Philadelphia Personal Injury Attorney Talks About Pennsylvania Personal Injury ValuesThis is the second in a series of articles about the value of a personal injury claim. The reputation of your lawyer is crucial. If your lawyer is known by the insurance companies and their attorneys as someone who knows how to prove a personal injury case, you will get a much better offer than if your lawyer is unknown or is known to be incompetent or inexperienced. The insurance company wants to settle relatively quickly with the knowledgeable, experienced P. I. lawyer because it fears that this lawyer will obtain an arbitration award or jury verdict far in excess of the usual settlement value. The reputation of your doctor is important. There are many doctors who are notorious for having a patient base made up almost solely of personal injury plaintiffs. The insurance companies suspect that many of these patients are faking or exaggerating their injuries. Naturally, the insurance company resents this kind of case and will not offer top dollar. The company may wish to investigate the case very closely for fraud. If you find that the office of the doctor your lawyer referred you to is crawling with shady looking characters with soft collars around their necks, or if you notice that the patients are treated as if on an assembly line, you probably ought to seriously consider finding a different doctor $ and a different lawyer too. In auto accident cases the amount of damage to the cars is viewed with interest by the attorneys and the insurance company. A lot of damage suggests that there was a strong impact and the injuries are legitimate and possibly serious. A small amount of damage emboldens the insurance company to make a small offer, if they make any offer at all. The suspicion that you may not really be hurt arises again here. The insurance company may be willing to roll the dice on the hope that the arbitrators or jurors will not believe that you were really hurt. Particularly suspicious are the cases where the damage to the vehicles is minor and you run up huge doctor bills at the office of one of the notorious doctors. Get ready for a long and ugly battle or a very low settlement if your case fits this profile. If you were forced to miss time from work because of your injuries, this increases the settlement value of your case. Some people can’t afford to take time off even if their doctor believes that they should. That’s a decision each individual has to make for himself. I recommend that you take a break if you can afford it. The time off can help you to a speedy recovery, and it will help the value of your case. Insurance companies assume that people who don’t miss time from work aren’t hurt very badly. For auto accident cases, if your car was insured and you didn’t waive wage loss benefits, you should be eligible to recover lost wages from your insurance company. If you have no wage loss coverage, your lost wage claim is added to your settlement demand against the defendant. The willingness you and your attorney have for holding out for top dollar is another important factor. Insurance companies always start with a relatively low offer and work their way up. Your attorney is ethically required to report each and every offer to you. If your attorney knows what he is doing, he will tell you if the first offer is too low. He will also ask you to be patient. This patience almost never fails. The insurance company inevitably increases the offer if they are convinced that you cannot be bought off cheaply. Generally speaking, the longer you hold out, the higher the offer goes. Every case has its limit though. If your lawyer knows what he’s doing, he’ll settle when the offer reaches that limit. So you are probably asking yourself at this point how that limit is figured by the lawyers and the insurance adjusters. Good question. The personal injury lawyer relies on her experience in other similar cases and on the opinion of other personal injury attorneys to gauge the maximum settlement value of a case. I constantly consult other P. I. lawyers, both plaintiff’s lawyers and insurance company lawyers, to help me set a fair settlement value on cases. Conversely, I receive calls all the time from other lawyers for my opinion on their cases. Jury research can also be consulted to determine what juries have awarded in similar cases. Jury verdicts set the market rate for settlements. Thus, if the average jury award for torn knee cartilage with two surgeries and a guarded prognosis is $175,000, it is likely that the insurance company ultimately will offer an amount close to this to settle such a case, provided they believe your lawyer is experienced and competent and the rest of the case is solid. The company will begin by offering much less, hoping to buy its way out of the lawsuit as cheaply as possible. If your lawyer realizes the true value of the case, he will hold out until the offer reaches or closely approaches $175,000. In a major injury case the client must rely especially heavily on the lawyer. Clients simply cannot know the true "value" of their case without an honest lawyer working on their behalf. Clients sometimes try to compare their case to a friend’s. Clients often wonder why the offer on their case is less than the settlement received by a friend or family member. Each case is different. It does the client no good to compare apples to oranges. Only after many years of experience with exposure to many similar personal injury cases is it possible to accurately assess the amount for which a particular case should settle. |
