PERSONAL INJURY VICTIMS RECOVER MORE WHEN THEY ARE REPRESENTED BY A LAWYER
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When
someone asks me if they need a lawyer to represent them in their personal
injury case, I sometimes think of the lawyer joke that goes something like
this: Asking a lawyer if a lawyer is
needed to solve a problem is sort of like asking a barber if you need a
haircut. The answer is always yes.
The answer
to the question of whether an injured victim needs a lawyer is found in the
statistics of the insurance industry.
Insurance
companies are in the numbers business.
Insurance companies keep numbers and statistics on everything. They categorize cases by the type of injury,
that is whether the injury is to the back or the legs or the feet and rank them
accordingly. Insurance companies can
tell you what the average payout on a case involving medical bills in the
amount of $3,000.00, $10,000.00 or any other denomination.
Insurance
studies have consistently shown that insurance companies pay out more money to
accident victims when they are represented by a lawyer than they pay out on
virtually identical cases in which there is no lawyer. These studies show that even after making a
deduction for attorney’s fees, the claimant puts more net cash into his or her
pocket if they are represented by a lawyer.
Because
insurance companies pay out more when a lawyer is representing the injured
victims, insurance companies would like to remove lawyers from the claims
presented to them.
Of course,
insurance companies keep this “big secret” to themselves.
These
insurance companies consistently encourage claimants to settle the case without
a lawyer and argue that the lawyers will take most of the money. That argument is simply not true. The truth is that in most cases, injured
victims are better off with a lawyer and put more money in their pockets for
their claims even after paying attorney’s fees than they would without a
lawyer.
That being
said however, there are some cases in which the expected recovery is so small
that the injured victim would be better trying to settle the case with the
insurance company themselves. A good
personal injury lawyer will tell a potential client when their case is so small
that they would be better off handling the case themselves.
A good
personal injury lawyer will not take a case unless there’s a reasonable
expectation that he or she can obtain more for the client than they could get
on their own.