VIDEO TRANSCRIPT: Hello everyone. This is Robert Mansour, and I'm broadcasting from my home office here in Los Angeles, California. I'm a practicing lawyer here, and one of the areas I practice is personal injury. There is an issue that has cropped up the last couple of client meetings that I think is worth bringing up and it's the issue of property damage. Clients come to my office and they have an older car and it gets into the accident and the insurance company evaluates the car and makes them an offer. For example, on a case that I recently had, the client had an older car. It was worth about $10,000 and the insurance company made an offer of about $10,000. The client comes to me and says, “Well, how am I supposed to buy a new car with that?” I said, “You're not supposed to buy a new car with that.”

You don't get a new car after an accident just because you were in an accident. If that was the case, then everybody with an older car who felt like trading up would just go get into some kind of car accident and get money from their insurance company and go buy a new car with it. I told the client you get the fair value of your car on the date of the accident. In other words, if you had sold the car the day of the accident before the accident happened, how much could you fairly get for it? How much could you have reasonably expected for a car that old, with that much mileage on it, with whatever options it had?

Basically, I tell them to go to resources like kelleybluebook.com or edmunds.com or cars.com. Another one is autotrader.com. These are nice online resources where you can plug in the information about your vehicle and see what comes up. If the insurance company's offering you roughly the same, go ahead and take it. You're not going to be able to buy a new car with it, but you can go maybe get a used car or put it towards a new car. Remember, you don't get a new car just because you were in an accident.

The other thing to keep in mind is that the insurance adjuster, the property damage adjuster doesn't really have a lot of leeway. They generally use a third party company. They hire this company and this company spits out a number and gets them a computer generated printout. Generally speaking, that's pretty much it. They don't have a lot of leeway from that number whereas perhaps on a bodily injury claim they might have more leeway.

When it comes to property damage they don't really move very much, so don't be terribly surprised or terribly disappointed if your experience with respective property damage is not that great.  Frankly, the car or the vehicle will never be worth what you think it's worth. Most of the time my clients think their car is worth a lot more than it really is. Again, use objective resources, see how much the car would have bore in the marketplace, how much you could have gotten from a fair market value standpoint and that's pretty much it.

Thank you very much for watching this video. I appreciate it. My name is Robert Mansour, and I'll see you next time.

Robert Mansour handles personal injury cases in Santa Clarita, Newhall, Castaic, Canyon Country, Valencia, Castaic, Stevenson Ranch and surrounding communities. Ca  (661) 414-7100 to make an appointment.

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:  Hi, my name is Robert Mansour, and today I'm broadcasting to you from my home office in Los Angeles. One of my areas of practice is personal injury, and I want to share a brief story with you regarding how important it is to mention all of your injuries to every single doctor that you go to after a personal injury case. You see, one of the reasons that clients have trouble with their personal injury cases is that they go to one doctor and they mention a couple of injuries. They go to another doctor, they mention different injuries. It makes sense because if you go to an orthopedic doctor you don't want to tell them about necessarily things that are not related to his field.

Let's say, you're having some vision trouble after the accident. You may not mention that to the orthopedic doctor because you figure what does the orthopedist have to do with my vision? Or you might be having trouble with your vision after an accident. Do you go to an eye doctor and you forget to mention the fact that you're having severe shoulder pain or severe hip pain after the accident or you're having your chest wall is hurting you ever time you breathe in? You may not mention that to the eye doctor.

Basically, the illustrations can go on and on, but here's the deal. The insurance company evaluating your case, that personal injury adjuster who is watching your case, they are going to be looking at those records with great detail. They're going to see what did this person complain of, what was this person complaining of at this doctor, what did they complain about at this doctor and here's the short nugget here to the take-away if you will. If something is not in the medical records it's like it never happened. That's right. If something is not in the medical records,s ou the insurance adjuster simply won't consider it.

As a matter of fact, sometimes they will use the discrepancies against you. They will say, “Well, you didn't mention that injury to this doctor, but you mentioned it to this doctor.” You don't understand the difference. Why? Did you just introduce that injury? Your argument will be, “No. I didn't think it was necessary to tell that doctor about that injury.” Again, this will be used against you.

Basically, what you want to do is every time you go to any doctor for any personal injury case, especially if there's an intake form that you need to fill out, take that opportunity to tell the doctor every single thing that bothers you. Start with your hair and move your way all the way down your body. If your hands hurt, your shoulder, your back. By the way, the back is upper, middle and lower.

So you also want to be very specific in your complaints and very illustrative and demonstrative with your complaints. Don't just say, my back hurts. That doesn't really help explain anything. If you say, “I have shooting pain that goes down my back into my leg like sciatica, and it bothers me every 15 minutes and it's like somebody poking me with a pen very, very sharply.” That's a little bit better than just simply saying, my back hurts.

So once again make sure you mention every single injury to every single doctor that you go see after a personal injury case. Also, make sure that you're very specific about your complaints, not just that simply this hurts or this hurts. That doesn't really help anybody appreciate what you're going through.

Thank you very much for watching this brief video. My name is Robert Mansour, and I appreciate you visiting.

If you need help with your personal injury case, please contact my office to schedule a free initial consultation.  I will let you know if I can help you or not.
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