Transcript: Hi, this is John Kelly of the Kelly Law Team. Today, I want to talk to you about why you should file a lawsuit in your case and not settle pre-litigation. A lot of times people end up submitting a demand on their case to the insurance company, getting the initial offer in, negotiating it, and settling their claim. In a lot of circumstances, that does make a lot of sense. You avoid the whole litigation process. You may not even have a lawyer. You don't have to worry about going to court, having a specialized knowledge about actually filing a lawsuit. But in other cases, and especially the more serious ones where you have a lot of injuries, have a lot of doctors, maybe future medical expenses, care that you may need in the future, in those cases, it's often very smart to file that lawsuit and actually litigate the case. A lot of people don't understand that some attorneys don't even litigate their cases. They actually just try to get them settled. And if they don't settle, they find another attorney to litigate them. You want to be smart about how to find your lawyer that's actually going to litigate your case if it does go to the point where there's not an offer that is a fair offer. What does litigation bring to the table for you? Well, the big one is you now have discovery. What that means is you have subpoena power, so you can get a hold of the defendant's documents. You can do depositions where you interview people on the record and you can use that. You basically have all the subpoena power to get what you need to understand the extent of what happened. A lot of this stuff is not information that you have access to pre-litigation. You can do interrogatories now where you ask them questions and they have to respond or else the judge gets involved. The other consideration, you get all that additional information that can be helpful to your case, but also the insurance companies kind of know who's going to file a lawsuit and take the case to trial. They may make a better offer to you if you have a lawyer who they know is going to go the distance. They may be discounting cases that they see there's no attorney involved. They're probably not going to be able to file a lawsuit. They have to take an offer that we make them, because they're not going to be able to file that, or maybe they have a lawyer that we know always settles their claims no matter what. Doesn't file a lawsuit against us, so we'll put some money on the table just knowing that they're going to take it. There's some strategy there to make sure you have an attorney that's actually going to file the lawsuit because these insurance companies know which law firms actually file the lawsuits and take them to trial. The closer you get to trial, usually your offers are starting to get bigger because the insurance company understands they're looking into the full extent of their damages. They know their future medical expenses. They know all the pain and suffering they've been through. And now they're litigating the case to try to get that full value. What does that mean? That means that a jury could make this decision eventually. If we get in front of a jury, all bets are off what that jury decides the value of the claim is. The insurance company has to start thinking about that and saying, "Maybe we have to put some money on the table here, some real value and actually value their pain and suffering and what they've been through. Because if we let this go to a jury and let a plaintiff's attorney argue, they may ask for a lot of money and a jury might award that." That's a consideration that the insurance companies are going to have. It makes sense to do that research with what attorney you're hiring and who you're looking at bringing your case to trial, or at least filing that lawsuit for you, especially in the serious injury cases. If you have traumatic brain injury, if it's a bad burn case, if you have broken bones, shattered your wrist or something and you may have arthritis in it in the future, and there may be future medical expenses, you might have surgery on your back that's needed, there's just a tremendous amount of things that pre-litigation you don't always know the full extent of what you're going to go through. And the fact of the matter is that you only have two years to file that lawsuit. Really within the first year, you have to kind of know what you're willing to settle your claim for. Sometimes it's hard to do because your treatment's ongoing. You have a MRI schedule to evaluate whether you need additional procedures. How are you going to put value on that? You don't even know what your damages are there. When you're looking for a lawyer, try to find someone that's going to be with you through the end.
