The kind of lawyer you need to sue a company depends on what the company did to you. A broken contract calls for a business litigation attorney. An injury on company property or from a defective product calls for a personal injury lawyer. Firing, harassment, discrimination, or unpaid wages call for an employment lawyer. Deceptive advertising or hidden fees point to a consumer protection or class action attorney. Theft of a patent, trademark, or copyrighted work points to an intellectual property attorney. Picking the right specialist matters because lawyers who work your claim type every day know the procedural traps, the realistic value of the case, and how corporate defendants in your situation tend to fight back.
Before you start calling firms, three things are worth checking: what you’re actually suing over, whether a contract you signed forces you into arbitration instead of court, and how much time you have left to file.
Match the Claim to the Specialist
Legal specialization isn’t marketing. An employment lawyer and a personal injury lawyer operate in different procedural worlds, cite different statutes, and face different kinds of opponents. The expertise doesn’t transfer well across those lines.
Business Litigation or Commercial Attorney
Right for breach of contract claims, partnership disputes, and other commercial conflicts. A breach happens when a company fails to hold up its end of a binding agreement: a vendor that never delivered, a service provider that cut corners, an employer that violated your employment agreement. These lawyers spend their days interpreting contracts and negotiating with corporate legal teams.
Personal Injury Attorney
Right for negligence and product liability claims where you suffered physical harm or property damage. Slip-and-fall injuries at a store, a crash caused by a company’s delivery driver, unsafe conditions at a business, or injuries from a defective product all fit here. Product defects can lie in the design, the manufacturing, or a missing safety warning. These attorneys calculate damages for medical bills, lost income, and pain and suffering, and they know how to deal with insurance carriers.
Employment Law Attorney
Right for workplace claims including wrongful termination, discrimination based on race, sex, age, or disability, sexual harassment, retaliation for whistleblowing, and wage violations like unpaid overtime. Federal statutes in play include Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, the Americans with Disabilities Act, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act, and the Fair Labor Standards Act.1U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Time Limits For Filing A Charge2Worker.gov. Filing a Complaint With the US Department of Labors Wage and Hour Division Employment lawyers also know the administrative prerequisites you have to clear before you can even file in court.
Consumer Protection or Class Action Attorney
Right for false advertising, hidden fees, bait-and-switch tactics, and other deceptive practices. The Federal Trade Commission Act lets the FTC police unfair or deceptive business conduct and seek money back for injured consumers.3Federal Trade Commission. Federal Trade Commission Act State consumer protection statutes add further enforcement, and some give private individuals the right to sue. When the same misconduct harmed many people the same way, these lawyers often package the cases as class actions.
Intellectual Property Attorney
Right when a company used your patented invention, copyrighted work, or trademarked brand without permission. These disputes are governed primarily by federal law, including the Lanham Act for trademarks, the Copyright Act, and the Patent Act. IP litigation is technical and often confined to federal court, so general litigators rarely have the right background.
If your situation straddles categories, say you were injured by a product at work and also want to pursue a retaliation claim, a good attorney will tell you at the first meeting whether they can handle the full case or whether you need a second specialist alongside them.
Check Your Contract for an Arbitration Clause
Before you spend time finding a lawyer, pull out the contract you signed with the company. Employment agreements, credit card terms, and consumer service contracts routinely bury an arbitration clause in the fine print, requiring you to resolve disputes through private arbitration instead of court. More than 60 million workers in the United States are bound by mandatory arbitration agreements with their employers, and the figure climbs higher once consumer contracts are counted.
Arbitration doesn’t end your claim, but it changes the landscape. An arbitrator’s decision is generally final and binding, so you typically can’t appeal to a court if you lose. Most arbitration agreements also include class action waivers, blocking you from joining with other people harmed the same way. A lawyer who regularly handles your claim type will know whether the clause in your contract is enforceable and whether any exception applies.
One exception matters for a specific group of readers: the Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act, signed into law in 2022, lets anyone alleging sexual assault or sexual harassment void a pre-dispute arbitration agreement and go to court instead.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 9 US Code 402 – No Validity or Enforceability The choice belongs to the person making the allegation, not the company.
Mind the Filing Deadline
Every type of lawsuit carries a statute of limitations, a hard deadline after which you lose the right to file no matter how strong your claim is. Miss it and a court will almost certainly dismiss the case without ever looking at the facts. The deadlines vary by state and by claim type:
- Personal injury: typically two to three years from the date of the injury in most states, though a few states allow as little as one year.
- Breach of contract: usually three to six years, with written contracts generally getting longer windows than oral ones.
- Employment discrimination: much shorter. You must file a charge with the EEOC within 180 calendar days of the discriminatory act, or 300 days if a state or local agency also enforces a similar anti-discrimination law.1U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Time Limits For Filing A Charge
- Product liability: varies widely, often tracking the state’s general personal injury window but sometimes set by a separate statute.
A doctrine called the discovery rule can extend some deadlines. The clock doesn’t start until you knew, or reasonably should have known, about the injury and its cause. This comes up most often in medical malpractice and defective product cases where the harm isn’t immediately apparent. If the company actively concealed its wrongdoing, the deadline may also be paused until you uncover the fraud. Don’t rely on either exception without a lawyer’s advice; courts read them narrowly and the burden of proof is on you.
