Accidents happen despite how careful we are. Unfortunately, as we navigate the world, we risk getting hurt in an accident. After an accident occurs, what are the next steps? If you have suffered an injury in an accident, you need an experienced accident attorney on your side to ensure that you can maximize your recovery.
You may be wondering about the benefits of hiring a personal injury attorney. There are many benefits an accident victim with legal representation enjoys that unrepresented victims do not. The biggest advantage of having a personal injury lawyer is that you do not have to face the uphill battle of receiving compensation for your injuries alone. To learn more about the benefits of hiring a personal injury lawyer, continue reading.
What Is a Personal Injury?
A personal injury is a physical, mental, or emotional harm to an individual. Personal injuries take many forms, and victims can file personal injury lawsuits against different people and businesses. There is no simple way to predict how severe an accident victim’s injuries will be or if they will be permanent. If you have suffered an injury in an accident, contact an experienced personal injury lawyer in your area.
Examples of Personal Injuries
There are various categories of personal injuries. Any action that causes an individual emotional, mental, or physical harm is a personal injury.
Common personal injuries include:
- Construction site accidents
- Medical malpractice
- Premises liability
- Products liability
- Motor vehicle, bicycle, motorcycle, or pedestrian traffic accidents
Benefits of Hiring a Personal Injury Attorney
There are many benefits of having a personal injury lawyer working on your behalf. One major benefit is having someone on your team that knows how to maximize your results. Continue reading to learn more about the benefits of hiring a personal injury lawyer.
Help Build Your Case
A personal injury lawyer can help you build your case. You know that you suffered an injury and the other person is responsible, but proving fault can be difficult. A personal injury lawyer knows what questions to ask to elicit the best evidence from you to prove your injuries. Proving fault is difficult on your own, and you must prove the cause of injuries in every personal injury case.
One way to prove that your injuries happened in the accident is to have a medical expert testify. Many personal injury lawyers have established relationships with medical doctors that can provide expert testimony about the cause of your injuries. It is much more difficult for an unrepresented accident victim to access these resources.
Help You Get Money for Damages Caused by the Accident
A part of a personal injury lawyer’s job is to get their client the maximum amount of compensation for their injuries available. An experienced personal injury may have years of experience doing just that. There are many types of damages available in a personal injury lawsuit.
Examples of damages available include:
- Lost wages
- Lost future wages
- Lost ability to earn/ lost earning capacity
- Medical bills
- Future medical costs (including physical therapy and rehabilitation)
- Loss of consortium and companionship
- Emotional distress and mental anguish
- Pain and suffering
- Punitive damages (in rare cases and the law might cap the amount available)
- Wrongful death benefits
Negotiate With Opponents
A personal injury lawyer can help you negotiate with insurance adjusters and defense lawyers. Insurance companies count on accident victims’ desperation to settle an accident claim to avoid paying out a satisfactory settlement amount. Insurance companies are for-profit businesses, so protecting the bottom line is the top priority in these cases.
A personal injury lawyer can help you avoid insurance company tactics. When counsel represents an accident victim, insurance companies are less likely to manipulate the victim, and these companies are more likely to work harder to settle the claim.
Avoid Pitfalls
There are various pitfalls that unrepresented accident clients face after being injured. Most of the pitfalls that injury victims face is due to inexperience. Most accident victims have never been in a lawsuit before their injury, so they don’t know how to keep a lawsuit alive.
Some common pitfalls include:
Failure to Comply With Procedural Rules
There are a lot of rules that you must follow in civil litigation. One example of a procedural rule is the statute of limitations. The statute of limitations is a deadline imposed by law that requires an injury plaintiff to file a lawsuit within a set amount of time or lose their right to recover. This and other procedural rules can keep you from recovering compensation in your accident claim.
A personal injury lawyer is trained on and intimately familiar with state and local court rules. If you hire a personal injury attorney, you will avoid a fatal technical error.
Prematurely Signing a Document from an Insurance Company
You should never sign a document from the insurance company without speaking to an attorney. Insurance companies and defense lawyers are not on your side. They have no obligation to make sure that you sign an agreement that is best for you. That is why you must have a personal injury attorney on your side to ensure you get the best results on your claim.
Settling Before You Finish Treatment
The current litigation is likely the accident victim’s first time filing a lawsuit. Because of their inexperience, accident victims may not know to wait to accept a settlement offer until they finish treatment. Taking a small amount of money for injuries that may require long-term or lifelong treatment is a major mistake.
A personal injury lawyer can help consider any future medical care required and help you negotiate a satisfactory settlement.
