What is the timeline of a personal injury case?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, everybody. This is Robert Mansour, and I wanted to make a brief video today to present you with a timeline of how a typical personal injury case works.

The first thing that happens of course is the accident. Without an accident, you don't have a personal injury case. The next thing is you have to be injured. You could get into an accident, but you walk out and you're just fine. Then you're not going to have a personal injury case. Let's assume that you're injured.

The next thing we have to figure out is, okay, the police might come investigate the accident, you might have to get a police report. You may not get that right away. You might have to order it a few days later, or sometimes a few weeks later. Your insurance company also might help you get that police report.

You also might need medical care right away. Don't forget, that's the most important thing. You might go to the hospital, you might take an ambulance, you might go to urgent care, and you might get some medical care.

Then at some point you might say, "You know what...I should run this by a lawyer to see what my options are." You might visit with that attorney. If the attorney is a conscientious, good lawyer, they're going to tell you all of your options. You might decide, "Well, I don't really want to bring a personal injury case; it's really not in my best interest," or, "I have a very remote chance of prevailing and I really don't want to do it." Perhaps you're just very busy and you don't even want to take the time. That's a very valid concern.

The lawyer might tell you, "Listen, I think you have a good case and you might want to proceed with it," in which case you should continue going through with all of your medical care as your doctors direct you. In some cases, you may go through your own health care channels. In other cases, you might work with doctors who do personal injury cases.

In any event, there's going to come a point during your treatment when you just basically plateau. There's nothing more that the doctor can do. Either you have reached pre-accident status, or you have plateaued and you're 20% off of what you used to be or 30%. Who knows what the case may be? If you have a really bad injury, maybe there's surgery recommended or maybe you actually have surgery, but at some point, there's not much more that can be done. That's when your attorney's going to start to collect all of your medical records from all of your providers, analyze them, present the case to the insurance company, see if we need to get any declarations from friends or family to discuss how the accident affected you.  Because remember your case has two components: the economic damages and then the non-economic damages, which are sometimes known as pain and suffering.

Then the insurance company will make an offer to us, and we discuss it, and we decide whether that's a good offer, a bad offer, or whether we should file a lawsuit. If we're going to file a lawsuit, we should sit down and talk about the pros and cons of doing so. Because sometimes you might recover more during a lawsuit, but by the time you finish paying all the costs involved, you're basically right where you were before you ever filed the lawsuit.

That's kind of a macro view of how these accident cases work. My website has a lot more information. You're more than welcome to click around or use the search box at the very top of the screen to find more information. Again, my name is Robert Mansour. Thank you for watching this video. I hope you found it helpful.

Call (661) 414-7100 to see if we can assist you with your accident case.