This is the situation nobody prepares for and almost everyone in a serious accident eventually confronts. You have real injuries. You have real medical bills, real lost wages, real pain that has changed the way you live. And the person who caused all of it was carrying the minimum insurance the state required, or something […]
What Happens to My Case If I Die Before It Settles
This is a question most people ask not because they are expecting to die but because they are seriously injured, facing an uncertain prognosis, and trying to understand what happens to the legal claim they have been pursuing if things go wrong. It is a responsible question, and it deserves a direct answer. The short […]
What Happens at Mediation and Does It Usually Work?
If your personal injury case has been scheduled for mediation, you are probably trying to figure out what the day is actually going to look like and whether it means your case is almost over. The answer to the second question is usually yes, mediation resolves most cases, but the way it resolves them and […]
Will Filing a Lawsuit Speed Up My Settlement?
Sometimes, and the mechanism by which it works is almost nothing like what people expect. Most people imagine that filing a lawsuit is an escalation — a way of signaling seriousness, of turning up the pressure, of forcing the insurance company to pay attention to a claim they have been ignoring or undervaluing. That intuition […]
Does Getting a Lawyer Make My Case Settle Faster or Slower?
The honest answer is both, depending on which part of the process you are asking about, and understanding why requires understanding something fundamental about how insurance companies think about claims. If you are asking because you are trying to decide whether to hire an attorney, or because you already have one and your case feels […]
How Do I Know If My Settlement Offer Is Fair?
The honest answer is that you probably cannot know on your own, and the reason you cannot know has nothing to do with intelligence. It has to do with information. Evaluating a settlement offer requires knowing what your case would likely produce at trial, what comparable cases have settled for in your jurisdiction, how your […]
When Do Insurance Companies Decide to Settle a Case?
If you have a personal injury claim pending against someone else’s insurance company, you are probably wondering why nothing seems to be happening, or why the insurer made an offer that seemed insultingly low, or whether they will ever make a serious one. The process feels opaque from the outside, and that opacity is not […]
Why Do Most Personal Injury Cases Settle?
The number most attorneys cite is somewhere between ninety-five and ninety-seven percent of personal injury cases settle before a jury ever decides them. If you are in the middle of one of these cases right now, that number probably sounds reassuring on one level and unsettling on another. Reassuring because it suggests most people get […]
What If the Accident Made a Pre-Existing Condition Worse?
If you had a prior injury, a chronic condition, or a history of treatment for the part of your body that got hurt in this accident, you are probably worried about what that means for your case. Maybe you had a bad back before the crash. Maybe you had a prior knee surgery, a history […]
Can I Recover for a Pre-Existing Injury That Got Worse?
Yes. This is one of the most misunderstood areas of personal injury law, and the misunderstanding almost always runs in the same direction: people who were injured in accidents assume that because they already had a bad back, a prior knee surgery, a history of migraines, or some other pre-existing condition, they have a diminished […]