Maximizing Recovery of Personal Injury Claim
So what do you do when your case does not settle? The simple answer is: you go to trial and secure the proper compensation from the jury. The subtext of that question is: do you have confidence in your lawyer’s ability to handle the situation if things go that far?
Your feeling on that topic is at the heart of a healthy (or unhealthy) lawyer-client relationship. We all want cases to get resolved not only fairly but quickly: swift, just compensation is the ideal outcome. Yet certain realities of the litigation world, often omitted from lawyers’ client consultations, render the ideal outcome highly unlikely. For example, some insurance companies dare injured people to go to trial: they count on “volume” accident attorneys to be unwilling or unable to take the case to the jury. This business model results in deliberately low-ball offers to accident victims, on the theory that eventually the lawyer will accept the offer, just to make the case go away and avoid a jury trial.
Another example: most insurance companies conduct a simple arithmetic calculation for case value: $20,000 medical expenses x 2 (in Charleston County anyway: the multiplier varies by county) = $40,000 case value. The fallacy here is that it assumes that all injuries are the same, that the pain and suffering produced by moderate neck strain, on the one hand, and two badly broken kneecaps, on the other, are identical. No reasonable person believes this to be the case, but this “one size fits all” approach is absolutely standard in the insurance industry. While the $40,000 offer might make sense for the moderate neck pain, that same $40,000 is manifestly inadequate for the broken kneecaps. If your lawyer is unable to see this—if he or she takes the same indiscriminate view of case value, based purely on numbers, that the insurance company does, then he or she is selling the client short.
Case value is driven by individual people, who have real lives and circumstances specific to their particular situation. One size simply does not fit all- no matter what anyone tells you. Victims of vehicular negligence nursing home or sexual abuse or medical malpractice each have their own story to tell, and these stories each deserve careful attention from the person’s lawyer. If the responsible person or company, or their insurer, attempts to impose a “one size fits all” approach that generates a low-ball offer, that person needs to have confidence that his or her lawyer will fight a tough, creative fight that forces the responsible people to treat the injury with the proper respect. If that means going before the jury to have our fellow citizens, sitting as a jury, force the right outcome, we welcome that challenge and that opportunity.
Again, everyone wants rapid, just compensation: nobody more so than Traywick & Traywick But in the end we stand apart because we are looking for the right number for you, not just whatever number is offered at the right time for us.