How to get started with your personal injury case

This video helps clients understand how to get started with their personal injury case.  Here is a complete transcript of the video:

Hello, everyone this is Robert Mansour and this brief video is designed to introduce you to how to get started with your personal injury case.  So obviously if you've come to this website, you've probably been involved in a car accident and you might be looking for an attorney's guidance regarding whether or not you have a case worth pursuing, whether you're better doing nothing, whether you should handle it on your own, or whether perhaps you should get a lawyer involved.  So you've come to the right place and this the starting point.  So the first thing you've got to do is call my office.  The reason you want to call the office is to setup your initial personal injury consultation and the consultation should occur as soon after the accident as possible, because one of the reasons personal injury cases fail is because clients take too long before they become proactive about their case and sometimes these delays can come back to haunt you. 

So during the initial call my office staff will probably ask you some basic questions about the accident just to make sure that it's something that we can help you with and then we'll pick a date that's convenience for you and for our office to meet.

So the next thing you need to do is fill out the personal injury questionnaire or the secure, online accident questionnaire.  So, near the middle of the page you're going to find a secure, online accident questionnaire, and go ahead and click on that and it's going to open up a questionnaire in a new window that will walk you through all of the relevant information that I'm going to need during our initial conversation.  And don't be overwhelmed by all the information, if you don't have it all, but gather as much as you can.  Now, if you don't want to fill out the online form, right below that, you can click on the checklist and that will open up a checklist that you can print.  Basically, the checklist will ask you for all of the relevant information including any and all photographs depicting damage to all of the vehicles involved in the accident, any and all photographs of your injuries, bruising, cuts, scrapes, those are the kinds of things that you want to be documented.  It will be asking you for all of your auto insurance information, especially something called your declarations page, which shows a review of all of the insurance coverage that you have available to you on your vehicle.  Also, we're going to ask you for insurance information for the other vehicle, the responsible party.  If you have any property damage estimates to your vehicle, we're going to need those and if you don't have a property damage estimate, you might want to go get one sooner than later.

If you've already been to some doctors or a hospital or you've received emergency treatment, or you went to urgent care, we're going to need all of the doctors and facility information for those places that you visited.  In fact, if you can, call those facilities and ask them for a copy of all of your records and all of your bills from your visit post-accident.  It makes life a lot easier.

Also, if you've been a Medicare or Medi-Cal recipient, we're going to need your information.  We also need your health insurance information.

If there is a police report of any sort, we will need a copy of that and if you don't have a copy, that's all right, we can order one for you, but let us know whether or not there was a police report.  Also, if there were any witnesses, we're going to want their names, addresses and phone numbers as well.

Then it's time for our initial consultation where I will sit with you, review everything that you've provided to me and again, the more information you provide to me, the better I can advise you.  So during this meeting I'll let you whether or not it's worth having a lawyer on your side, what your options are, what different paths you might want to take and how the case might unfold.  And during that consultation you can ask any questions that you have and I'll do my very best to answer them.  And then of course, the relationship may begin, if you choose to go forward.  There will be absolutely no pressure for you to do one thing or another.  It is a purely informational meeting and in most cases, there is no charge.

Thank you very much for visiting my website.  Thank you for your interest and go ahead and proceed with the steps and we'll get started in assisting you with your personal injury consultation.  Thank you very much, again this Robert Monsieur and I appreciate your time in watching this video.