In this Google hangout, personal injury lawyer John Kelly explains how long it typically takes to settle a personal injury claim. If you have additional questions, feel free to post them in the comments section below.
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Hi, this is John Kelly from Kelly Law Team. I want to talk to you about how long it takes to get paid in a personal injury claim or settlement. These are online questions that I've been answering, so let's get started here. This is really for people that don't have a lawyer or an attorney, and a lot of it applies if you do have a lawyer, but this is kinda some good pointers for people who are trying to handle the initial parts on their own. The first thing I want to make a point about is getting hospital records if you did go to the hospital and order it right away. So what you wanna do is make sure that you contact the hospital's records departments and tell them you want full bills and records. Hospitals, anymore, will take a long time to get your records and you may be waiting three for four months, believe it or not, to get those records. They'll send you an invoice, you may have to send them a check for the amount that it takes them to produce copies of your records. So, you wanna get that process started right away. The other thing that you need to know is that when you're, you're gonna have to wait typically until you're done treating before you make your demand letter. So that's something that is, you may be treating for three months with care, you know, you may have physical therapy, chiropractor, you may have other things, orthopedic person involved, it may be six months, it may be a year. You don't necessarily want to settle your claim, typically, until you're completely done treating. So that will delay your case to a certain degree, depending on how long you're treating. After you're done treating with your providers, or your follow-ups to the hospitals, so if you went to physical therapy, for instance, for three months, you'll want to request their full bills and records that includes your last visit. Then when you get all your bills and records together, you need to put a demand letter together to the insurance company that's applicable. From there, after you put your demand letter together, you typically are going to be giving the insurance company 30 days to respond to your demand letter, including all your bills and records. Now, they may come back and we need a little bit more time to review this, or they may follow up with you and say there is some missing bills and records and that kind of thing, so you may have to extend it out from there. After you get to the point where they've made an initial settlement offer, it can go very quickly from there. You can negotiate that initial settlement offer if you think it's not high enough, you can make your arguments, produce other documentation that you think is relevant, but that whole process can be done in a couple of days if you can get an adjuster on the phone.
