Personal Injury Settlement Archives

How Do I Negotiate a Personal Injury Settlement With an Insurance Company?

Written by George McCoy on February 20, 2023. Posted in Car Accident, Personal Injury. Leave a Comment

When you’ve been injured in a car crash or accident, you are entitled to financial compensation to cover your losses. In order to receive that, you will need to negotiate a settlement with an insurance company. You shouldn’t have to take that on alone, especially when you already have recovery to focus on. Thankfully, having an attorney in your corner will be a huge advantage.

Read on below to find out more about how an attorney can help with negotiating a personal injury settlement:

What Is the First Step Toward Negotiating a Personal Injury Settlement?

Before filing a claim, you should gather as much information about the accident as possible. There should be some important details within the accident report, and you’ll want to confirm that the date, location, and time are all correct.

You’ll also need to have information about the other parties, including the driver who was at fault. Most significant is their insurance information, as that’s where you’ll file your claim. You should also gather the contact information of witnesses and anyone else involved.

As for yourself, make sure to include details and evidence of the injuries you sustained in the accident. This can include medical bills and photos, but make sure these are copies; you should keep the originals for yourself.

How Do I Start Trying to Receive a Personal Injury Settlement?

To get the ball rolling, you would file a claim with the insurance company. If you want to receive the highest settlement possible, you should have an attorney at this point. They’ll take care of filing a claim on your behalf.

A personal injury attorney will make sure your demand letter is written to be as convincing as possible. This letter will state your requested settlement amount. Your lawyer will send this along with all the necessary supporting documents. Because of their experience with these matters, you’ll be assured everything was done correctly.

How Do I Decide the Requested Settlement Amount?

Work with an attorney to decide how much your case is worth. Every accident is different, so the attorney would have to review and evaluate the details before coming up with an estimate. Typically, you will discuss how it breaks down into special damages versus general damages.

Special damages are more objective items. These are the medical bills, any lost wages, and other expenses. You’ll already have the paperwork on hand to crunch those numbers.

General damages can be difficult to discuss. Instead of objective numbers, this category refers to the non-economic damage from the accident. How the accident has impacted your life, and the pain and suffering it caused you. Throughout the negotiation process, your attorney will make sure the emotional damage you’ve suffered never gets overlooked.

These numbers aren’t set in stone, as things are set to change throughout the negotiation process. But it’s good to have a general idea.

How Long Do I Have to File for a Personal Injury Settlement?

Though the exact time may depend on individual circumstances, there are some general timelines in the Pacific Northwest region. In Oregon, you have two years but inWashington, you have three. In both cases, that clock begins after the date of loss or discovery of loss.

How Will the Insurance Company Respond?

At first, you should expect to receive a reservation of rights letter. This is an acknowledgment that they’ve received your claim and will review it. You should keep this on file, as it will include your claim number and the adjuster’s contact information. This letter does not guarantee that the insurer won’t deny it.

How Do I Respond to the Insurance Company’s First Settlement Offer?

It’s advised not to jump at the first offer you get. Expect the insurance company to offer the smallest amount possible, and they’ll try to justify the low amount by arguing that you’re asking too much or that you haven’t provided enough evidence. A personal injury attorney will back you up and ensure that you receive what you actually deserve.

How Do I Successfully Negotiate a Settlement?

Before it officially starts, an attorney will make sure you understand exactly how the settlement process works. The insurance company will have its own lawyers, who will try to trick and intimidate you. Therefore, you shouldn’t go into a negotiation like this on your own.

Obviously, you would hope to receive the exact amount you requested, or even a bit more. At this time, you can also discuss the minimum amount you’d accept. While you should prepare not to get everything you want, you should also go in feeling confident and strong. Have faith in the evidence you and your attorney have gathered.

The negotiation process will include a lot of back-and-forth with the insurance company. With every offer and counteroffer, your attorney will argue to effectively defend your side. Considering attorneys literally negotiate, argue, and defend for a living, this puts much less pressure on you.

As difficult and intimidating as the negotiations may seem, hiring an attorney instantly gives you an advantage. It shows that you’re serious about receiving the best settlement, and it implies you would be ready to file a lawsuit if the insurance company doesn’t align. In almost every case, they would prefer to settle out of court.

How Do You Reach a Personal Injury Settlement Agreement?

Even when you think you’ve reached an agreement, your attorney will follow up and follow through to ensure everything is settled. They’ll make sure you get everything in writing, and make sure the amount agreed upon is adequate to cover your bills and any future related needs.

Your attorney will also thoroughly review the agreement to make sure you understand and approve it. After all, this settlement agreement is a legal contract with the insurance company.

Here at Warren Allen LLP, our attorneys have experience successfully negotiating personal injury settlements in Portland and the surrounding Pacific Northwest area. You can find more information about our personal injury attorneys and contact us by visiting our website. We look forward to working on your behalf to get the compensation you deserve.

Man with brace on wrist working on laptop.

