Do I Really Need a Personal Injury Attorney for my Case?
If you’ve been hurt and are dealing with an insurance company, you may wonder if you really need a PI attorney on your case. After all, the Insurance Company may have already offered a settlement – how is an attorney going to help?
Here are several ways that a PI attorney can benefit your case.
- Change a decision of a denial of liability.
Insurance companies are a business and payouts of policies damage their bottom line. Therefore, they will look for ways to deny liability when they can. Even if most people hire an attorney to call them out, even a small percentage of people who just accept the denial, this is a big win for the insurance company.
- Strategy
Even if the Insurance company has accepted liability for their insured and have offered a settlement, you still might want to speak with an attorney first. Why? Because the best strategy might be to be patient. Even if the prospect of a quick pay out seems enticing, it can cost you in the long run. For example, some injuries take months or even years before we can see the full extent.
Most regular people do not usually experience serious injuries on a regular basis, but many of us watch sports. How many times has a player sustained a serious injury, only to return to the game. Only later does he realize that it’s something that will sideline him for weeks and months – like an ACL tear. How was he or she able to continue in the game? With the adrenaline flowing, they might not even feel the injury. The point is that you are not the best person to diagnose your injury. You should go to a doctor. If you settle the case before seeing the full extent of the injuries, you sign away your right to recover for those. An attorney can help you decide whether to take the quick settlement or to be patient.
- Maximizing the Settlement
An insurance company is going to try to pay you the least that they can get away with. As an example, I recently had a case where the Adjuster offered to cover injuries, but was not covering any lost wages. My client had a physically demanding job and was out for weeks. In fact, his lost wages eclipsed even the value of his injuries. By law, the Insurance Company owed those lost wages to my client, but they were refusing to pay. Without an attorney, my client may have assumed that they were being fair, and that he was only owed for his injuries. That would have been a huge mistake. By hiring me as his attorney, he was able to recover full policy limits.
If you’ve been injured, you should speak to several attorneys. An ethical PI lawyer will let you know if his or her services aren’t needed. And believe it or not, most of us are ethical. if you visit 3-4 attorneys, you’re likely to find a good one who will steer you in the right direction!
Of course, I can’t tell you in this blog post whether you need a lawyer or not. That’s going to depend on the facts of your case. But if you take away only one thing from this post, it should be that Insurance Companies are NOT your friend. Warren Buffet made his fortune with GEICO, and he didn’t do that by paying out extra to people who were injured.
This post is for educational purposes, but if you would like legal advice on your specific situation, you can call us at 512-677-5003 or fill out a contact form at www.atx.legal/contact