An "Okay case" vs A "Slum-dunk case"
What happens if your lawyer wants to settle but YOU want to go to trial?
Recently, I had a case like this, it was a case with a lot of problems. And so when a lawyer signs up the personal injury case, the case can look a certain way at the beginning of the case and then we collect the medical records and the police report where the work injury incident report happened. Depending on what kind of case it is, we find out what the insurance information is, as soon as I sign up the case, the whole process on our end is collecting information to figure out where this case will go.
And in this case, it looked like an “okay case” not a “home run” and not a “slam-dunk”, so I would be able to get the person some money on the case and his injuries weren't that severe. It was as a situation where it would be a little bit of a fight and we would be able to get the guy's medical bills paid and put a little bit of money in his pocket to compensate him for the injuries he sustained and the inconvenience and all that stuff. We took the case we began to work it up and I was clear with the guy up front that the case wasn't a perfect case, and he was cool with it.
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Go To Trial and Get The Offer
As we worked on the case for a little while and what was a run-of-the-mill average sort of case as we collected more information. We got the medical records, without telling you the details there were about three things wrong with this case that any one of which wouldn't kill the case but when you stamped the three of them together it made it a case that was going to be really hard to prove if we went forward as we went to trial.
Basically, what happened is we got on the phone with them and we're at the point where we either were going to go to trial or we got an offer on it. As we're going to take the offer, and surprisingly to me, we got an even better offer on the case! It's more than I thought we were going to the offer that they put on the case. It was quite good and that's frankly because we did a very good job of working the cases up, we did everything possible to make the case as strong as possible for this gentleman and there was nothing, we could do to fix those three problems. I was surprised maybe the insurance company hadn't discovered the problems so it was a case that I didn't want to go to trial on because the offer was so good that even if we didn't have those problems, the offer was like in the ballpark of what we could reasonably expect a trial.
Before You Walk Away For A Settlement Offer
I got my client on the phone, to explain the circumstances to him, and all of a sudden, he became very unreasonable, and he wanted a huge amount of money in his pocket. He wanted to review the entire file and wanted way way more money and he eventually agreed to settle the case but the reason I wanted to tell you this story is basically sometimes cases start out great and then as we research them, there are problems that are really difficult to overcome and now it works out the other ways to where a case looks one way when you sign it up but it goes on with challenges and they end up being really great cases.
That is why I work on those cases for people and sometimes take cases at the beginning even if the case looks like it might have some challenges, but the thing for you to remember is that you know your lawyer can give you some impression of what the case is at the beginning. Your lawyers need to do research, they've got to get the medical records, they're going to find out what your medical outcome is. So, you should not be where any personal injury lawyer who tells you,
“Oh yeah it's a slam dunk million-dollar case I don't do that, because you don't really know whether it's a slam dunk million-dollar case until you've done all the research and the investigation.”
And if you're in a situation where your lawyer is telling you that you should settle a case that you would rather go to trial. They owe you an explanation as to what's wrong with the case and if your lawyer won't explain to you what's wrong with the case, then they probably are just afraid to take it to trial, you may have a lawyer who represents themselves as a trial lawyer but they're just afraid to go to trial.
So I hope this information helps you and if I can help you, please give me a call 312-500-4500.
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