How the Timing of Your Settlement is Affected by Your Injury-Type
Transcript:
Hi, I’m Jared Richards and I’m one of the partners at Clear Counsel Law Group. One of our readers has asked: does the type of the injury that you get after being in a car accident affect how long it takes to settle? The answer is yes. Settlement deals with various different factors. Depending on how those play out, your settlement might take a month or two or might take years. The general principle is when you make a claim against an insurance company, you want to make a claim for the full size of your injury.
You don’t really know what the size of your injury is until you’re done treating. Because, one, you don’t know how much you’re going to be out of pocket for medical bills, or how much your medical bills are going to be. You don’t know whether or not you’re going to get better in a timely manner. There may be complications that occur midway through treatment that you don’t anticipate at the beginning. Until your injuries have either, one, resolved, or two, your doctors have said there’s nothing more we can do so we need to start planning what the expense of your future care is going to be, then it’s generally not ripe to settle the case.
Now there is an exception to this. Let’s imagine that you have a horrendous injury. Let’s imagine you get into a car accident and you lose your leg. You know that the other side has only $15,000 of insurance and you also know that that other side doesn’t have money outside of insurance to pay the claim. That case actually might settle very, very quickly because the insurance company is very motivated to get that off their books and to make sure that they are protecting their insured. Sometimes a very big and complicated injury can lead to a very quick settlement.
However, if it was, say, a taxi company that hit you instead or a Walmart truck, or some truck that has a large insurance policy, that probably will lead to a longer settlement, often litigation, because the sides are not going to agree on how serious your injury is and how much you should actually be compensated for it.
Anyway, there are a lot of factors. Big injury, small policy, generally means you’re going to be settling quickly. Big injury, big policy, generally means that you’re going to be in it for a while. Anyway, we’re happy to help. If you have any questions, give us a call and take a look at our other videos. We’ve got lots of answers for you. Thanks.