Steps You May Have to Take Before Filing
Some claims require you to clear administrative hurdles before you’re allowed to file suit. Skipping them can get the case thrown out on a technicality.
EEOC Charge for Employment Discrimination
If you want to sue under federal employment discrimination law, you generally cannot go straight to court. You must first file a charge of discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.1U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Time Limits For Filing A Charge The EEOC then investigates and tries to resolve the charge. You typically must allow the EEOC 180 days to work the file before requesting a right-to-sue letter, which is what gives you permission to file in federal court. Once that letter arrives, you generally have just 90 days to file your lawsuit, another deadline that’s easy to miss.
Claims under the Equal Pay Act are an exception. You can go directly to court for those without an EEOC charge first.1U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Time Limits For Filing A Charge If you want to bring a Title VII claim alongside an Equal Pay Act claim, though, you still need the EEOC charge for the Title VII portion.
Demand Letters
For contract disputes and many other civil claims, a formal demand letter before suit is not always legally required, but it is almost always smart. The letter puts the company on notice that you’re serious, states what you want, and builds a paper trail. Some state statutes do require a demand letter before you can bring certain claims, so skipping that step can weaken or delay the case. Most attorneys send one as a standard first move.
Small Claims Court as an Alternative
If your dispute is over a relatively small sum, small claims court lets you sue a company without hiring an attorney. Jurisdictional caps run from $2,500 to $25,000 depending on the state, with $5,000 and $10,000 being the most common. Procedures are simplified, filing fees are low, and some states actually prohibit lawyers from appearing. This is the right venue for a contractor who didn’t finish a job, a company that won’t honor a refund, or a landlord withholding a security deposit.
The limits are real. You can’t recover more than the jurisdictional cap even if your actual damages are higher, discovery is minimal, which makes complex cases hard to prove, and you generally can’t appeal if you lose. For any claim involving significant money, ongoing harm, or complicated legal questions, you need a lawyer and a regular civil court.
Class Action or Individual Suit
When a company’s misconduct harmed many people the same way, say a defective product sold to thousands of customers or a payroll scheme affecting an entire workforce, a class action may make more sense than individual lawsuits. A federal court must certify the class before the case can proceed, which requires showing the group is large enough, the legal questions are common, and a class action is the most efficient way to resolve the dispute.5Cornell Law School. Federal Rules of Civil Procedure Rule 23 – Class Actions
The tradeoff is straightforward. In a class action, costs are shared across all participants and the group’s collective weight pressures companies toward settlement, but individual payouts tend to be smaller and you give up control over strategy and settlement terms. In an individual suit, you keep the full award and every decision, but you carry the entire financial risk. If your individual damages are substantial and your evidence is strong, going it alone often makes more sense. If your losses are small but the company harmed thousands, the class action route may be the only practical path. The distinction also affects which lawyer you want: not every employment or consumer attorney handles class work.
What You’ll Pay
Attorneys charge in a few standard ways, and the right arrangement depends on your claim type.
- Hourly rates run roughly $150 to $400 nationally, with senior attorneys in major markets reaching $500 or more. Experience, practice area, and location all drive the number.
- Contingency fees are common in personal injury and some employment cases. The attorney takes a percentage of your recovery, typically around 33%, and you pay nothing upfront. The percentage often rises if the case goes to trial. If you lose, the attorney gets nothing, which means they’re selective about what they’ll take on contingency.
- Flat fees are sometimes available for discrete tasks like drafting a demand letter or reviewing a contract, but rare for full litigation.
- Retainers are upfront deposits the attorney bills against hourly, replenished as they’re drawn down.
Any fee arrangement should be in a written agreement signed before work begins, spelling out the percentage or hourly rate, how expenses are handled, and what happens if you change attorneys mid-case.
Attorney fees are only part of the expense. Filing a civil case in federal district court costs $405.6Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 US Code 1914 – District Court Filing and Miscellaneous Fees State court filing fees vary widely. Beyond filing fees, expect costs for depositions and court reporter transcripts, expert witnesses (which can run into the thousands in technical cases), document production, and process servers. Against a well-funded corporate defendant these expenses accumulate quickly. Ask your attorney upfront who pays costs as they come due and whether they’re deducted from any eventual recovery.
Evaluating an Attorney at the First Meeting
Start with your state bar association’s lawyer referral service, which can match you by practice area and location. Personal referrals from people who went through similar disputes tell you what the experience was actually like. Online reviews add data points but skew toward extremes.
When you meet with candidates, weigh these factors:
- Specific experience with your claim type. Ask how many similar cases they’ve handled against companies and how those cases ended.
- Track record against corporate defendants. Companies have in-house counsel or large firms on retainer; you want someone who isn’t intimidated and has gone the distance before.
- Communication. You’ll work with this person for months or years. If they can’t explain your case clearly in the consultation, that won’t improve later.
- Honest assessment. The best attorneys name the weaknesses in your case at the first meeting. Be wary of anyone who promises a big outcome before asking hard questions.
Bring every document that relates to the dispute: contracts, emails, texts, photos, medical records, pay stubs, performance reviews, product packaging, and any written communication with the company. Write a short, factual summary of what happened, when, and who was involved, with a rough estimate of your financial losses. Ask the attorney what the single biggest obstacle to winning your case would be. The answer tells you more about their competence than anything on the firm’s website.