Seven Key Mistakes Personal Injury Victims Make When Trusting A Modern-Day Goliath
Mistake #4: Jumping to take Goliath’s offer to settle their personal injury, wrongful death or accident case.
As we keep harping on, insurance companies know all the psychological tricks in the book. Goliath might come back to you multiple times with different escalating offers and finally give you an offer that’s the “final offer” – yours to accept or decline to forever settle your personal injury, wrongful death or accident case. Goliath may even say that his offer “is all your personal injury, wrongful death or accident claim is worth” with the implication that his years of experience tells him this. If you act as your own representative – if you don not have an experienced personal injury lawyer, wrongful death lawyer or accident lawyer to advise you – you might just accept Goliath’s “last and best” offer because you lack the skills and knowledge to press for more and to prepare the case in such a way to maximize your recovery for your personal injury and bodily injury to fully compensate you for compensatory damages, punitive damages, property damage, medical bill and future medical treatment, lost wages and future earnings, loss of consortium of a spouse, pain, suffering and mental anguish.
Again, this is why we keep talking about how early and thorough trial preparation and documentation are important. If you slack, you might find Goliath’s underwhelming “final offer” tempting enough to take – and thus inadvertently “cheat yourself ” out of substantial compensation to pay for your accident damages as state earlier such as: long-term care, therapies, critical medications, lost work time, etc. Having the right personal injury lawyer, wrongful death lawyer or accident lawyer to build your case on a solid foundation is key to maximizing the recovery in your case.
Be sure to read about Mistake #5 in our next post in this series
Aaron Gartlan is a graduate of Troy University and the Thomas Goode Jones School of Law who focuses his practice exclusively on representing those injured by the wrongdoing of others. He is member of the National Trial Lawyers Association’s Top 100 Trial Lawyers, Million Dollar Advocates Forum and Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum. In addition to his legal practice, Aaron teaches Business Law as an adjunct instructor at Troy University’s Sorrell College of Business and serves as a field artillery sergeant in the Alabama National Guard.
