In this video, Central Illinois personal injury attorney Josh Rohrscheib explains what liens are and how liens can impact your settlement. Stressing the importance of being aware of what liens could be paid out of your settlement and in making an effort to negotiate a reduction in those liens.
What are liens and how can liens impact your personal injury settlement? Hi, I'm Joshua Scheibe, an injury lawyer in central Illinois. And liens are a write of a third party to be paid directly from your personal injury settlement. We often see liens for medical providers who provide treatment to an injured person, maybe an ambulance company, a hospital, a physician, a physical therapist, that isn't paid in full. We often see providers a certain means and they've got a right to be paid directly out of the settlement of their bill satisfied. We also commonly see health insurance, so liens from Medicaid, Medicare or a private health insurance company that basically assert a right to be repaid for what they actually paid out on the injured person's behalf for medical treatment that they received. Another common type of lien and personal injury cases, especially car accident cases would be something called a med Balian. So your own auto insurance policy may have coverage or provide for your medical bills. But in your contract with your insurance company. There's language that allows them to be repaid if you receive a settlement from the defendants insurance company. So these are the most common types of liens. We've seen injury cases or other potential types of liens that arise from time to time. But the other important question for you to ask is how can a lien impact your settlement. So if there's money that's going to be paid directly out of your settlement, there are a few kind of big picture ideas. First, you want to make sure you are fully aware of all the potential liens that could need to be paid out of your settlement need to be satisfied out of your settlement. In some cases, we see insurance companies offer people money without fully telling them about all the liens that they have. And if an injured person accepts a settlement, they may end up getting a lot less money than they thought they were going to get if they weren't aware of liens. So the second kind of big picture idea about what's really important to know about liens is that liens are often negotiable. So one of the things that we do as injury lawyers is we will gather all the information about the client's unpaid medical bills and their liens. And we will negotiate reductions in the liens for the client. And by negotiating a reduction in what we have to repay out of a settlement or how much we have to pay lien, we're actually obtaining more money that the client is able to keep for their own portion of the recovery from the settlement. So it can make a big difference in how much money a client gets at the end of the case, how successful a law firm is in negotiating liens down for the client. I'll give you one example I represented a wonderful lady who was in a tough situation where she had over $150,000 of medical bills and liens. And the person who hit her only had 100,000 of coverage. So if she would have accepted that money, she would it were used immediately to satisfy her liens. So it just wouldn't have been enough to go around. And certainly not enough to even begin to pay her for what she went through. So she would have started out about $50,000 in the hole. Fortunately, we had a lot of success, in her case negotiating reductions in her medical bills and and her liens. And she was able to keep more than $50,000 in gross settlement because we're able to negotiate over other bills and liens down and so all of our bills were satisfied. And she was able to keep $50,000 That was a particularly good result when I'm really proud of every case is different. But it's I guess the the thing I really want you to understand is, if you have a personal injury settlement, there's a good chance that there could be a lien or multiple liens that would have to be paid out at the end of your case that would come directly out of your settlement.
