Do you need a lawyer for a vaccine injury claim, and who pays?
Short answer: you are allowed to file a Vaccine Injury Compensation Program petition without a lawyer, but almost nobody who does wins, and the program pays the lawyer's fees whether you win or lose. In this registry, 187 petitions were filed pro se (without counsel) and 6 of the 185 decided ones ended in compensation, a 3% success rate. Represented petitioners with an identified firm won 83% of 12,061 decided cases.
Who pays the lawyer
The National Childhood Vaccine Injury Act (42 U.S.C. § 300aa-15(e)) directs the program to pay reasonable attorneys' fees and costs on top of any award. If the petition loses, fees are still paid as long as it was brought in good faith and had a reasonable basis. Lawyers may not charge the petitioner a contingency fee or take a share of the award; the court reviews and approves the fee request separately. That is why the same few dozen specialist firms handle most of the docket: the economics work for them, and the petitioner's exposure is zero.
Where a decision states the fee award, the typical figure in this registry is $18K (median of 81 fee decisions with a recorded amount). Fee awards on dismissed petitions appear throughout the registry, which is the statute working as designed.
Why pro se petitions fail
Not because the rules are different. The same Vaccine Injury Table, the same Althen causation test and the same Special Masters apply. The difference is that a winning petition needs medical records assembled in a particular order, an expert report from a physician willing to state causation under oath, and a filing that lands inside the 36-month statute of limitations. Pro se filers in this registry cluster in exactly the claim types where those steps are hardest: Other / multiple, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Autism spectrum disorder.
| Representation | Cases | Decided | Win rate | Median award | Median time |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pro se | 187 | 185 | 3% | — | 13 mo |
| Represented (firm identified) | 12,122 | 12,061 | 83% | $80K | 23 mo |
How to pick one
Use the law firm scorecard and the attorney scorecard, filtered to your condition, and read the contested win rate rather than the headline. Then open the firm page to see the actual decisions. Volume in your injury type matters more than anything on a firm's website.
Related: Law firm scorecard · Attorney scorecard · How cases are decided
About this data. Computed from every published VICP decision indexed by this registry (13,292 cases as of 2026-09-11), from the public dockets of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. Median figures exclude a small number of records with unusable award data. Most compensated cases resolve by stipulation or proffer (negotiated settlement) rather than a litigated finding; an award is the court's resolution of an individual legal claim, not a medical or scientific finding about vaccines generally. Past awards do not predict any individual outcome.