What You Need to do in a Personal Injury Case

Answer:

For the person who’s injured and has a personal injury claim, what they have to do in the lawsuit is not a lot, believe it or not. It basically means if you’re going to hire – if you don’t hire counsel, then you’re going to have a lot to do. It’s going to be overwhelming, particularly if you’re injured.

If you have an attorney, particularly an attorney with the sophistication and background and experience of pursuing such claims, then the lawyer will do most of the work for you. You’ll first have to interview with lawyers and select one. You get the right to select who you want to have representing you and your interests. Once you do that, it will be then up to them to do that which is necessary to put the case in a position of being evaluated and attempted to be settled. If that can’t be settled, or if it can’t, then to pursue the lawsuit. At that point, the only things that the injured person would need to do is basically call and find out what the status is and just to follow it along. You’ll be occasionally called upon to answer some questions. You’re occasionally called upon to have meetings or the like where you are engaging in answering the other side’s discovery requests. That really just involves meeting with the lawyer or talking with the lawyer. Then at some point, you may be required to give a deposition. If iThe other side has the right to take a deposition, which is testimony under oath in a conference room just like the one I’m sitting in now and ask you a series of questions about what happened in the accident, your background and the like. That would be something potentially you would have to do. If the thing ultimately has to go to a jury trial, well, then you’ll be required to sit in during the jury trial and be present at all times. Really, the amount of effort that the injured person has to put into the pursuit of the claim is actually relatively limited. It’s the lawyer or team of lawyers that’s going to do most of the work associated with pursuing the claim and trying to maximize its value. At our firm, for example, we have a lot of legal horsepower here. We have a number of different lawyers. They’re all doing the same type of work to pursue the common goal of maximizing the value of the claim and getting you the amount deserved. The insurance companies on the other side, they know that we have the legal sophistication and horsepower and the actual experience of going to jury trials if necessary. If you have such a claim, please feel free to call me personally at any time to talk about it further or talk to any of the other lawyers at our law firm. Again, we all do the same type of work and we’re all working closely together.