At Clark and Steinhorn, LLC we field a lot of phone and internet inquiries seeking legal advice. We are predominantly personal injury trial lawyers which mosty encompasses car and truck accident cases but often requires knowledge of other legal fields.
We are fluent in workers comp, medical malpractice, premises liability and slip and fall cases and have recovered some millions of dollars in them as well. However, since the bulk of our 80 or more years of combined trial experience has involved vehicular accidents, this article is focused more specifically on whether or not having an attorney is beneficial or not in such cases.
Spoiler alert, having a lawyer who is knowledgeable about your particular legal problem is almost always better. Which is to say if you want a will or guardianship get a lawyer for whom that is a specialty and similarly lawyers who have handled hundreds or in our case thousands of car and truck collision cases are more likely able to bring about a favorable outcome in your crash case.
Like a lot of professions, law has a huge body of expertise and much of it is not acquired in law school. The actual day in and day out practice of law is where one develops a feel for what tactics work best given the prevailing circumstances. Liability insurance companies and their minions ( adjusters) are designed to return millions and in some cases billions of dollars to their shareholders and they wouldn't accomplish that by being fair or generous.
As has been written about previously on this website, the insurance industry has used a host of tactics to reduce not only the value of claims for settlement puposes but also for verdicts. The prevalence of so-called " House Counsel" legal offices has made the costs of litigating cases for insurers much less than was the case in former days. https://www.maryland-law.com/library/the-devolution-of-maryland-personal-injury-settlement-offers.cfm?q=house%20counsel
Cultivating a legion of physicians to testify against injured crash victims has had a similar impact. It used to be that insurers measured their settlements through formulas like " three times specials" which meant a person with Five thousand dollars in medical bills would receive an offer of three times five thousand or fifteen thousand dollars.
Now insurers not only don't multiply but subtract. In negotiation we routinely hear that certain medical care is unnecessary or overpriced and that the insurance company isn't including it in their analysis. Lost income is often ignored or reduced for a host of fallacious reasons.
Often the first offer from the at-fault driver's insurer is equal to the medical bills. This has been explored on this website in detail elsewhere but even with a lawyer who knows what they are doing offers are laughably low. It is not however funny when you are the injured victim. https://www.maryland-law.com/blog/want-a-fair-offer-on-your-maryland-crash-claim-file-suit-.cfm
So what do you do without a lawyer? Is the insurer's offer fair? Can you counter their offer and what would be a realistic? There are a multitude of questions.
So lets drill down on the question posed: Do You Need a Lawyer in a Maryland auto or truck accident case?
First we postulate the advantages of not having an attorney. There is really only one, you keep your entire settlement That seems appealing but keeping 100% of $10,000.00 is still less than keeping 67% of $30,000.00 or $20,000.00.
That is one of many issues that pro se plaintiffs ( unrepresented ) confront, what is their case worth for settlement or at trial? Insurers now often throw out low-ball offers early in cases with the hope that injured victims will accept them. Even as highly experienced lawyers who have done this for forty years we get offers particularly from Geico before our clients have completed treatment.
It is absurd to think that the value of an accident case can be fairly arrived at before the victim and his or her healthcare providers have fully treated and evaluated them.
But who in the general public knows this unless they've had a lawyer in prior case? That's the point really, insurers generate billions of dollars for their shareholders by taking in premiums, investing them and being as thrifty as possible with claims payments.
So lets examine in a cursory manner what experienced trial lawyers actually do in car and truck crash cases and why its value is so great.
The list starts long before you walk into a lawyer's office. The well trained attorney has a reputation. The insurance defense lawyers know and it often goes into the computer analysis that is favored by many insurance companies. If they know an attorney won't try cases or tries them ineffectively, it devalues your case as soon as you hire that lawyer.
Once your crash has happened and you're in the lawyer's office do they discuss the benefits that you may be entitled to in addition to any settlement? Do you hear about PIP or Personal Injury Protection benefits or Medpay? Do they ask about whether you were working at the time and might be entitled to workers compensation benefits?
How about whether you have short or long term disablity benefits? What amount of uninsured motorist coverage do you have? Do you have property damage coverage for your vehicle if the at-fault driver's insurer balks at paying for your vehicle? Rental car coverage, health insurance, there are many potentially helpful benefits.
They all need to be considered in order to weave them together in the way that is most helpful in putting your world back together after a crash. Sometimes the different pieces don't immediately fit together and need an experienced lawyer to force them into place.
This doesn't however just magically occur. If I had a dollar for every time that a client has said they have " full coverage" but really don't I would be wealthier. Yes they have the minimum amount of insurance coverage allowed by Maryland law but there is nothing full about that.
PIP coverage was a benefit that was required for all Maryland auto insurance policies until the insurance industry realized how expensive it was and created an off ramp for policy holders who could pay slightly less but lose a benefit that was enormously beneficial.
Whenever I hear or see Liberty Mutual commercials about only buying " what you need" I see red. What they mean is please don't buy PIP or sufficient liability or uninsured motorist coverage because if you do and you get in a collision it will cost us, the Liberty Emus.
Maryland state minimum coverage is ZERO PIP and $30,000.00 per person liability and unisured motorist coverage and that isn't good for anyone who gets in even a modest crash much less a major wreck.
