If you are injured in an accident because of someone else’s negligence or maliciousness, you don’t want to make any mistakes so that you can get the compensation you deserve. Unfortunately, people make mistakes all the time.
Here are two that I see people make all the time when they pick an attorney for their case.
Does Your Attorney Actually Handle Personal Injury Cases?
Of course, one of the worst things you can do is hire the wrong attorney. When I say “wrong attorney,” I mean someone who does not actually handle personal injury cases. For example, I follow a group on Facebook with a bunch of personal injury attorneys statewide, and it’s amazing some of the types of questions that I see. What these questions show is that these attorneys don’t actually handle personal injury cases. Maybe they handle a case here or there, but they don’t know what the heck they’re doing.
This is why I think it is really important for people to hire an attorney who truly handles personal injury cases. You want an attorney who has been handling personal injury cases for years, not months. It’s as simple as asking, “how many personal injury cases have you handled?” The answer will tell you all you need to know.
Do They Litigate?
Here’s another question you need to ask an attorney you are considering for your case: do they litigate? In other words, will they take your case to court if necessary? Believe it or not, I actually get cases from other personal injury attorneys because they don’t litigate. They work with the client pre-suit, but if they can’t settle the case without having to go to court, they’ll send me the case to litigate on behalf of their client.
You would actually be surprised how many attorneys out there don’t actually litigate their own cases. Some don’t litigate at all, while others might litigate every once in a while, but those attorneys aren’t really that good in the courtroom because they get rusty. They’ve handled maybe a dozen cases in the last two years, so they don’t really know what they’re doing. A lot of the time, these cases get messed up. So the clients who have put their trust in their attorney to handle their case from start to finish find themselves out of luck. I’ve had a few such clients approach me and tell me that they want to fire their attorney. Will I take over their case? Unfortunately, most of the time these cases are too far gone to recover, and I have to decline.
Here’s an example of the type of mess that I’m talking about. In personal injury, there are objective findings, and there are subjective findings. You can go to the doctor and tell the doctor that your back hurts. The doctor might ask how much it hurts on a scale of one to ten. Oh, it’s an 8? Okay, well, that’s a subjective finding, and it only helps your case so much. If the attorney doesn’t monitor the case and doesn’t make sure that the client gets an MRI or some other concrete evidence of your injuries, then you don’t have any objective findings to back up your case.
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