You might be wondering how you know what awful advice your coworkers are sharing. The solution is straightforward. When customers dismiss those solicitors and come to us, You get to hear what counsel their previous personal injury solicitors offered them. After years of receiving the same awful advice, we began keeping a list of the worst bits of advice you had ever received.
Some solicitors provide advice that they have developed and improved over time. Others provide counsel to personal injury clients just because another lawyer encouraged them to do so in the past.
Some of the bad advice you will get from personal injury solicitors
Insist On The Presence Of A Witness For The Insurance Company Doctor’s Examination”
This is ridiculous. The concept of having a witness there to open the door to evidence from the witness demonstrating the insurance company doctor’s wrongdoing is a pipe dream. It is ineffective. The doctor would most likely refuse to let the witness return to the exam room, resulting in a heated verbal conflict. The examination will eventually begin. But at this point, whatever possibility you had of swaying the doctor and getting him to write a good report is gone.
Alternatively, if the doctor allows the witness, the doctor will only be doing it correctly on the surface. He will still be angry that you brought a witness. So, while he may appear friendly to you, he will still write the same devastating report. And because the doctor was aware he was being monitored, your witness will have nothing important to speak about.
We can promise you that since this ridiculous advice became popular, it has never fulfilled its purpose. It eliminates even the remote prospect that the insurance doctor may side with you. This is poor advice.
Begin An Injury Diary
Seems naive enough, but it is a fatal idea in actuality. Nobody and we mean nobody, who delivers this advice understands human nature or personal injury trial practice.
The personal injury solicitor will advise you to keep a diary of your pains and injuries from the time of the injury to the time of your testimony, either in deposition or in court. It is intended to help you to think about your pains when they were at their most intense and to be able to recollect and testify completely about the event.
Secretly Record The Insurance Doctor Examination
This is worse than the witness’s suggestion. It’s a long shot to secretly record oneself in the hopes that the insurance company doctor says something quotable and maybe rude.
The first issue is that doctor exams, whether for you or for the insurance company, sound roughly the same on tape. They cannot be quoted. But, more importantly, if your clueless lawyer plays the tape at trial in an attempt to establish that you “caught the doctor saying something biased,” the whole jury panel will immediately focus on one undeniable fact: you will do everything, even sneaky, to win. Bad advice.
Only Begin Settlement Negotiations After Every Single Doctor Has Completed Your Care And Discharged You
It might take years for an injury to recover. Doctors can keep track of a patient for years. Waiting for all doctors to release you will almost certainly result in a significant overflow of bills that you will have to pay out of a restricted budget of insurance settlement money.
Instead, continue to treat and ask your doctor to offer you a projection for your future medical needs and the time required for a full recovery. A prognosis like this is normally achieved in a matter of months, not years, of treatment. A settlement should be reached based on what physicians say regardless.
Write Personal injury solicitors Rage Letters To The Insurance Company
You engaged a solicitor to fight your war with his persuasive words. Having you perform the act typically makes you appear uncontrollable and, worse, petulant. The whole shooting competition is based on you seeming personable and like the type of person that a jury of your peers would adore. A few letters complaining to the insurance company might forever sway a jury against you.
Treatment With Special Doctors Who Are Friendly With Your Lawyer
It has to be the Worst advice ever. These doctors (friends of plaintiff attorneys and their clients) are exactly the sort of doctors you need to avoid if you want to prove and retain the authenticity of your personal injury claims. If you begin visiting the typical suspicious doctor, the insurance company will immediately think that your lawyer referred you to a “doctor in a box,” and the value of your case will collapse. This is really terrible advice.
Stay Away From Work As Long As Possible
Personal injury solicitors like nothing more than claiming that an injured victim is a forger or, worse, a malingerer. Sitting on your sofa and waiting for that huge settlement check to arrive when you might be working, even on limited duty or part-time, may ensure that the payment never arrives. It’s absolutely awful advice.
Conclusion
There is a solicitor that takes action, and if questioned about why he did things a specific way, he will just shrug his shoulders and reply, “I’ve always done it that way.” However, we’ve found that defining individuals in personal injury claims against insurance companies is a highly fact-specific and conscious undertaking. There is no space for rote regeneration because “that is what we have always done.” The advice given in the preceding cases is incorrect and totally counterproductive to their primary goal.
At Invicta Legal, we understand that filing a personal injury claim is challenging enough without giving our clients incorrect advice. If you have any questions about the counsel you’ve gotten from your existing attorney, please call our expert personal injury solicitors.
