What does the "settlement amount" include?

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello, everybody. My name is Robert Mansour. I'm a personal injury lawyer and I wanted to make a brief video today about liens and personal injury cases. 

You see, after you have your personal injury case and you settle your case, you're offered a certain amount of money from the insurance company. What you have to realize is that from that settlement amount, you have to pay the doctor's fees in some cases, outstanding medical bills. There may be liens on the file. For example, there's an attorney's fee. You may have to repay your health insurance company. They may have a lien. A workers' compensation insurance company may have a lien, Medicare...Medi-cal.

In other words, you have to understand that the settlement amount is one thing, but then you have to pay all of these entities and then there is the residual amount that goes to the client. Let's say for example, I have a case that's settled for $20,000, and the client nets let's say $10,000. The clients in some cases get very frustrated and I understand why because they say, "Well, wait a minute. All I got was $10,000," and I say, "Wait a minute. You got $20,000, but you see, you had to pay a whole bunch of different service providers and then you got $10,000." The client say, "Well, that doesn't seem fair," but actually, that's how it works. 

You see, there's two components to these cases. There's the economic damages and the non-economic damages. The non-economic damages are sometimes called pain and suffering. Let's say you have $10,000 in bills and you wen to a jury, and you went to a trial and a jury came back and the jury said, "Okay. We're going to give you $10,000 for your bills." By the way, assuming they buy all of your bills. "Then we're going to give you say $10,000 in pain and suffering." That's your result, $20,000. You still have all these bills that have to be paid. You see, that's part of your recovery. 

In a personal injury case, your focus should not be on what you net but should be on the entire amount of the settlement. That is the value of the case and you will net less because different providers need to get paid. Of course, a good lawyer should explain these things to his or her client and make it very clear that this is how the process works. 

I hope you found this video helpful regarding liens and payments and personal injury cases. Thank you very much for watching.