- Do all injury claims go to trial?

Hi. I’m Warren Whiteknight one of the partners here at Bergeron Clifford Injury Lawyers and on today’s ask an injury lawyer I’m going to talk about whether or not all injury claims should go to a trial. Or to put it another way, what is better a trial or a settlement?

First of all one thing you should know about any any injury lawyer you’re going to hire is if they have done trials before.

Most cases do settle but the only way to get a good  settlement is to ensure that your case is prepared as if it’s going to go to trial.  Everybody knows that practice makes perfect and the only way to convince an insurance company that  your claim is actually one which should be settled is if your lawyer can show the insurance company  that they’re ready to go all the way to a trial and that the case is actually ready for a trial. In most cases, getting ready for a settlement takes two to three years whereas getting all the way to a trial in our court system particularly during Covid is going to take four to five years.  The court system is very slow some of that’s for good reason. In order to properly understand what  a case is worth in terms of a settlement or a possible result takes a lot of time in terms of  a person’s healing and their therapy. It also takes a number of expert assessments.

These  expert assessments need to be built on top of each other and the expert assessments help convince the insurance company of the value of the case the likelihood that they are going to lose which creates risk for them and then also increases the overall value. If a case gets built up to a point  where an insurance company is worried about the value of the case for the plaintiff i.e my client and the associated risks for the insurance company, they will settle the case.

If it doesn’t settle, because you have the expert opinions you’re ready for the trial. So the answer is trial or settlement which is better? You need to be ready for both.

Thanks this is Warren Whiteknight here on Ask an Injury Lawyer, as always please send in your questions.