Yes, you can switch lawyers in the middle of the case

That part is simple.

If your lawyer in South Carolina has gone silent, keeps saying the case is "under review," or lets weeks turn into months while the insurance companies keep poking around, you are not stuck.

A restaurant server hurt in a fog-related pileup around Columbia - say on I-26 where visibility drops to nothing near the Broad River or out toward Lexington County in one of those ugly spring morning fog banks - can change lawyers before settlement and before trial.

The harder part is the money.

Why cases like this stall out

Multi-car fog crashes are messy as hell.

On I-26 between Charleston and Columbia, one rear-end hit can become six, ten, fifteen vehicles in a few seconds. Everybody blames the weather. Every insurer says its driver "could not avoid impact." And because South Carolina uses modified comparative negligence, the whole fight turns into percentages of fault. If they can tag you with more than 50%, you recover nothing.

That is exactly why delay can be useful to the other side.

The longer your own lawyer sits on the file, the more likely bad facts harden. Skid-mark analysis gets stale. Vehicle damage photos disappear. Witnesses who remember "zero visibility" start mixing up which car hit first. Meanwhile, adjusters keep looking for a statement, a medical gap, or a social media post that helps them argue you were following too closely.

If you live in Georgia, North Carolina, or somewhere else now, it gets even easier for a lazy lawyer to let the file drift. They assume distance will keep you quiet.

Living in another state does not move the case out of South Carolina

This trips people up.

If the pileup happened in Columbia, South Carolina law usually controls the injury claim, even if you live across the river in Augusta or moved back home after the crash. The case is generally handled where the wreck happened or where the defendants can be sued.

So if you switch lawyers, your new lawyer needs to be able to handle a South Carolina case. That does not mean your old lawyer gets to hold the file hostage because you live elsewhere. It means the new firm needs the case file, the crash report, photos, medical records, insurance correspondence, and any expert work already done.

What happens to the retainer and fee agreement

Most injury lawyers in South Carolina work on contingency, not a classic up-front retainer.

So when people say "retainer," they usually mean the contract they signed with the first lawyer. If that contract says the firm gets a percentage of any recovery, firing them does not usually mean you suddenly owe that full percentage out of pocket that day.

What usually happens is uglier and more practical: the old lawyer may claim a lien for the value of the work already done, and the new lawyer may agree to resolve that fee claim out of the eventual settlement or verdict.

In plain English, the old and new lawyers fight over the same pie. You should not be paying two full contingency fees stacked on top of each other. South Carolina fee disputes in these situations are typically worked out by apportioning the fee based on who did what work and when.

What to do before you fire the first lawyer

Do this in order:

• Ask for your complete file in writing, including the contract, crash report, insurance letters, medical records collected, bills, photos, and any deadlines or hearing dates
• Ask whether any lawsuit has already been filed in Richland County, Lexington County, or federal court
• Find out the statute of limitations date and whether any claims notice deadlines are coming up
• Save every unanswered email, voicemail, and text showing the communication problem

That paper trail matters if the old firm later acts offended and claims you were the difficult one.

The fee dispute is real, but it is not your main problem

Here's what most people don't realize: the old lawyer's fee claim is mostly a lawyer problem until somebody makes it your problem.

A competent new lawyer will want to see the first contract and will usually talk directly with the old firm about the lien or quantum meruit claim. If the first lawyer barely touched the case, their fee claim may be small. If they did real work - ordered records, hired an expert on pileup reconstruction, filed suit, took depositions - they may be entitled to more.

But none of that changes your right to leave.

And if the case feels stalled now, waiting around because you're scared of "offending" the first lawyer is a terrible strategy. On a fog-chain-collision case, delay helps insurers more than injured people. That is true on I-26, it is true on US-501 when beach traffic turns chaotic near Myrtle Beach, and it is especially true when multiple carriers are already playing the blame game.

One thing to watch in a South Carolina fog pileup case

Ask whether the first lawyer has identified every possible insurance policy.

In a Columbia pileup, there may be several at once: the driver who hit you, the driver who pushed another car into you, your own underinsured coverage, and maybe a commercial policy if someone was working at the time. If you were a restaurant server driving between shifts or heading home after a late close, that employment issue may not matter. But if any vehicle was commercial, the coverage hunt gets more complicated fast.

When a lawyer goes quiet in a case like this, it is sometimes because they missed something and do not want to admit it yet. That is the part you do not ignore.