Barry Doyle Personal Injury Attorney [email protected] 312-766-4875 www.fightingforwhatsright.com
This is Fighting for What's Right with personal injury attorney Barry Doyle. So Barry, setting aside the issue of insurance, how do you evaluate the case for settlement?
Well there are three major variables. The first of these is the liability question, the second is the nature and extent of the injury, the last is the damages. Those are the three that you kind of weigh together and sort out through the lens of our experience. I've been doing this for over 20 years now and you weigh them together and try to come up with a range of what's considered a fair settlement.
When you're talking about liability, what do you mean by that?
The basis of just about every type of personal injury lawsuit is fault and you need to be able to establish fault before you move on to any other issue. Now the issue of fault is one that sometimes it's clear, sometimes it's not. If the issue of fault is one that's contested, there's a defense that's called contributory negligence. Basically what contributory negligence is, is the defendant, the person who you're blaming for the accident is saying that you were in some respect at fault for causing the accident. If you end up trying the case, there's literally a line on the verdict form for the jury to insert some percentage of fault against you. What happens is that if the jury finds you say 20% at fault, your damages get reduced by 20%. So if a jury was going to award you $100,000 and found you 20% at fault, your damages get reduced from $100,000 down to $80,000. This is true all the way up to the 50/50 point. But as soon as they find you at fault any degree in excess of 50%, 50.1, you get a not guilty verdict.
So in assessing the issue of fault, insurance companies are going to be looking at this issue of contributory negligence as being something that has the potential to significantly reduce your recovery or keep you from getting anything at all. That's an important factor to kind of keep in mind when you're trying to evaluate the issue of liability. Now depending on the kind of case that's involved and the legal issues that are involved, there may be other defenses that are going to be available as well and those are things that need to be taken into account in evaluating a case for settlement. The bottom line is if the insurance company believes that they have any reasonable chance of getting either a not guilty verdict or one that's significantly reduced by the issue of contributory negligence, the odds of them offering fair value or full value for a settlement is really pretty slim. So one of the reasons that I really recommend to people that they get a lawyer is if the issue of liability is not one that's being fully conceded because the odds are that a fair settlement offer is not going to be forth coming.
Now, the other thing that you have to kind of keep in mind is bad conduct tends to be in the eyes of a jury a damage driver. In other words, if the conduct of a defendant is really awful, it's something that angers the jurors, those tend to be situations where a jury may award more money than may otherwise be warranted just based on the nature and extent of the injury. On the flip side, one of the things that I actually really hate to see happen is to have a defendant admit liability and it sounds odd because it takes one of the issues out of the case but if I have a defendant who has bad conduct and is admitting liability, all of the sudden that bad conduct becomes inadmissible evidence and all that's left then is to focus in on the issue of damages with my client. What happens then is that the jury knows that the defendant's admitted liability so they're wondering why they're there, why the case hasn't been resolved and the answer that they naturally turn to is that well, there has to be a greedy plaintiff. This lady has to be trying to get something for nothing or more money than she really is entitled to. It becomes a much more difficult case for me to get the kind of money that a client may really deserve when you have a defendant who's admitting liability.
Barry Doyle Personal Injury Attorney [email protected] 312-766-4875 www.fightingforwhatsright.com
