Health Upp Personal Injury- If you’ve become a victim of medical negligence or experienced an accident that wasn’t your fault, then you may have the right to file a lawsuit. The downside? Besides trauma, loss of earnings, pain, and suffering resulting from the accident, victims are often left fighting with insurance companies to get the coverage they need to pay the medical bills.
If you have one of the best personal injury lawyers on your side, you will have an advocate working for you to make sure you get what is owed to you. Better yet, you don’t have to pay your solicitor until they get you money from the other party.
This post will help you find the right personal injury solicitor to meet your needs.
Finding an experienced solicitor
The practice of law is more and more specialized, and many tax attorneys, for instance, know less about personal injury law than most of us. So, the first task is to find legal experts who have the necessary experience in personal injury cases.
To be honest, nobody wants to be represented in court by someone who has primarily worked for insurance companies, even if they’re experienced. Such a legal representative may be too familiar with taking the insurer’s side and might not fight hard enough to defend your case. What’s more, an experienced solicitor who has some experience representing personal injury victims can be a real asset.
Not all solicitors want your case
Finding a personal injury lawyer you want to hire is one thing. But that person also has to want to work with your case. And a personal injury solicitor could have several reasons for rejecting you as a client.
Most attorneys work on a contingency fee basis which means their fee is a percentage of what you ultimately receive in compensation. And compensation you are likely to receive is small, most personal injury solicitors won’t join your case. Why? A lawyer’s cost of operating a law office is too high to take on small cases that are economically worthwhile.
However, if your case is too small, you can still hire a solicitor on an hourly basis to give you advice on essential parts of the claim.
Even if your potential compensation is high, a personal injury solicitor may decline your case if the chances of winning full compensation are low for some reason. For instance, you might have been entirely responsible for the accident, it might be difficult to prove otherwise, or the person responsible for the accident might have little to no coverage.
Look for referrals
If you want to know who the most qualified solicitors are in your community, ask the lawyers who practice there. You can find out whether a significant number of an attorney’s caseload comes from referrals from other professionals. In any profession or field, the professionals who work in the field typically know who’s good and who is not. If you know someone who practises laws or has an attorney, that might be a good place to start. Even if that person doesn’t handle personal injury cases, they are sure to have colleagues who are acquainted with malpractice or personal injury lawyers who are known by their peers as being experts in your community.
Look for a professional office
You need a personal injury solicitor who has the resources to manage your case. That means they have the staff capable of addressing issues as they arise and doing investigative work. The chance is you will be interacting with some of these staff members as your personal injury cases advance. A professional office is a good sign that your solicitor is running a professional business.
Remember, it’d be difficult to trust any legal worker who is flipping through documents trying to find your case when you come in for a meeting.
Your settlement goals
If you’ve finally decided to work with someone on your case, the lawyer may give you a general opinion of how much your case is worth and how challenging it may be to the insurer to pay something in that amount. According to PersonalInjuryClaimsCare.org.uk, at this point, you will be discussing with your solicitors the different ways your personal injury case could be approached and whether he or she will be willing to manage the case in the way you prefer. These approaches include:
- Receiving any amount more than what the insurer has already offered, as soon as possible
- Obtaining the highest amount possible, no matter how long it takes
- Obtaining a compensation amount for you within a certain range and with as few costs as possible.
Be careful about lawyers who send “solicitation” letters to your home
There’s an increasing number of personal injury attorneys who have been hiring “gophers” to obtain traffic accident reports from state police officers. If they manage to obtain these reports, law firm members will comb through these reports to find where the accident victim lives. They often mail “solicitation” letters to the injury victims, informing them that the law firm is ready and willing to represent them in a case.
In some states, it’s not unusual for personal injury victims to receive these solicitations from law businesses. These firms rely on solicitation letters as they can’t attract referrals from satisfied customers as easy as other firms, hoping they will receive attention from their mass mailings. It’s probably safe to ignore or do a lot of research if you decide to hire one of these firms.