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.
Barry, I read the free report How Much is my Case Worth, which is available on the resource center at fightingforwhatsright.com. There was a section in there about the things that people believe about settling a personal injury case that just aren't true. I wanted to ask you about a few of them.
One of the things that isn't true is that if I'm the accident victim, the insurance company has to offer me a settlement.
That's not true at all. Most often, insurance companies will be quite happy to wait and not make a settlement offer at all. There's a statute of limitations which limits the amount of time you have to file a lawsuit. As long as you're not asking to settle the case, there's no incentive for them to do anything other than wait for the time to pass and for the statute of limitations to expire. If that statute of limitations expires, then you're out of luck. You're not going to be able to collect any compensation at all.
The other thing that you have to be aware of is insurance companies coming to you very quickly to try to settle a case. From the perspective of an insurance carrier, a quick settlement is often a cheap one and that's a good one for the insurance company. It's often not a good one for you at all.
What about I will get a settlement offer that will at least cover my medical bills?
Well, that's not true either. The reason for that is is that you may have medical bills that exceed the policy limits for the insurance policy that the at-fault person has. So, for example, if the person is driving around with the state minimum in terms of insurance coverage, that's only $25,000 worth of insurance. You may have $100,000 or more in medical bills. If that's the case, there's not enough insurance coverage to go around. They aren't going to offer you money that's in excess of the policy limits.
The other thing is is that insurance companies also have the ability and often do contest both the reasonableness of the bills as well as whether or not they're actually related to the accident which is going to be the subject of the claim.
Another one is there's a standard settlement for every type of accident or injury?
That's another one that's just false. There really isn't a standard settlement for any type of injury or accident. People tend to believe that it's true. A lot of times it kind of drives people's research on the Internet trying to find out what's the standard settlement for a broken arm or a torn cartilage in their knee or whatever their problem might be.
The fact of the matter is there aren't any type of standard settlements for any particular kind of injury. Really, trying to evaluate cases for settlement really is at the heart of what I do as a personal injury lawyer.
What about the case should settle for three times the medical bills?
Well, when I started practicing law 24 plus years ago now, that was sort of a rough rule of thumb for things say that were really kind of simple accidents. The fact of the matter is is it never really made much sense and it was really abused both by lawyers and people in the medical profession.
If I'm involved in an accident and I have an MRI done and it comes up negative but the bill for the MRI is $1,500, there's no reason that my case should settle for $4,500 or in light of a negative MRI.
It was a rule that never made much sense to begin with but it certainly has gone the way of the dinosaur. It isn't true too at all.
How about if I have the same insurance company as the other driver, my insurance company will treat me fairly?
That's one of those things that people really do tend to believe. Most often, it comes from the fact that most people have reasonably good experiences with their insurance company, whether it's they've had a claim before or they have an agent who they really like. The thing that makes this false is that you're not making a claim yourself. You're making a claim against somebody else's policy.
To that extent, you're kind of a stranger to the insurance company and they're not going to treat you any better. A lot of people tend to believe it. It's just not true.
This has been Fighting for What's Right with personal injury attorney Barry Doyle. Feel free to subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Barry Doyle Personal Injury Attorney [email protected] 312-766-4875 www.fightingforwhatsright.com
