Richmond VA Personal Injury Cases Frequently Asked Questions

Richmond Virginia - Car Accident Claims - The Most Regularly Asked Questions

Today I'm going to speak with you about the 4 most common questions that new injury victims have. First, should I talk to the adjuster? Our normal advice is no, at least not until you have seen one of our books or spoken to an experienced Virginia personal injury lawyer in your area.

The rationale is that these claims adjusters are trained in questioning and they’re seeking to diminish or do away with your entire lawsuit. You certainly don’t want to talk to them while you’re consuming any medication while you’re still in a hospital or anything like that. Again, always be polite, you can tell them that you are still treating and that you’ll get back to them later.

Second thing people find out is “should I sign the papers?” Typically an insurance adjuster will be sending you healthcare privacy waivers. These authorizations tend to be very broad and they deliver to the defendant's insurance company all sorts of medical information of yours and what the defendant's insurance company does is they get through this and then request even more records. So they might have 10 or fifteen years of your private record without you ever knowing that, we suggest getting your own records first making sure they’re accurate and getting those records to the insurance company for the defendant.

The second form they’ll I often ask you to sign is a release. They may send you a check just know that once you sign a standard release, that’s it. If you need care later or if there’s some undisclosed injuries and you need an operation or something else further down the line that insurance company for the person who hit you is not going to pay for it.

Our next new personal injury claimants want to know, “Who will pay my medical bills as they are accumulating?” Here’s our advice. Number one, use your own health insurance plan first. It’s primary, it should pay the bills, the last thing you want to have happened is to have the medical doctors and hospitals go unpaid and have them send you off to collections. Second you may have a type of coverage on your own car policy called Medical Payments coverage.

Typically, people will have an amount of $2000.00 or $5000.00 or $10,000.00. Call your own insurance agent, your car insurance agent. Ask if you have med pay or Medical Payments coverage and submit all of your costs to them as well.

Finally of course the insurance company for the defendant for the person you caused the accident and caused your injuries is responsible for the bills. The difficulty is they’re not going to pay for the charges until the end of the claim, they’re going to give you one lump sum settlement and your doctor is saying “You can’t wait for two or maybe three years to get that money.”

The next question we typically get is what about all those yellow page ads, what are they really saying? And I understand if you’re looking, if you’ve been in an accident and you’re looking for a attorney you’ve probably have come across hundreds of yellow page ads, websites all the same pretty much the same thing. That’s why I wrote this book, The Truth About Lawyer Advertising, it’s our little consumer guide that will lead you to ask the right questions and show you exactly how to check out law firms, so you can find the right law firm for your case.

Now, we are going to talk about what is the formula for settlement in a car accident claim. We get calls from potential clients and they find out how is a settlement range calculated and so they will say things to us like, “I know there is a formula where you take the medical expenses and multiply them and you get a range.” We'd like to dispel that myth. There is no magic formula for settling car accident claims.

Why is that?

Well, personal injury claims, when they go to trial are determined by juries. Juries decide how much money the plaintiff will be awarded and they're not given any formula book. Instead, they're given evidence and a list of items of damage that they may consider and then they arrive in their own mind what your lawsuit is worth.

You can order a free sample chapter of our free consumer guide, The Five Deadly Sins That Can Wreck Your Injury Claim, to learn more about personal injury claims in Richmond, VA by following this link

So what that tells us is that while there is no formula for settlement values in a car accident case, there is definitely a methodology, a way of looking at cases that are engaged in both by the defendant's insurance company who is making the offer and by the personal injury attorney who is making the recommendation for settlement.

So let’s talk a little bit about that. Ultimately, the issue that both the defendant's insurance company and your law firm are doing is answering the question, what would a local jury do with your claim? And in order to answer that, at least from the insurance company’s perspective, what they're doing is keeping track of thousands and tens of thousands of cases a year across the United States and for each claim that they settle or each case that goes to a jury, the jury awards an amount of money, they have all sorts of data including what are the injuries being claimed, what are the medical expenses—that certainly is a part of the data although not a part of the formula, is there any scarring, what do the person do for a living, how much time do they miss off of work, do they have any permanent disability and they take all of those numbers and put them into their database and then they can extract from that database knowledge and information about what juries in the same or similar circumstance in your location, in your particular city or town have done with that and they also know how successful they have been in settling cases with same or similar type injuries and the same or similar type picture of the overall case, how successful they have been in settling those cases in your area.

