Can You Afford an Attorney?

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Why Can’t I Just Handle my Injury Claim Myself?

When you attempt to speak with an insurance company about paying for your car and your medical bills after an accident, it’s YOU vs. A HUGE CORPORATION AND THEIR WHOLE TEAM OF ATTORNEYS. Does that sound like a fair fight? We don’t think so. At least when you hire a personal injury attorney to represent you, you have access to the applicable law on the subject and you have a partner who deals with these types of negotiations all the time. Your attorney likely could not come to your job and do it better than you can. It is unlikely that you can do the attorney’s job better than he or she can, especially considering that attorneys have spent seven years of their lives in formal education after high school to prepare them for this situation. They have spent years of their lives cramming laws into their brains so that your state would certify them as ready to represent others and to help others resolve their disputes. Injured victims with counsel are compensated at a rate of 54% more than unrepresented victims.

 

But How Can I Afford an Attorney?

            Professional services like lawyers and doctors can be very expensive. If people were required to pay thousands of dollars up front to get an attorney to work for them, most people would be precluded from ever being able to take advantage of our great legal system. Even if you had the money, because you don’t fully understand the law, it would be unfair to put the risk on you anyway. Think about it, after you have been hit in a car accident by Bob on his way to get a burger, your bills are stacking up, and you’re not working because you’re hurt. If you had to take the risk of paying thousands of dollars to your attorney, plus pay thousands more in legal fees to take your case through trial, a loss at trial would crush you. If you lose, you get nothing. There is no way that injury victims could calculate that risk and decide whether they wanted to go into debt thousands of dollars more when they don’t know whether or not they will win.

That is why good personal injury attorney’s work on a contingency fee basis. Contingency fee is just a fancy term lawyer’s use that means that the attorney only gets paid IF he or she wins the case and the client gets paid. This system allows us all to have access to our great legal system because we can now take our case to an experienced attorney, and pass all the risk to the party who has the specialized knowledge to decide if the case is worth something. The attorney assumes all the risk for the loss. He or she will have to invest loads of time and money into fighting for you. In the end, if the attorney loses, he gets absolutely nothing, and he is in the negative because he cannot recover any of his costs. You, as the injured party, would get nothing as well, but it didn’t cost you a red cent. This system gives you and your attorney mutually aligned interests. You can rest easy knowing with 100% certainty that your attorney is doing his or her absolute best to get you every cent you deserve to compensate you for your injury because they get paid on a percentage. The more you get, the more they get. It’s a win-win situation.

Why Should Someone Else Help Pay For My Injuries?

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The Age-Old Question:

What should happen when one person is hurt by another?

The Answer:

The common law in the United States has evolved as an answer to that question over the last few hundred years. We certainly don’t want to criminally punish people for making a mistake, but we also know it’s not fair to let victim’s suffer more than they should. Those who cause harm should bear the cost of repairing that harm. The goal of a personal injury attorney is to put the victim back in the place that they were in prior to the accident. We only get one body, so there is no way to fully repair someone after suffering a catastrophic injury. Instead, the law offers money as the best available substitute it can come up with in an effort to make the injured party as close to whole as it can. That still leaves us with a problem; physical and emotional injuries can be extremely expensive, the at-fault party likely cannot afford to pay for your injuries. We don’t want your life to be ruined by your injury, but we also don’t want another person’s financial state to be devastated after making one mistake. That is where insurance comes in. We pay for insurance coverage so that we can afford to right the wrongs that we cause. Insurance is a system where we all pay in a little, so that the money is there when one of us needs that system to pay out a lot.

Our legal system enables us to enforce personal accountability by shifting the cost of an accident to the person who caused it. Then, our insurance system enables us to pay to heal the injured party without ruining the life of the person at fault. It’s a true win-win.

But are we Taking Advantage of Insurance Companies when we file claims?

Many people ask this question. The question I have is: do you feel that you are taking advantage of your television provider when you decide to turn on your TV? We pay insurance premiums monthly so that we will be protected from a catastrophic loss. We pay for TV monthly so that we can watch a television program should we choose to. We pay both of these bills whether we ever use it or not. Sometimes, we decide that we would like to watch a show. We pick up the remote without remorse because we have been paying for that exact service. Why would we then feel remorse when we are forced to call to make an insurance claim? Would it be better if we all just paid a company monthly for our entire lives for no reason whatsoever? The insurance industry is the only service industry that we pay and yet we hope that they do nothing for us.  Sounds like a pretty profitable business to get into.

