live part of daily life for years.

Neither reaction indicates strength or weakness. But it is worth deciding, before you begin, what support you would want in place, and worth telling a lawyer honestly what your limits are.

What you can control

• Whether to consult at all — and consulting is not filing.
• Whether to file after consulting — you can walk away at that point having lost nothing.
• Whether to accept a settlement — this decision is yours, not your lawyer’s.
• Whether to change lawyers — you can, and the fact that a firm signed you up first does not bind you to it.
• The pace of your own participation, within the court’s schedule.

Deciding not to

Some people work through all of this and conclude they do not want to pursue a claim. That is a legitimate conclusion, not a failure of nerve, and it does not make what happened less real. If that is where you land, the support resources below apply to you exactly as much as to anyone who files.

Two companion pages cover the questions that follow on from this one: how long a civil lawsuit takes in California, and whether a claim is filed alone or grouped with other cases.