Failing to Include All Potential Defendants
It can be hard to know who to include in a lawsuit. It may seem obvious that you must name the person who hit you as a defendant, but other defendants may also be liable for your harm.
Examples of potential defendants in personal injury lawsuits include:
- The driver that hit the injury victim
- The driver’s employer, if the driver operated the vehicle within their scope of employment at the time of the accident
- A third party
You should always name every potentially responsible person or entity in a personal injury lawsuit. A personal injury lawyer can help you find all potential defendants and pursue justice against them.
Advocacy
Insurance companies, insurance adjusters, and defense lawyers are not on your side. Their focus is to protect the company’s bottom line. So, they will employ many tactics that will decrease your financial recovery. If you hire a personal injury lawyer, you have an advocate in your corner. A personal injury lawyer knows how to avoid the bullying tactics that insurance adjusters and defense lawyers use to avoid taking responsibility.
Help Getting Medical Care
Having an attorney on your side can help you avoid cautious doctors that often refuse to treat injury victims because they want to avoid litigation. Usually, the doctor that treats your injuries will testify about their findings.
An attorney can help you get the medical care that you need by helping you find a doctor willing to treat you. Many seasoned personal injury lawyers have relationships with medical doctors. If you hire a personal injury lawyer, you can gain access to these doctors and get the help you need to ensure that you fully recover.
Ensuring That You Do Not Get Lost in the Shuffle
Contacting a personal injury lawyer immediately after the accident can help speed up your claim. An insurance company may prioritize an accident victim when represented by legal counsel. Your attorney can work on your behalf, and you can focus on recovery and avoid the stress of staying on the insurance company’s radar.
Providing Guidance for Your Case
Personal injury lawyers guide their clients every day. If you hire a personal injury attorney, you can benefit from their experience working with defense lawyers and insurance companies to get the best result. You can ask your attorney any question about your case that is weighing on your mind. Your attorney can tell you what to expect at each case stage and help you understand how the case will conclude.
A personal injury attorney can also help you understand the likelihood of a successful outcome for your case. Hiring an attorney puts you in the best position to get the most out of your claim.
Possible Higher Settlement Amounts
It is unfair, but accident victims with the right legal counsel tend to get higher settlement offers than unrepresented accident victims. Some factors cause this phenomenon. One reason that represented clients are more likely to get a higher settlement amount is it costs a lot of money for insurance companies to take a case to trial.
Depending on the payment arrangement between you and your attorney, the cost of a trial is not a huge issue. However, the attorney or client must pay litigation costs either during the trial or trial prep. If the attorney and their firm front the cost of trial prep, they may require repayment, depending on your arrangement.
Represent You at Trial
One of the biggest benefits of having an attorney is that they represent your interests at trial. Although it may look easy to represent yourself on TV, advocacy is truly an art, and having the right attorney on your side can make all the difference in front of a judge or jury. When insurance companies and defense lawyers know that your attorney is willing to go to trial on your claim, they are more likely to give a satisfactory settlement offer to avoid the expense of going to trial.
Assurance
If you hire a personal injury attorney, your focus can solely be on recovering fully. There is no reason to worry about whether you are missing something (like incorrectly filing a document or improperly responding to discovery requests). An experienced personal injury attorney can handle every stage of your claim so that you can rest assured you will receive the best results on your injury claim available.
If an accident injured you, you need an attorney to represent your interests. Without an attorney, you may leave money on the table or forfeit your legal rights. If you have suffered an injury, contact a personal injury in your area and schedule an appointment.
What If I Cannot Afford an Attorney?
Do not let the potential legal costs deter you from hiring a personal injury lawyer. Most personal injury lawyers across the country work on a contingency basis. A contingency fee payment structure is an agreement between the client and the attorney to defer payment for legal services until after the case resolves.
Typically, if there is no recovery, an attorney will not charge for their work but might require reimbursement of any advanced litigation costs. If there is a recovery in your case, your attorney will take an agreed-upon percentage of the settlement as their fee. Usually, a personal injury attorney charges one-third of the settlement amount as their fee.
This might seem like a lot, but it is worth it in the end:
- Without a lawyer, the insurance company offers you $50,000, which you can take home
- With a lawyer negotiating on your behalf, the insurance company eventually offers $300,000. Even if the attorney takes one-third, you still take home $200,000, which is much more than you take home unrepresented.
Before signing a contingency fee agreement, understand all of its terms.
Contact a Personal Injury Attorney Today
Personal Injury Attorney, Jacob D. Lawrence
There is no reason to go it alone after an accident. A personal injury lawyer is your advocate and will work hard to ensure that you receive maximum compensation on your claim. If you suffered a personal injury, contact a personal injury lawyer in your area today.