Everyone seems to be freaking out about the $1k deposit to cover costs... so let me further explain the way contingency fee agreements usually work:

In any sort of contingency arrangement (where the lawyer's fee is a percentage of any recovery, paid out that recovery) defendants are still liable for costs associated with the case, whether they win or not. Those costs include things like filing fees, arbitration fees, expert witness fees, costs of hiring an investigator, photocopies, long distance calls, etc... all the things that actually represent costs paid out by the lawyer in pursuing the case. This does NOT include the lawyer's time, or the time of any associates or paralegals or secretaries under him.

With a contingency agreement, the lawyer is compensated for his time (and the time of those who work for him) only if he wins, and is then compensated in the form of a percentage of the recovery.

This $1k up front is not a $1k payment that is then gone and never coming back, it's $1k that's placed in the lawyer's trust account and not touched until an invoice is sent to and signed off on by the client for costs incurred so far. The possibility of "additional payments" is in the case where more than $1k is spent in costs, an additional deposit is made to the trust account and handled in the same way. If, when the case is over, there is money left from that initial $1k it is refunded to the client.

If we lose, the money spent on costs out of that $1k is gone and never coming back. That's the risk of litigation.

If we win, the money spent on costs is first subtracted out of the recovery, and then the lawyer's fee is calculated based on what's left, and the remainder goes to us. To illustrate with relatively easy round numbers:

Assume $750 are spent on costs, and we recover $2750. We are first returned the remaining $250 from the initial $1k deposit. The $750 spent on costs is then subtracted from the recovery, so our costs are reimbursed from the recovery first. The lawyers contingency is taken out of the remaining recovery (so 40% of $2k, or $800) and what remains, $1200 in this example, is sent to us along with the $750 of costs we already paid.

It's extremely common for lawyers to ask for money up front which they will use to cover costs in contingency cases, especially when dealing with an unknown group like this, because it's going to be extremely difficult if not impossible for the lawyer to get money out of us to pay for costs incurred in the event that we lose. He's already gambling his time on this by accepting it as a contingency, and he's not interested in gambling an out-of-pocket payment by fronting us the money for costs too.

...that said, it does seem like it would be difficult to get the group to put up the $1k deposit. I'd still like to see us do it, though, because it's the only way we're going to get anything even approaching a reasonable refund (and I want to shove a lawsuit so far up Hash Fast's ass they taste it for weeks).