John N. Demas is a personal injury attorney in Sacramento, CA. As a founding partner at Demas & Rosenthal, LLP., he has become an expert in helping victims who’ve suffered a personal injury. In this article, he tells us why it’s worth it to hire a personal injury attorney if you’ve been injured.
For the majority of people who have not necessarily gone to law school or become experts in the field of personal injury law, understanding a claim is difficult at best. People typically don’t know the full extent to what is involved in their accident claim, especially in situations where they are involved in an accident that was not their fault.
And so, in not understanding the complexity of these types of cases, too many people try resolving their disputes themselves and end up putting their cases in jeopardy in the process. By moving forward with a claim that you are not entirely sure about, you could easily be putting yourself at an extreme disadvantage.
At the same time, you have insurance companies that are trying to do one thing—and that thing is settle a claim for as little as possible without paying what they are obligated and required to pay.
You have to understand, insurance companies are in business to do one thing, and that is to make money. The way they make money is by collecting as much as possible from premiums and paying out as little as possible to their customers when they have a claim. It’s simple economics. Their only incentive, then, when someone makes a claim, is to pay out as little as possible on that claim.
The bottom line comes down to this: The only way you can have any leverage in the whole process is by having an attorney who knows how insurance companies work and who knows what each person is entitled to in the specific case on your side. In order to equalize the field, or level the playing field, you need to have someone representing you who knows how to obtain fair and equitable compensation in personal injury cases.
Many times, insurance companies will play the good guy role, pretending that they’re on your side to get you to give them a recorded statement. In other scenarios, they might be trying to talk you into turning over valuable documents or evidence to them. The reason they do this is because they know that when a person is not represented by an attorney, he is more likely to immediately hand over any requested documentation or evidence to the insurance company than when they are represented. The only reason an insurance company will play the “good guy” role is to get evidence to hurt the claimant’s case and lessen the amount that they end up paying out.
Without that insider knowledge—along with the experience and training that comes with years of experience as a personal injury attorney—individual consumers who are left to their own devices against the massive insurance companies will always lose. It is that simple, really.
Insurance companies have no incentive to pay the full value of a claim when you are not represented by an attorney because they know that you have no leverage in the case. And without the knowledge, training and experience to back you up, there is little you can do to dispute the verdict that an insurance company hands out.
That in itself is why it is important that individuals hire an attorney when they have been involved in any type of accident. It is not about putting yourself at some type of advantage, it is just about putting yourself on a level playing field with the insurance companies and getting the award settlement that you deserve.
