How to Work with a Personal Injury Lawyer
Summary
When you hire a lawyer and start the legal process, the most important thing is to be open and honest. Don't hold back any information, even if you think it's not important, because even small details can be crucial.
Litigation can be intimidating if you're unfamiliar with it, but your lawyer is there to guide you. Communication is key, so don't hesitate to reach out to your lawyer whenever you need to. Building a good rapport and having open lines of communication will make the process smoother.
Ultimately, you and your lawyer are a team, with you as the leader who guides the direction of the case while relying on your lawyer's expertise and advice.
Full Transcript
The most important thing for a client to do when hiring a lawyer and starting the litigation process is to be open and candid.
Oftentimes people have a lot of information, but they automatically start trying to filter that information and say, well, I don't know if that's important. And then they withhold the information that they think is not important. But what's really crucial is that at the very beginning stage of a litigation, it's important for you to get all of the information that you have, even if you think it's not that important, because a fact that you think is not important might ultimately be the most important thing. And so, again, it's really incumbent upon the lawyer to pull from the client all of the information about an incident, and then it's the lawyer's responsibility to figure out what's important and what's not important.
Litigation is very, very complicated in the sense that there are a lot of moving parts. And because there are a lot of moving parts, one particular fact that a client thinks is unimportant may be very important to one of the parts of the litigation process. And so it's really important that a client be open, be comfortable, and just give all of the information that they might know. We don't want clients making up information. We just want our clients to actually tell us what they remember, what they saw, what they heard, what they smell, smelled, what they felt.
We want you to use all of your senses about a particular incident, and that allows you to give us the information that we can work with. I think there's a scenario that I've come across a lot in my practice in terms of information that a client didn't share with me early on, and it became something that we had to deal with later on. Usually it comes in the form of a preexisting health condition or a preexisting injury. So, for instance, if my client is involved in a vehicle collision and as a result of the collision, they hurt their knee. And if my client doesn't tell me that six months before this particular collision or three weeks before this particular collision, they were in another incident where that very same knee was hurt, and my client doesn't share that information with me, that can be challenging.
Because what's going to happen is a defendant is going to, almost 100% of the time, blame the knee injury on the incident. That was not the vehicle collision. They're going to say, well, you know what? Your knee was hurting before this vehicle collision. So you know what? We don't really think that we're responsible for the injury and the pain that you're going through.
But what's important for clients to know is even if you have a preexisting injury, if someone does something that exacerbates or makes worse that preexisting injury, you're entitled to damages. Defendants do it all the time. They say, well, you're not hurt that bad because your leg was already broken. What we spent a lot of time arguing is symptomology.
Now, yeah, I fractured my shoulder last year playing football. But between that injury and it being addressed by my doctor and then me getting into this vehicle collision, I had no symptoms. There's no record of me going to a hospital. There's no record of me going to a doctor complaining about my shoulder being hurt. The only time I started complaining about my shoulder being hurt again is when your clients hit me as I was trying to cross the crosswalk.
And so I can see, just based on the medical records, well, there's a seven, eight month period of time in which there's no record of me complaining. My family members don't say that I was complaining about my shoulder. My colleagues at work don't say that I'm complaining about my shoulder. I only started complaining about my shoulder when your client hit me as I was crossing the crosswalk. In personal injury cases, family members, their testimony is extraordinarily important.
And the reason why it's important is because they knew you before the injury, and they know you, and they knew you after the injury, so they can speak to what you were like. Were you able to lift your kids and throw them in the air? Were you able to go on long walks? Were you able to go on hikes? Were you able to go out in the ocean and swim?
Were you able to go in the swimming pool and swim? Were you able to rollerblade? Were you able to play tennis? Were you able to do all those things? And then when the defendant did what the defendant did and did so negligently and recklessly, what do you like now?
Can you do all of those things anymore? And if the answer is no, that's a problem. They have impacted your life. They have negatively affected your quality of life. They've made your life not as enjoyable.
And for that, you're entitled to compensation because you are allowed to pursue damages to try to put you back to where you were before their negligence or recklessness. In our society, unless people can actually see your injury, they don't think that it's that big of a deal. So, for instance, if a jury can see that you have a cut on your arm caused by being involved in an incident, they understand that they can see, okay, I see the cut. I see the medical records that they went to a doctor, and the doctor had to address it. It's easy for jurors to look at that and to say, okay, yeah, clearly this person was hurt.
And clearly it's something that needs to be addressed. When we have a traumatic brain injury or what we call a TBI, or when we have a mental health crisis or a mental health issue, you can't see what's going on in someone's head. You can't see what's going on in someone's body. And so oftentimes the struggle for jurors is to understand, okay, well, how has this person been impacted? I can't see the injury.
They're telling me that the injury exists, but I can't see the injury. And that's when it becomes really important to have family members involved in the case because they get to describe and they get to explain what the person was like before the incident and what the person is like now. And that's powerful, powerful testimony because who knows better than the people that you're around most of the time? They can speak to what it was that you were like, what were your likes and your dislikes, and what was your personality like, what was your temperament like before the incident. And then they can talk about what it's like now.
And I think that's where jurors get a chance to say, oh, now I see. I can't physically see it, but I can hear the testimony from the mother, or from the father, or from the kids, or from the aunt, from the uncle, from the grandmother, from the grandfather. Now I understand how this incident has impacted this person's life. I can't see it. But I'm being told by people that I believe that this person is really suffering.
Litigation is really scary to people that are not familiar with it. For lawyers such as myself, this is what we do day in and day out. And we understand that in a lot of cases, people that come to me, they've never been involved in a lawsuit, so they don't know what to expect. And so I'd like to spend the time early on explaining the process, explaining terminology, making sure that I'm speaking in a language that we all understand, which is a basic language. I don't want to speak in what's called legalese because that doesn't help anybody.
I am interested in making sure that my clients understand what this process is all about, what my expectations are in terms of them helping me help them. So I do try to spend a lot of time explaining the process, answering all the questions that my clients have for me. I always provide my clients with my phone numbers, my email addresses, so that they can get in contact with me whenever they need to. In this day and age, everything is pretty much twenty four, seven and I'm available to my clients. I encourage them to reach out to me even if they think they have a silly question.
I encourage them to reach out to me and ask those silly questions because I think that that gives them peace of mind and ultimately that's going to help their case because if they're comfortable in communicating with me, then we have this open line of communication and it just makes the process so much more smooth. I can ask questions of them, they can ask questions of me, and it's just a team, and that's really how we view it. The client is certainly part of the team. In fact, the client is probably the team leader. If the client gets to tell me what it is that they want me to do, they, of course, rely on my legal expertise and my legal advice.
But at the end of the day, I respect the client as such.
Final Thoughts
Many personal injury lawyers, including myself, will give a free initial consultation so you can determine if I am someone you feel comfortable sharing sensitive information with, and working with for at least several months to as long as a few years.