How does the personal injury process work? Well, you hire a lawyer, and they gather all the information related to your case. Police reports, medical records, loss of earnings, documentation, everything that will document how you suffered in the accident, the expenses that you incurred, everything like that.
But the first priority, though, is you getting your medical treatment and stabilizing your injuries. So the process sort of depends on you at the beginning because we can't really start the negotiations until we know that your injuries have either completely resolved or they've reached a point where they've just stabilized, they're not going to get any better, and then we can make a claim for some sort of permanent disability. You're going to be very important in the timeframe of when we start the negotiation process. So you get your medical treatment, you finish that up, then we gather all those documents, and we create a demand packet.
A demand packet is basically a nice long letter that describes how the accident occurred, why the other party's at fault, what sort of damages you incurred, what pain and suffering you went through, and then at the end of the letter we put in a demand amount. We leave a little bit of room there so that some back and forth negotiations can occur.
We get your input on the demand letter, and we have you approve the number. We talk about some of the factors we put in there with you, make sure everything is accurate and that you approve, and then we start the negotiations. We bring each and every offer to you because the client is the boss in this situation, and you're the one who gets to approve certain settlements and we make recommendations to you.
So you control whether it settles or not, and we'll make recommendations as to whether we think it should. Then if we're able to come to a resolution with the insurance company, that's great. Then what we'll do is we'll work to try and negotiate with your medical providers so that they will possibly take a little bit less for your medical bills because you do need to reimburse them out of the settlement proceeds.
We also will, if the case doesn't settle through the demand and the negotiation process with the insurance company, we'll file a lawsuit and we proceed with discovery, which will be some written questions, maybe a deposition. We can still try and settle while we're litigating, but if it ends up we can't settle even during litigation, we go to a trial. At trial, the jury will decide, you get a judgment in whatever amount they decide, and that's the resolution of your case. That's the process.
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