The importance of having realistic expectations

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.