The majority of people who hire a personal injury lawyer have never hired a lawyer before. It can be a very confusing time.
Think about it, an accident has happened where a person has been injured. This injured person or someone close to them performs research or gets the name of a lawyer from a friend or family member. They call and the lawyer agrees to take their claim.
The whole process can cause a lot of anxiety on top of the anxiety from the accident.
Now that the lawyer has been hired, there is still a whole set of steps that the injured person has never faced before. What happens after you hire a personal injury lawyer?
In today’s podcast, that is the question we’re answering for you. Obviously, we don’t know how every attorney operates, but the following interview with Ben Cochran sets out in general terms the steps Hardison & Cochran takes after a person injured thorough no fault of their own becomes a client of the firm.
It is our hope that if you’re facing a situation as described above, this podcast will help you alleviate some of you anxiety.
TRANSCRIPT OF EPISODE 8 | North Carolina Personal Injury Claims
Ben Cochran: Once you’ve retained Hardison and Cochran to represent you in your personal injury claim. The first thing that we’re going to do is make sure that we have the proper documentation and information so that we can file a notice of representation with the insurance company. Predominantly, we are going to make sure that we have a one on one dialogue with our client to make sure that we put the insurance company on proper notice as to the nature of the injuries that we contend were caused by the defendant; their client.
Ben Cochran: What we’re going to do is within the first 24 hours of retaining us an individual case manager from our office is going to contact the client and they’re going to review all the information that we have thus far. Go through the police reports. Go through the medical documentation that we have currently up to date. And we will prepare a notice of representation that we’re going to send over to the liable party’s insurance company.
Ben Cochran: Once we put them on notice it becomes a situation to where we want to make sure our client is available in terms of being able to contact us and getting us information that we need in order to update the insurance company as to what’s going on with them medically.
Ben Cochran: So at that point we take over dealing with the other side. We, as a goal, want our client to just be able to focus and concentrate on getting better. That is what we want them to do and we want them to give us consistent updates as to what’s going on with them so we can update the insurance company.
Ben Cochran: We do this as a process to make sure that the insurance company has an understanding over the severity of the injuries that our clients going through.
Ben Cochran: Ultimately, the client will be placed in what’s called Maximum medical improvement. That means that doctors have said that our client is as good as they’re going to get. At that point in time we put all the information together and we submit it to the insurance company. And our goal at that point is to take all the documentation from the original date of injury, up until that point, and capsulize it into a package to where we can claim the compensation for our client that we think they’re entitled to.
Ben Cochran: So once we put that together we submitted to the insurance company and the negotiations began. We always hope that we’re able to negotiate a reasonable adequate settlement without having to go to court. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.
Ben Cochran: If there is a dispute or disagreement as to the value of the case, the next step is to file a lawsuit. And we do that on behalf of our client and we work with our client to ultimately bring that claim to an adequate resolution. If it must be through litigation.
