How should someone choose a personal injury attorney

How should someone choose a personal injury attorney is a question that comes up all of the time. And the answer to that is pretty simple. First of all, make sure you choose a personal injury attorney. Don’t call your cousin’s divorce attorney and ask him or her to handle your personal injury case. Don’t hire a criminal defense attorney to handle your personal injury case. Personal Injury Law is very complicated. And if you make a mistake in a personal injury case, as an attorney, that can have grave consequences for your client.

And the best example that I can give you of this is when you’re trying to determine how much motor vehicle insurance applies to any particular case. In automobile accident cases, there are multiple levels of coverage. And in order to make sure that or there can be multiple levels of coverage. In order to make sure that you have obtained the best settlement that you can, you have to identify every one of those levels of coverage. And within those levels of coverage, you have to make sure that all of the paperwork was formed correctly or signed correctly. Because if it was not done correctly, you may be entitled to hundreds and 1000s of dollars in additional insurance coverage. Because the insurance company 10 years ago, didn’t get you to sign the right form.

If you don’t have a lawyer that knows what forms to look at, you could lose out on that money. And I can think right off the top of my head of one case where a client hadn’t signed the paper, but his ex wife 15 years before the accident had signed the paper. And that’s no good under the law. And so I got that guy additional insurance coverage. I’ve had people whose limited tort waivers were deemed invalid because they were signed by ex wife’s beat or ex wives before a divorce.

If you don’t have an attorney who knows what to look for, in every situation, and for every insurance form, you could be losing out on money. So you don’t want to hire somebody who spends 90% of their time handling divorces, and then just handles personal injury cases 10% of the time. Sometimes people ask me if they should hire their criminal defense attorney to handle their claim. And I say no, if you were charged with murder, you wouldn’t want me handling that claim. You’ll be in jail. Let me get you somebody who knows how to defend you. And it’s the same thing. in reverse. Obviously, your your personal freedom’s not at stake in a personal injury claim. But you have financial considerations that have to be protected.

So, again, the first thing to do is make sure that you hire a personal injury attorney. Once you once you’ve learned that, that you’ve got to hire somebody who practices in this area of the law, make sure that you hire a competent personal injury attorney. It’s easy for somebody to say they handle personal injury, look in their background and see how long have they been handling these claims? Do they have a website that gives you examples of the types of claims they handle? Do they have results on their websites that tell them what types of successes they’ve had? Have they been in court or are these lawyers that just send out settlement demands and take whatever the insurance company chooses to give them.

Also, communication is key. I get lots and lots of calls from clients who have called their attorneys four or five times and their attorneys have not gotten back in touch with them. And sometimes this is very early on in the relationship. I feel that clients are entitled to know exactly what’s going on at their case, or in their case at any point in time. And we make it a goal of ours here at Waldman and Associates to pick up every phone call that comes in. And if we can’t do that, to return that phone call that same day, if at all possible.

So you have to make sure that you have an attorney who communicates with you. You also have to make sure that if you have that attorney that communicates with you that he or she knows what they’re talking about. And that’s pretty apparent when you talk to different attorneys, who knows the substance of the motor vehicle law, how it applies to your case, as opposed to people who say to you, well, let me look into it or let me get back to you on that. If you have a competent personal injury attorney, they should know what needs to be done on your case. Those are the real factors. There are of course 1000’s of other little curly cues that go into who you hire and why you hire them. But really, those are kind of the factors that you need to look at first. Is this person, a personal injury attorney? Is this person a competent personal injury attorney, and how well do they communicate with me?