Hemminger Law Office handles Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), personal injury, employment discrimination, medical malpractice, and personal injury cases.
Lead attorney David Hemminger will handle your case from start to finish. In some cases, he will associate with other attorneys, but he will always get your approval first.
We don’t do credit repair, but we work with closely with A+ Financial, a local company that specializes in credit repair and gets great results for their clients. Our FCRA practice focuses on inaccurate entries on your credit report.
The FCRA’s statute of limitations is two years from the date you discovered the inaccurate entry. The FCRA also gives “furnishers” – the bank, finance company, collections company, etc., who furnished the inaccurate entry to the credit bureaus – one chance to correct the entry by way of the consumer filing a formal dispute with the credit bureaus. If your dispute comes back “verified” – in other words, if the furnisher and the bureaus won’t correct the error – your next step is filing suit against the furnisher and/or the bureaus. The verification process usually takes around 30 days.
In the case of a negligent violation, the FCRA permits you to recover “statutory” damages of $1,000 per violation and your “actual” damages, i.e., money damages you incur as a result of the violation. These can range from denial of credit to paying a higher interest rate than you would have without the violation. In the case of a “willful” violation, i.e., if you can prove that the furnisher or the bureau intentionally violated the FCRA or, as is more often the case, recklessly ignored the FCRA, you may be entitled to an award of punitive damages. The amount and the existence of potential punitive damages varies with every case. Finally, whether the violation was negligent or willful, the FCRA entitles you to an award of your attorney’s fees if you can show a violation of the statute.
Any case – FCRA, personal injury, medical malpractice, employment discrimination, or insurance bad faith – could go to trial. We don’t guarantee any result in any case we take, including whether the case will settle or go to trial.
In most cases, we charge a contingency fee of 40% of any settlement or judgment (a damage award after trial). In those cases, we won’t charge you anything up front.
For FCRA cases, please bring all of your credit reports, any credit denial letters, and any dispute letters, if you’ve tried to dispute the incorrect entry yourself. For personal injury and medical malpractice cases, copies of your medical records and any billing receipts are helpful. For insurance bad faith cases, bring a copy of your insurance policy or the declarations page for your policy and any correspondence (letters, emails) you’ve had with the insurance company. For employment discrimination claims, please bring copies of any complaints you’ve already filed (for instance, with the Kentucky Human Rights Commission or the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) and a copy of your personnel file if you have it.
This one’s easy. No. Whether you talk to us or another lawyer, you should know your rights before you accept any settlement from an insurance company. Insurance companies perform a valuable service, but they’re interested only in their bottom line, not in seeing you made whole for your injuries.
Maybe. Kentucky is an “at-will” employment state, which means that, unless you have an employment contract, your employer can fire you for any reason or no reason at all. The only exceptions are if you’re fired in retaliation for a “protected activity,” like filing an EEOC complaint or reporting unsafe conditions, or if your termination is based on your race, religion, age, pregnancy, gender, or disability status.
An insurance company, whether it’s your insurer or a third-party insurer (for instance, an at-fault driver’s insurance company) has to deal with you fairly and honestly. Insurance companies can’t misrepresent the terms of your policy or tell you you’re not covered if you really are. Insurers also have to accept reasonable settlements. If you’re at fault for an accident and your insurance company won’t pay a reasonable settlement to the injured person you may have a claim for insurance bad faith.
We can’t make any promises as to how long any particular case will take from filing the complaint to settlement or trial. Some cases take weeks, others take years, but we’ll do our best to ensure your case is not dragged out longer than necessary.