Maximizing Your Personal Injury Compensation: Essential Tips and Strategies

The difference between handling a personal injury case yourself or with an inexperienced attorney and hiring an experienced personal injury attorney could be tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maximize your personal injury compensation with the following essential tips and strategies.

Follow Up with Medical Care

If you are injured, do not try to self-diagnose and self-treat. Your leg might be broken, but you just take fistfuls of ibuprofen and put your leg up on a chair. You might be doubled over in abdominal pain, but you just drink ginger ale and lie down. Or maybe you were taken to the hospital following your injury and you didn’t like the doctor who prescribed you some sort of treatment plan. So, you don’t follow up with it; you’re exhausted and you just don’t feel like it. These are detrimental errors. Top personal injury attorneys in Philadelphia will help you connect with the right doctors to ensure you get the critical follow-up healthcare you need to heal and recover.

You Need a Lawyer, an Experienced Lawyer

If you are injured and you file a claim with your insurance company, the insurance company may try to convince you that they can handle everything. More often than not, an insurance company will undervalue your case. In other words, they will tell you that they can only collect a certain amount of money (because that is the maximum amount they’d be able to collect for you). Whatever amount the insurance company tells you is typically far less than what a Philadelphia personal injury lawyer can collect for you.

And no matter how straightforward your case seems, it’s actually not. Let’s say you were driving and the car behind you rear-ended your car, causing you to suffer neck and back injuries. You may think this is a straightforward auto accident because you learned that people who rear-end the drivers in front are always at fault. But there are many factors to consider in auto accidents including the usage of handheld devices (like your cell phone) while driving, whether there were other distractions, whether the cars involved were compliant with state inspection laws, whether there were any recalls of parts on either of the cars, etc.

And what about the various laws and rules of procedure in the Pennsylvania courts? No layperson is expected to understand how the law and procedure work in any particular case. Sadly, even many practicing attorneys who spent three years in law school don’t understand all of Pennsylvania’s complicated rules and regulations!

So, you may think your case is simple, but it’s not. You need a personal injury lawyer — an experienced personal injury lawyer — to help you.

Preserve Evidence

People who suffer an injury and don’t consult with a lawyer often learn after it’s too late that they made critical errors early on. Often, it’s that they failed to preserve key evidence that would have helped their case. An experienced personal injury attorney knows what actions must be taken early in the process such as ordering medical records; reviewing police reports; and collecting witness statements, photographs, and videos. The presence or absence of these crucial forms of evidence could determine whether your lawsuit is successful or not.

Much of the critical evidence is in the possession of the defendant and if those items aren’t requested early in the process, the defendant could destroy them.

Thus, you need an experienced Philadelphia personal injury attorney to help you avoid common missteps that could otherwise hinder the success of your lawsuit.

Manage Expectations

Even if you file your lawsuit promptly, there will still be a wait time of at least a couple of years before your case goes to trial. Between the time your attorney files the Complaint and the actual trial is a lengthy period called “Discovery,” in which both sides to the lawsuit request, exchange, and examine information and evidence pertaining to the case. This includes depositions of parties, experts writing reports, and often a series of motions and hearings on evidentiary issues. 

And notwithstanding the considerable length of the discovery period, another delay looms large in Philadelphia: cases then need to be scheduled for a trial and that usually happens months after all discovery is over. So, there is a long line of previously scheduled trials that get priority over recently filed cases.

Follow the above strategies to maximize your personal injury compensation. To talk with an experienced Philadelphia personal injury lawyer, contact VSCP Law.