Millions of people across the country are injured by the careless actions of others. You may be one of them. If so, read on. Here are some observations about personal injury and what you can and should do as a victim to get the compensation you deserve.
When there has been an accident and a victim suffers serious injury through no fault of their own, the victim can sue the person responsible for damages. Damages may include medical bills, time away from work, extra expenses incurred because of the accident and so on. Usually, the process involves the liability or auto insurance a person or company carries.
Unfortunately, victims often receive less than they deserve because they don’t know their rights and they don’t know how to go about seeking redress. Most people, if they suffer an accident at all, suffer the kind that causes serious injury only rarely. They then come up against an industry that defends against personal injury lawsuits for a living. The large insurance companies know all the tricks and strategies to keep from paying out any more than they absolutely have to.
Here are a few of those tricks.
Delay
The biggest one is delay, delay, delay. The more time it takes to make a claim, the less likely the victim is to make one at all or follow through. One major hospital in the Seattle area has a department of damage control. When it looks like a patient might sue the hospital, damage control swings into action. Every doctor, nurse and therapist who has any contact with the patient is instructed not to cooperate in any way short of breaking the law. They are to withhold any information the patient might request for as long as possible. The law allows a delay of nine working days, and they take every hour of it.
Red Tape
Another trick is to drown you in paperwork. While you’re still traumatized by the shock, and possibly in pain, you are expected to fill out a mountain of forms to process your claim. You may get bills you don’t understand. One patient in Boston, who happened to be a doctor himself, found that of the 360 medical bills he received, more than half contained errors – errors a normal person would not have been able to understand.
The paperwork and the delay can compound as your claim sits on someone’s desk. Unless you call routinely to find out where your claim is, it can stay there for weeks. One patient, also in Boston, found that her paperwork was sitting on a nurse’s desk and had been there for over two weeks. When she asked why it hadn’t moved, the nurse told her she was waiting for a doctor’s signature. Would the nurse call the doctor to ask for the signature, the victim wondered? She wouldn’t, so the victim called the doctor, who didn’t know he needed to sign anything.
Get a Lawyer
So the first rule of personal injury is to get professional help. Yes, it can be expensive, but personal injury lawyers will often work for a percentage of the settlement (known as contingency), in which case it is to their advantage to push for as big an amount as possible. Seth Gladstein, an experienced Louisville, Kentucky, personal injury lawyer notes the benefits of hiring a personal injury attorney:
An attorney will know how much your claim is worth. So will the insurance company, but you don’t.
Attorneys understand the legal process. There are strict procedures to be followed and time limits you have no way of knowing.
Hiring an attorney will greatly increase your chance of success. Going it alone against the insurance behemoths is folly. Moreover, the attorney, if he works on contingency, is motivated to get you the best settlement possible. Your success is his success and the more money you get, the more he gets as well.
Finally, if negotiations do not go well, the attorney can take the case to trial. This is a major advantage and shows the insurance company you mean business. Just having an attorney shows the insurance companies you are willing to go to trial if necessary, which strongly motivates them to settle.