What do we learn from this? First, only your jurisdction matters. So, for example, what happens in Virginia matters, but not what happens in New York. That is the market place, so the jury is the marketplace.

Insurance companies have huge databases about this. Because they are the one settling more cases than any lawyers possibly could. It doesn’t mean they're right all the time, but it means it has a statistical matter. They're going to have the most information about what has gone on in the past.

Let’s talk about some of the intangibles that go into an examination of the case and there really are two big ones from the company's standpoint and they find out who is your doctor and who is your attorney? Now, I told you that the insurance companies keep a record of everything so they have these big data source and they know for example which physicians are the overtreaters and their costs are prone to challenge at trial in before a jury.

They know which doctors make awful witnesses. They also know of course which doctors make good expert witnesses and here’s something you might not have thought of, but there are a lot of lawyers who refer clients to doctors. So you may go into a lawyer’s law office, he’s got a stack of physician cards or orthopedic cards. This is something that you'll never know unless you go to court, but it can be really be the destruction to your court case.

Because if your lawyer is one who refers lots and lots of claimants to the same group of doctors, I can guarantee you that on cross examination at trial, that is going to look awful. So a witness saying you have a certain injury and he’s had to treat you for X number of weeks and it comes out in the middle of court that—well he gets 10 patients a month from your lawyer, the argument is going to be made that that doctor is lying to favor your lawyer. So you need to ask that question of your legal professional if referring you to a doctor's office, and you need to know how many times has that attorney referred to that doctor, how many people a year, a month because it can be important to your claim.

The next thing the insurance company for the defendant is going to learn is who is your attorney because they keep track of these couple of things. They know which lawyer settle everything. That’s important because they know that some attorneys will never go to trial and so they can be convinced to take a lower amount of money for your case. They keep track of this stuff. The other thing they know is—is your law firm is a specialist. That’s important again because the defendant's insurance company is making an evaluation of how likely it is your legal professional will do a great job if you have to go to trial. Remember that while most of these cases settle, a certain percentage will go to trial every year and you're going to want to go to trial with someone who is an experienced specialist. Not someone who is a general practitioner who dabbles in personal damage claims, not someone who is doing a divorce one week and a personal damage court the next. You're going to want to go with the specialist in order to have the best chance.

The insurance company is keeping track of that and it goes into their calculus when they are making you settlement offers.

So let’s talk about what goes into your lawyer’s evaluation. Typically a lawyer will—the good one’s anyway are not going to be able to tell you what your claim is worth until you have finished your treatment. They’ve received all the doctor reports, the medical expenses, information from your employer. They perhaps have spoken to your doctor about the nature and extent of your problems and then your attorney is going to make you a settlement evaluation will come to you in writing before any demand is made on the insurance company for the person who hit you. In fact, you should ask for it in writing.

What your law firm is doing is very similar to what the insurance company is doing is that here she is saying to himself what would a jury do. The legal professional is often an experienced personal damage law firm who is often in a very great position to be able to tell you, ‘look, in my city or town or in other cities or towns where I've tried a lot of cases, I think your case is worth between X and Y.’ Some of the other things that a personal injury lawyers do is they of course subscribe to publications that report jury verdicts, that report settlements. They talk to their colleagues at law firm meetings, things like that. Again, what this all says for you, the consumer is that you want a law firm if he’s going to represent you in a personal injuries claim, you want a legal professional who is in the game, who is sort of in the thick of it in terms of seeing being exposed to a lot of personal damage trials and settlements so that, here she can give you a fairly accurate range of settlement for your lawsuit.

Now, at the end of the day, nothing is perfect. At the end of the day, when you go to trial and the case is submitted to the jury, ultimately, all of this is up to the jury as I said in the beginning of this legal academy lesson, the jury has no formula. The jury will hear and see the evidence, listen to the arguments of the lawyers. They’ll evaluate you in your damage listening to the testimony of your doctors and ultimately, they're given a set of jury instructions from the judge that tells them how to go about deciding the case, what the rules of the law are, what the elements of the damages are, but ultimately, at the end of the day, remember, no formula for the jury.

Ben Glass is a practicing personal injury and medical malpractice attorney in Fairfax, Virginia.He has been written up and featured in Trialv magazine, Wall Street Journal Online and the Washington Post, among others.

You can order a free sample chapter of our free consumer guide, The Five Deadly Sins That Can Wreck Your Injury Claim, to learn more about personal injury claims in Richmond, VA by following this link

If you have a question for Ben, you can submit it confidentially online at JustAskBenGlass.com.

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