VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:  Hello, everybody. My name is Robert Mansour and I wanted to make a brief video today about reasonable expectations and personal injury cases. If I get a perspective client walking into my office and they have "dollar signs" in their eyes and they think they've won the lottery and the heavens are going to open and all kinds of money is going to fall into their lap because they got into a car accident, that's not a very good fit for me. 

You see, those clients have unreasonable expectations. I think the reason for that is back in the 1970s and the 1980s a lot of people were getting pretty amazing payments from insurance companies on auto accident cases. Then what happened is in the early 1990s the insurance companies started to fight these cases aggressively, especially the ones that were soft tissue injury which was basically sprain and strain of the muscles. No serious injuries. What happened was the insurance companies started fighting these cases aggressively. I know that because I was working for one of these insurance companies at the time, and we would take these cases all the way to trial and more often than not the plaintiff, the person making the claim got $0 or very little from a jury.

The reason that this happened is because juries were very conservative and juries were not handing out a lot of money, and the insurance companies started to realize that by fighting these cases aggressively they were discouraging the filing of these cases. In cases like that, the clients have to have very reasonable expectations. The days of money falling out of the sky, those days are over. 

What you want to do is you want to focus on the injury. You want to focus on appropriate care. You want to focus on getting better. A client who comes to me and their main focus is their injury, that's a good fit for me. If they think they won the lottery, that's not a very good fit for me and that client has unreasonable expectations. That client is going to be disappointed probably every single time.

My name is Robert Mansour and I wanted to make this brief video today to talk about unreasonable expectations in relation to personal injury cases. I hope you found this video helpful. Thank you very much for watching. 

VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:  Hello, everyone. This is Robert Mansour. Today's brief video is about the bad behavior of the responsible party. Sometimes I get clients and they call and they're very, very upset because the other party was a real jerk at the accident scene. They were inclined to them. They maybe used foul language. They lose their cool. They screamed at them. They maybe blamed them for the accident and they wouldn't accept fault or I get clients calling me and telling me that the other person looks like a thug, and the other person was very belligerent at the scene.

Look, here's the thing: The bad behavior of the other person, whether or not they're a jerk or they're not a jerk has very little to do with whether or not you have a personal injury case worth pursuing. The question for you is 1) Was the other party at fault? 2) Were you injured? Whether or not they are nice people or they call their mom on the weekend, or they dress nicely, or they treat others with respect, or they use foul language is pretty much irrelevant.

The trouble is that some clients generally correlate the behavior of the responsible party whether or not they have a personal injury case worth pursuing. There is no correlation. The other part is that they're a jerk. What are you going to do about it? There's nothing you can really do.

The question is whether or not you have a personal injury case worth pursuing and the behavior, whether it's bad or good or whatever, the party has very little to do with that. Don't get too concerned about the behavior of the other party. If they're a jerk, they're a jerk.

Again, you can't really change that. It might make your blood boil and it might make you want to go after them, but you can't just do it out of spite and out of anger because you may go down a path that you don't really want to go down. You need to divorce yourself from the emotion and the anger that you might have because the other party was a jerk at the scene. So please, keep that in mind when evaluating whether or not you want to pursue a personal injury claim.

This has been Robert Mansour talking about the bad behavior of the responsible party. I hope you found this video helpful. Thank you very much for watching.