How Do I Estimate a Personal Injury Settlement?

Written by George McCoy on December 21, 2021. Posted in Personal Injury. Leave a Comment

It’s never a good thing when you need to seek a personal injury settlement. By definition, it means you’ve been injured in some way, whether that’s injury to your person or injury by the loss of someone close to you. However, we are fortunate to have a legal system that makes legally and safely seeking personal injury settlements as straightforward as it can reasonably be.

But we regularly find our prospective clients asking us a particular question as they start their personal injury settlement journey: How much money should I be asking for? What’s a fair amount to be seeking as a personal injury settlement that will adequately address my damages and financial need, while not making it look like I’m just trying to get rich quick?

In this blog, we’ll look at the different types of damages typically included in a personal injury settlement and how much you should typically be seeking in your claim.

Important caveat: If you’re at all unsure about how to estimate your personal injury settlement amount, don’t just hazard a guess. There are many factors that go into assessing the amount you should be seeking, and you may not know about many or even most of the categories. For that reason, we highly recommend speaking to an experienced personal injury lawyer before ever putting expected damages down in writing.

That said, let’s look at common wisdom about estimating claims.

The Average Personal Injury Settlement Is Between $3,000 and $75,000

Conventional wisdom in the world of personal injury law is that when you seek compensation for damages in a personal injury lawsuit, you can expect to receive (if successful) anywhere from $3,000 to $75,000. Damages below $3,000 typically aren’t seen in personal injury lawsuits; they’d be more suited for small-claims court.

On the other hand, while it is certainly possible to receive claims above $75,000, and you may have heard about personal injury settlements in the range of millions or tens of millions of dollars, these are extremely uncommon. What’s more, these are almost always not economic damages but rather punitive fines. That is, these are not necessarily reflective of the economic and personal hardship you yourself suffered but rather levied in order to punish the offending party for wrongdoing.

For instance, let’s say you lived downstream from a power plant that was dumping chemical waste in your water supply, leading to health issues for you and your neighbors. A judge or jury might award you money to address your health care costs, but if it found that the power plant company was acting willfully and recklessly, it might impose millions of dollars more in punitive fines as an extra penalty.

Still, punitive fines aren’t something that you can control—and the vast majority of personal injury lawsuits are settled before a trial ever starts—so you shouldn’t consider them as part of the estimate of damages you’re seeking.

Intangible vs. Tangible Damages

In any estimate of personal injury damages, there are always two types of injury to consider. One is much easier to estimate and quantify than the other.

Tangible damages

Tangible, or “hard” damages—sometimes called “special” damages—can include things like:

Medical expenses. How much did you spend out of pocket on specialists, medicine, physical therapy, hospital stays, and so on as a result of this injury?
Lost wages. How much money would you have made during the time period you were out of work as a result of the injury you suffered?
Other bills. If you were in a car accident, how much did it cost you to repair your car—or was it totaled and you had to buy a new one? Did you have to rebuild part of your house when an incorrectly felled tree damaged it? How much did you spend on hotel fees while living elsewhere waiting for your home to be livable again?

These are just some of the most common types of tangible or hard damages that you can expect to encounter as part of a legal settlement. These, in the end, are easy to quantify—you just need to add up all your bills. (Incidentally, this is why it is critical to keep records of all of these expenses so that you can prove you really did pay this money and that it was immediately relevant to the injury.)

Intangible damages

However, there are other damages, as well. Intangible damages, sometimes called “soft” damages or “general” damages, include things like pain suffered, emotional damage, loss of enjoyment, and so on.

These damages can be much more difficult to quantify than hard damages can, but they’re often the bulk of a settlement amount, and for good reason. After all, you can quantify being out of work for three months recovering, but how much money does it cost to have an aching body for the rest of your life due to the accident? If you had a car accident, what price can you put on anxiety every time you drive? Or if you had a love of skiing but the injury to your legs means you may never ski again, how much is “may never again do a beloved activity” worth?
For these reasons, you can see why intangible damages are both much harder to calculate than hard damages and often the more sizable part of any personal injury settlement estimate.

While it’s impossible to just put a price tag on things like loss of enjoyment or physical and emotional pain, one handy rule of thumb is this: take whatever your hard damages total is and multiply it by four or five to get the amount you should estimate for your intangible damages.

Setting Expectations

The reality is that you likely won’t get the full amount you seek in a trial, mainly because settlements are negotiated out of court to prevent it from going to trial in the first place. You can also only expect to recoup, in general, what the other party has in assets or insurance. It may not be possible for the person or entity you’re suing to pay the amount you ask.

However, working with an experienced personal injury attorney, like those at Warren Allen LLP, will increase your odds of getting the settlement you deserve. We know how to handle negotiations and estimations to maximize your settlement. If you’re looking to file a personal injury settlement, contact the experts at Warren Allen today.

Tag: Personal Injury Settlement

Personal Injury Settlement: Understanding Your Options and Maximizing Your Compensation