Insurance companies know that they will occasionally have to pay out. They plan on that. That is why they charge the prices that they do. They want to accept this obligation. They are extremely aggressive in their advertising because they are not afraid of having to protect new people. They know that even after all of their claims, they are operating at an enormous profit. After all, by the time an insurance company is forced to pay for your injuries, odds are that both you, and the person who injured you, have been paying insurance premiums for many years. What’s more, insurance companies know that some people are told that it’s a bad thing to get an attorney involved. They love it when unrepresented parties attempt to negotiate a fair settlement with them. They use their entire team of attorneys to keep your recovery at the low end of what they think is fair. At the end of the day, they are a business, and a very profitable one. You should not hesitate to seek the help of an experienced personal injury attorney in St. George, Utah when you have been injured in an accident.

A reminder to keep your eyes on the road!

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As many of you know, Utah has been taking great steps in an effort to minimize cell phone and other distractions behind the wheel.  In fact, our recent post titled Explaining the New Cell Phone and Driving Law outlines Utah’s new statute.

The following video is an effective way to convey this very important message.  It is only 90 seconds long, but well worth a watch.  Please share this message with those around you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHixeIr_6BM

Am I a Bad Person if I Sue Somebody?

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We get it. Lawyers are best used as the blunt of a good joke right? You are hesitant to get an attorney involved after an injury because you have been told that we live in a “sue-happy” world. Many people associate hiring an attorney, or bringing a lawsuit on your own, with being contentious. What’s even worse, is that some people rely on the incorrect assumption that if you sue, you are looking to get something for nothing. Until you have been injured by the actions of another person, you are never forced to question this flawed logic. So naturally, most people don’t ever realize that such negative associations are completely unfounded. In reality, hiring an attorney to represent you after an injury is the most efficient system we have for making victims whole again. The legal system in the United States is the product of hundreds of years of policy and lawmaking. It is based on the best ideas that our country’s brightest minds have been able to come up with for righting wrongs.

Imagine a World Without Lawsuits.

Think about it this way, imagine if there were no lawsuits at all in the U.S. Happy place right? No. Not at all. Let’s say you go for a nice Sunday morning drive in your new car. As you pass through an intersection, BOOM! Another car runs their red-light and T-bones your car on the driver’s side. An ambulance comes. The other driver’s airbag deploys and he suffers minimal injuries. You are stuck with a broken left arm and a few broken ribs. As you are being wheeled into the ambulance, you hear the other driver, Bobby, informing the police that he ran the red-light because he was in a hurry to go get a burger. He hopes you get better soon. The officer sites him for a traffic violation for breaking the law by running a red light. He will have to pay a few hundred dollars to the state. For now though, he hurries along to go eat his burger.

In a world where you could not sue, the other driver would owe you nothing. You would bear all the costs of your own injuries regardless of whose fault the accident was. A lawsuit is simply the way that you get a court to recognize a right you have. You have the right to be made whole after another person hurts you. If you are not hurt, you cannot be awarded anything in a lawsuit. To return to our hypothetical, in the months following the accident, you would waste countless hours obtaining medical treatment from all varieties of medical professionals in an effort to get back to the level of health that you were in prior to the accident. Your new car is ruined. You likely would have been forced to miss work because of your injuries. Missing work may prevent you from being able to pay medical bills that have reached outrageous amounts when considering the ambulance, the surgery, doctor’s visits, chiropractic and physical therapy. An accident like this would derail a life physically, mentally, emotionally, and financially. The law exists so that the burden of these costs can be passed to the correct party.

To take this point one step further, if the law did not hold parties responsible when they injured others, would the world be a safe place? How could you even dare to get on the road when everyone around you knows that they can do whatever they want and they will not have to pay for the consequences? You could not proceed through an intersection on a green light. You would have to stop and look both ways because you would never know if the other drivers were as concerned for the safety of others as you are. This problem would apply to much more than just driving. Companies would make unsafe products because their profits are higher when their safety costs are lower. Employees would be forced to work in unsafe conditions for that same reason. We could no longer rely on others to act in our best interests. Our expectations of reasonable safety would be shattered.

Conclusion:

We enjoy a good lawyer joke as much as the next guy, but the truth is that hiring an attorney after an auto accident is the best way to ensure a full recovery. It is very rare that a case actually ends up in court. It’s more likely that an attorney will be able to work with the at-fault party’s insurance company to resolve your case fairly and efficiently without ever having to file a lawsuit. Visit the free legal resources tab at stglegal.com to find answers to related questions.

Client Testimonial – St. George, Utah Car Crash

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As a Utah personal injury law firm, we strive to provide excellent service to each and every client.  It is our belief that it speaks volumes when someone takes the time to recount a positive experience.  Below is a testimonial we recently received from two of our valued clients:

“Not having much experience with an attorney I will answer this request from my heart.  I found Anthony to be someone I could easily work with.  He was friendly and was very professional.  He also seemed to be a good family man.  I asked to see pictures of his children and he readily showed them to me.  I was very pleased with the service provided by Anthony and his team at McMullin Injury Law.  I recommend him to anyone wanting a good attorney.”