Today's topic is: How long does the average injury case take to finish or settle or wrap up? In other words, how long does an injury case take?
It's a topic I've covered before. I think some time ago, but here's the Reader's Digest. No lawyer can tell you up front how long a case is going to take.The main reason why is, it takes two to tango. If I signed up your case and it was up to me whether your case would settle, I'd settle every case in my office for 10 million dollars and I'd be writing these articles for you from Hawaii. I'd be retired.
But you know there's insurance companies and defense attorneys and multiple levels of bureaucracy. Once we have an injury case going on the other side and there's a lot of obstruction, a lot of slowing down of a case. The first issue, is do they want to fight the case? or do they want to settle the case? So if they want to fight the case, boy your case can go on a long time.
Right now with shutdowns and the lockdowns we're still recovering for them, from them. We're over two years after as of writing this. We're over two years after everything shutdown and the courts were shutdown for a little while. They're still not up to volume and up to snuff and so many procedures have changed and things are very inefficient handling the cases.
As a general rule, if your case is on a settlement track, it's going to resolve faster. If it is on a litigation and fighting track, you're probably going to be in for a one to three year wait before you get to trial. Then those kinds of cases tend to settle at trial or immediately before trial. You got to plan for anywhere between one to three years.
Now what if your case is on a settlement track? there are some lawyers who don't try to settle their cases, they just file lawsuits. File lawsuits on everything the minute the case comes in the door, even if they have a two-year deadline and even if it's a case that should settle and even if it's a case that the lawyer and everybody's going to save money and you're going to get your money faster if there's a settlement attempt. That's why in my office, we do try to settle everything before litigation.
You get your money back, there's less hassle for you. You don't have to come down to answer discovery, you don't have to come downtown to go to court you don't have to come downtown to attend an arbitration or a trial, you don't have to come downtown for a deposition. Much easier if we try to settle your case and you get your cash much faster.
So, in my office right now, cases tend to settle like within 8 to 14 months of me getting involved in the case. I can tell you, that's an excellent number. It's faster than any law firm that I've ever worked at or been affiliated with. It's because, over the last several years, I've really sat down and focused on how to make everything as fast as possible and as efficient as possible while also keeping case costs down.
The Reader's Digest is, if your case is going to settle once your medical treatment is done, the lawyer is going to need at least 60 to 90 days to get your medical records. Another 30 days to get a demand letter done and then another 30 to 60 days to find out whether the insurance company is going to settle. So realistically you have to give a lawyer three to six months after you're done treating before they can even try to settle your case.
But then once it's in litigation, the defense lawyers work by the hour so they want to build a bunch of hours on your case that's in their office. So the odds of the case settling right after a suit being filed are usually not that great. I mean if you file it, and the insurance company calls you then you can settle it. But once they assign it to a law firm that works by the hour, that law firm has a target goal of ten or twenty thousand dollars or more per file in their office.
Case costs are the amount of money the lawyer has to advance in your case to put it together. And either settle it or take it to trial, case costs are usually pretty reasonable before a lawsuit. But in cases I've taken over from other lawyers, these guys, some of them spend thousands of dollars before you even get to court, which in my office sometimes the case costs are under a hundred dollars.
Usually, they're in the two to three hundred dollar range if I can settle the case. Considering how expensive medical records are to get and how expensive everything is these days, turning cases around that quickly and for that little money is usually pretty awesome. I'm happy with it. It's much faster than what I'm used to working in other places or faster than what other law firms do.
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