Reasonable Expectations and Medical Care
The first challenge is setting reasonable expectations for a client. When a new client comes to you, they have just experienced something traumatic in their life and, justifiably, feel like they are in total to a rather large amount of compensation. At the same time, we need to set reasonable expectations for the process, the relative value of claims based on the individual factors of a client’s case, and develop a rapport to establish trust.
The second challenge is ensuring that your client obtains the reasonable, necessary, and appropriate medical treatment for their injuries. This helps to ensure your client gets on the road to recovery and also builds the necessary evidence to support your claim for damages on their behalf. Amazingly, it can be a huge challenge making sure that your client actually attends the necessary treatment.
Running in the background of all of the above is the obvious fact that you, as the lawyer, need to have a solid grasp on the law and any creative tactics that may help leverage areas within the law that can help build value.
If you are unable to accomplish each of the above three items, you will face significant challenges in developing, pursuing, and resolving personal injury claims for good value on behalf of your clients.
Enough Insurance Money for the Injuries
There can be an endless number of potential challenges in developing a personal injury claim, particularly in harder fought, serious injury cases. These typically require litigation to attain the highest value, and lawyers can fight over just about everything in litigation.
However, as a general matter, probably the two biggest challenges to proving a personal injury claim are: attaining sufficient medical evidence to prove the extent of the injuries, and needing the defendant to have enough insurance money to cover those injuries.
The good news is that the medical evidence piece is normally something that the plaintiff can control by undergoing whatever treatment his or her doctor recommends. We can run into challenges when clients either do not have health care, or simply do not want the treatment, for whatever reason. Medical records truly are the centerpiece of personal injury cases, as far as evidence that we simply must have.
Then we have to consider insurance coverage. Unfortunately, the amount of available money that any given plaintiff might recover is the luck of the draw. But available insurance coverage policy limits are often the cap or max on potential recovery. We can sometimes recover defendant assets but that’s not a common scenario.
Proving Negligence and Fault
Proving negligence and who is at fault are often the most difficult aspects of building a solid personal injury claim for clients. Dash cams are great, but they aren’t always there to capture clear evidence of the injury-causing situation. In cases where there isn’t any physical documentation of the situation (like security footage) or witness statements, you have to rely more on medical records and other documentation that you can secure. Those things can help, but they aren’t nearly as impactful or damning as footage and/or testimonies.
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