Personal Injury Lawyer - Get a Settlement in a Personal Injury Case

So how long should it take to settle an automobile or a personal injury claim let me just start out by saying that really depends on what kind of settlement you want insurance companies will typically make a lowball offer within a matter of weeks or months of the time of an accident and if you want to take that type of offer you can get it done quickly.

You can know you can have a settlement in a matter of weeks that I most of my clients do not want that type of settlement and so usually what Personal Injury Lawyer deal with are people who want a good or even the best that one is possible and so let me explain to you what is involved in getting that type of settlement first of all in order to get a good settlement the insurance company is going to want to review all the medical records and medical bills. 

Personal Injury Lawyer are going to want to determine what your injury was whether you have any residual problems from it and what medical treatment you might need in the future and so in order to assess that Personal Injury Lawyer are going to obviously want to require that you reach maximum medical improvement and that way.

Personal Injury Lawyer know what complications will not resolve through medical care or treatment and they will know or at least have an idea of what is to be expected future so it can take months or sometimes okay rarely years to finish to reach maximum medical improvement but in most cases its reached in a matter of months once that is reached it.

We got to obtain all the medical records from the providers bills from providers sometimes employment records this type of stuff that can take usually a month or two after you reach meant maximum medical improvement we submit to the insurance company and they will usually want maybe days in order to evaluate the claim maybe take it to a panel within the insurance company and roundtable it and then Personal Injury Lawyer will you know take a couple weeks to negotiate the claim and then another couple weeks to get all the checks cut and delivered and settlement papers done that kind of stuff.

So it can be as fast Personal Injury Lawyer would say is maybe a couple months after reaching maximum improvement in order to get a good settlement sometimes it takes longer if there is complications but that usually goes pretty quickly you know it could take up to four months just depending whether were able to get doctors to give us records in a timely manner in this kind of thing one of the things that you can do as a client to speed that up is to go to the doctors and get medical records and bills and that type of stuff because they generally respond to their own patients faster than they respond to attorneys. 

Now that being said that you can get a good settlement then within a couple months usually of the reaching maximum medical improvement now how long does it take to get the best settlement that usually takes oh I would estimate a year or two after reaching maximum medical improvement now let me explain why that is when to get a best settlement you have to engage all of the or use all of the negotiating strategies available to you. 

So it is not just a matter of making a good pitch to the insurance company or you know buttering up the adjuster you know whatever some attorneys might say they can do in order to get good settlements one of the negotiating strategies and probably the most powerful negotiating strategy is a walkway Ill put a link on this page to a different video talking about the walkway.

So I was not spend much time on that here but basically the idea of the walkway is we are not willing to take your offer were walking away from this and were taking this matter to trial and so what happens is the insurance company the last thing they want to do is to have this thing go to trial and so they do not usually capitulate quickly but they will capitulate later on and substantially raise their settlement let me give you two real-life examples both of them the first ones a little bit extreme but it is absolutely real it really did happen.

So the first example acts automobile accident in June of the insurance company makes their good offer the best offer that they are willing to make prior to trial in May of that offer was client says I am patient I am willing to you know do the walk away and so we file suit we go through the discovery phase and were getting ready for Lady for trial is scheduled in January so the insurance company comes to us in December of and offers, dollars to settle the claim now.

Bad huh to learn goes from five thousand dollars to two hundred and fifty thousand client made one thousand seven hundred percent interest on an annualized basis by doing that increase the settlement by what two hundred and forty five thousand dollars definitely worth waiting the client was ecstatic when this all came down and by using that walkway strategy Personal Injury Lawyer think did the right thing for the client.

It was much better than taking the five thousand putting it in a bank two percent and ending up with maybe one hundred and fifty dollars in interest at the end of that time and so you can see in a case like that it took just over two years two and a half years to get the best settlement possible here is another example client involved in an automobile accident in July of about fifteen months later November of the insurance company makes the best offer why did it take fifteen months while the client had to treat reach maximum medical improvement this was a claim against a government entity.

So there was a few extra hoops we had to jump through in order to make that claim but anyway the claim goes the governmental entity and they make their good offer of fifteen thousand dollars client is prepared to engage in a walk away negotiating strategy so Personal Injury Lawyers file suit we begin the litigation process this time the insurance company was not willing to wait to get quite as close to trial and so they really got serious about negotiating and in May of so six months after filing the lawsuit we settled that case for sixty two thousand five hundred dollars so the client what quadrupled their money by doing it again on an annualized return about one thousand seven hundred percent now.

These are two real examples obviously they cannot tea results we cannot say the walkway always works exactly like that but in my experience if you are willing to engage in the walkway negotiating strategy it does add time to settling your claim but the amount of the increase in your settlement will be so much that it is much better than taking the early settlement putting the money in the bank and earning you know whatever you can earn on that and so Personal Injury Lawyer guess to summarize a settlement can take anywhere from two weeks up to a couple years.

What you really need to do is when you talk to your attorney you need to let your attorney know Personal Injury Lawyer either want a quick settlement I want a medium length settlement or I really want the best settlement I can get and you may not know that at the beginning it can change but you just need to remember that as the client you are the employer you are the boss and so your Personal Injury attorney it needs to work for you it does bring me to one issue and that is when you are hiring a personal Injury attorney one of the questions.

If you really want to get the best settlement possible one of the questions to ask is are you willing to take my case to trial if need be there is Personal Injury attorney out there who for whatever reason financial or they do not have the guts or Personal Injury Lawyer do not know what it is but for whatever reason they are not willing to take cases to trial they will advertise that they can get quick settlements this type of thing and that is great but they are not going to get best settlements and so one of the interviewing things.

I suggest you do with a Personal Injury Lawyer is to ask them are you willing to take the quick settlement if that is my choice number one because you are the boss so find out if the Personal Injury attorney is going to follow your instructions and are you willing to take it to trial if that is what I want and have you taken personal injury cases to jury trials in the past you need to attorney that is willing to do both of those things if they are not then keep looking so I hope this answers your question if you have any other questions feel free to Contact Personal Injury Lawyer.