Being involved in an accident can be a painful and traumatic experience, but as long as you didn’t cause the accident, you may be at liberty to issue a claim. If you’re considering this, there are two general ways to go about. The first and most familiar way is to enlist the services of an attorney and take the insurance company to court, but unless your case is extremely intricate or complicated this may be wholly unnecessary and ultimately quite expensive. The second strategy is to file a claim yourself, a route few people take, yet because of the manner in which these cases are handled, perhaps more people should. A large percentage of personal injury cases are handled outside the parameters of a court and by following a few simple steps you may be able to “go it alone.” In this article we have outlined a simple strategy to follow if you decide to take that path.
The notification process is the first step in filing an independent personal injury claim. At this point you’ll need to send written notice out to everyone and anyone whose actions may have caused the accident and your subsequent injuries. Taking care of this before you file the actual claim is not only courteous; it will also help to protect you legally down the road.
The next step is one you may have heard of before and it’s called the “demand letter.” The demand letter is a document in which you detail the amount of monetary damages you are asking for. You will certainly need to provide written and valid documentation of the monetary items for which you are seeking reimbursement, but some costs such as pain and suffering and future medical costs will be impossible to prove with figures. This, however, should not prevent you from filing the demand letter, as long as you categorize the reimbursements and provide a realistic figure even for the items you cannot prove.
After submitting the demand letter, prepare yourself for a lot of waiting followed by several written, telephone and even face-to-face negotiations. Insurance companies have certain rubrics for determining what they typically will or won’t pay out and they are trained to reject most first offers and to try to “bring you down.” If at the end of this process a happy medium cannot be found, your only option is to sue and pursue the matter in court.
Hiring a lawyer to handle your personal injury case may sound like the easy thing to do, but keep in mind that you’ll usually wind up paying up to a third of your award in legal fees. To avoid this, follow the steps above and see if you can’t navigate the process on your own. It could save you hundreds, even thousands of dollars in the long run.
Now Try – Injury Claims
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