To Hire Or Not To Hire A Personal Injury Lawyer – How To Take A Decision

Most personal injury claim settlement happens out of court with the aggrieved and affected parties arriving at some agreement that creates a win-win situation. The process known mediation is the most popular choice for personal injury claim processing. However, it is often a misconception that personal injury claims go to court because this happens only when the victim is not happy with the settlement offered by the insurance company or settler. And such cases are quite a few.

It means that it is entirely possible to handle personal injury cases on your own provided you and have some basic knowledge about the process of accident claims and the will to handle it. To be sure that you can do it without a lawyer, judge if you have the right traits like patience and organizing skills to do it by yourself. Of course, you must know how to deal with the insurance company for fair settlement.

The nature of the accident and how serious the injuries help to determine if at all you will require a lawyer. In situations involving serious injuries leading to temporary or permanent disablement, it becomes imperative that you cannot do with the services of a lawyer, maybe someone attached to HersheyLaw LA. Cases of toxic exposure and medical malpractice are quite complex, and you need lawyers to handle it. However, simpler claims that do not involve serious injuries like home accidents, slip and fall accidents and automobile or cycle or pedestrian accidents and accidents from defective products are ones that individuals can handle without assistance from legal professionals.

If you are confident and comfortable in handling not so serious cases that do not have major claims for property damage or injuries there is no harm in trying it. When losses are not much, you can try your hand out in filing a personal claim and then following it up for settlement. Let us now look at instances when it makes sense to take a DIY approach in a personal injury claim.

Simple claim process

Insurance adjusters are not legal professionals, and you can talk to them in your own language to settle claims, the process of which is quite simple. Even though some lawyers might like you to believe that you must entrust them with the job, it is not always so, as you have learned earlier. Making a few phone calls to the insurance adjuster and sending out two or three letters without using any legal language or being too much technology is just enough to take the process through. Using your common sense is often good enough to demonstrate how the accident happened and who was at fault and should take responsibility for injuries and provide compensation.

You know best about the claim

No one knows better than you how the accident happened – neither the attorneys nor insurance adjusters could know it better. You know best how things happened, what kind of injuries you suffered and its effects on your life, what were the circumstances and your physical condition. These are the usual components of any claim, and more convincingly you can build your case, better would be the compensation that you get.

Now let us look at some scenarios when it becomes necessary to hire a personal injury lawyer to make the best use of his or her skills and experience to represent your case.

Significant injuries

When an accident results in serious and or significant injuries to the victim, that decapacitates a person and inhibits physical activities in the long term or might even result in permanent disablement, then you must hire a personal injury lawyer to handle your case. Ascertaining the seriousness of injuries and assigning a monetary value to it is no easy task. It requires stitching many small pieces of information together duly supported by documents and physical evidence to prove that the other party (defendant) was at fault. That the injuries resulted in several losses and damages to physical and mental health which translates into fat sum money is what only experienced lawyers can establish convincingly.

Severity of injuries

The severity of injuries has a direct relation to the amount of compensation. There must be some quantifiable data supporting the claim for the extent of severity that comprises of several components like the type of injuries you have, the amount of medical expenses incurred and the time it takes to recover. With an increase in the amount of potential compensation, the range or bracket within which the compensation falls keeps widening. Only an expert lawyer can efficiently handle such claims and navigate through the process confidently to drive it towards a favorable conclusion. Only they can ensure that you receive the compensation at the highest end of the range.

Medical malpractice

Medical malpractice cases are complex, and only legal professionals are competent to handle it. If you have received wrong or poor treatment that made you suffer an illness or injury due to careless, unprofessional or incompetent handling by a doctor, nurse, laboratory, clinic, hospital or other medical providers, then you must seek help from a lawyer to file a case for personal injury claim. The claim handling requires sifting through complex medical terminologies and legal rules that need proper interpretation to present the case in its proper perspective. The subject and its handling require special knowledge and skills that only personal injury attorneys have.

It is not that only when injuries are serious and severe that you must hire a personal injury lawyer. It might happen that even for smaller and simpler claims, an insurance company or government agency might not be ready to make a fair settlement for your claim and even refuse to settle it at all. In such cases, engaging a lawyer would help to get the compensation although it will be less on account of the payment that you must make to the lawyer. But then, something is always better than nothing.

If you want to play safe in claim settlement regardless of the nature of the claim, then you have the task cut out because simply you cannot do without a lawyer.