So, just evaluating all the potential pieces in play at the beginning of a claim is complex and often those pieces are loath to cooperate with you. As an example, health insurers often balk at paying for medical care because it was necessitated by injuries sustained in a collision.
They are obliged to pay for that care but periodically we have to call them out and threaten to sue them for failing to honor their own insurance contract. One can imagine that the health insurers wouldn't be very concerned about being sued by people without lawyers.
So at the start there are many questions and issues and many of them take a while to resolve and play out.
Secondary issues including actually finding a doctor, therapist or healthcare professional, can also crop up regularly along with questions about how to pay for care. Many crash victims don't get properly diagnosed much less treated and concussion victims are particularly susceptibe to missing clues as to their underlying problems.
Of course there are also issues concerning vehicle repair or replacement if your car is totalled. Temporary vehicle use or Rental car coverage isn't included in every policy and so that often is a delay in getting crash victim's cars or trucks repaired.
At-fault insurers often refuse to repair crash victim's cars until they have interviewed their insureds and similarly won't provide a rental car until fault is cleared up.
This phenomenon can be hard for innocent not at fault folks to handle. Sometimes we suggest that they use their own insurance coverage and they bristle at this, complaining that it will affect their insurance rates. The problem is folks who cause crashes are not always especially cooperative even with their own liability insurers. It can take weeks to pin down some at-fault drivers and that can mean you have no vehicle for work or school.
Often using your own insurance at least initially is the best alternative to avoid delay and yes you may have to pay out your deductible but ultimately the at-fault insurer is likely to pay it back to you.
Thus, at the initial phase of a car or truck accident claim many variables are in play and it is a rare non-lawyer who can appreciate them all and chart a course designed to yield a full medical recovery, minimal disruption to family life during the post-crash recovery period and fair compensation.
It may also be a prejudice of the legal and insurance world but individuals acting for themselves or so-called pro se plaintiffs, are rarely accorded much cooperation or assistance. So you may read this article and think you can juggle all the described matters but even for experienced trial lawyers the process can be frustrating and time consuming.
Once you have gotten past the first phase and gotten appropriate medical care, a repaired or replaced vehicle and activated PIP, Medpay, Short term disability, workers comp and any other applicable benefit things are somewhat easier for a while.
This is where lawyers and insurance adjusters do their dance conveying medical and lost wage information and attempting to shape the settlement to the advantage of their side. Insurance companies are obliged to keep reserves to pay all of their claims and having an accurate reserve can make settlement far more likely and far more rapid.
That is why personal injury lawyers correspond with insurers and provide them pertinent information.
It is not enough to merely send medical reports and bills often one must ensure that the medical reports are substantively accurate. Doctors and therapists see many patients per day and often mix them up.
This can be fatal to a claim. If a doctor says left leg when it was your right this can cloud the legititimacy of your diagnosis and the doctor's opinions. That is why having lawyer read the reports before sending them to the adjuster can be quite useful.
The final and perhaps most important and difficult phase of the claim is settlement or trial. Trials occur rarely when the injured party has a good understanding of the value of their case. Trial is stressful and can be expensive and time consuming so it is a last resort.
If the insurer and/or its attorneys know that your lawyer will try an effective case if necessary that will increase the prospect of getting a fair settlement offer.
There is no fixed analytical formula for what a case is worth, That is perhaps the most troublesome part for the injured parties. As a lawyer who has tried many such cases, I have a sense of what a case is worth but not to the nickel. I usually ascribe a range of values to a case saying a case is worth between, as an example, twenty and thirty thousand dollars.
Sometimes it is because Allan or I have tried a quite similar case previously other times it is simply intuition borne of years doing this. The bottom line is that an offer in the range needs to be thought of seriously because trial is expensive.
None of it is a certainty as judges and jurors can be somewhat unpredictable. There are however factors that do come into play that are quite important.
The magnitude of the crash damage is often cited as being important to whether it is plausible that a specific injury could have been sustained.
The time that goes by between the crash and medical care can be significant in demonstrating both that the crash caused injuries and that you endeavored to get them properly cared for.
If you miss significant time from work you need medical support for the need to miss time from work and further that is related to the injuries sustained in the collision.
Medical support for the fairness and reasonableness of your medical costs and for any alleged permanent injuries is essential.
Marshalling all these things can be difficult. Sometimes doctors and other healthcare providers need to be encouraged to provide the needed evidence.
How these all meld into the value of a case is particularly complex. It is not intuitive to a lay-person and necessarily requires an ability to recognize weaknesses in their evidence. The mere fact that an injured crash victim feels pain three years after a crash doesn't mean that will seem plausible to a judge or jury.
Similarly lost income is often too speculative to be credited at trial and that is a hard thing for non-lawyers to process.
Once a case settlement or a verdict has been completed another dance of sorts takes place regarding any liens on the recovery. If Medicare or Medicaid paid the bills they must be repaid and establishing the amount is complicated and can take months.
Failure to honor Medicare or Medicaid liens can result in loss of medical coverage and other sanctions and that can compound any injuries you may have sustained in an auto or truck accident.
Except for the smallest cases having an experienced trial lawyer is essential.
