Have you suffered an injury of someone being negligent and have questions about personal injury case expectations? Call our Florida lawyers.
1) Mistakes After a Your Injury Claim
The value of a personal injury claim in Florida is what the question presents and that is it’s personal. These are personal injury claims, personal to you. The value of that claim depends on many factors and many things that go into looking at what that claim is worth. It starts from the insurance company’s perspective with your medical bills. What did it take to treat these conditions that resulted from the accident or the incident? The value of the claim also includes things like your wage loss if you missed work as a result of the accident and your injuries. That goes into determining a value of the claim.
It’s so much more than that. The value of the claim is personal— how this claim has affected you, how it’s affected the way you go about your daily activities, the things that you enjoy doing, your hobbies, your interests. The value of the claim varies based upon many factors that go into a case.
2) Pre-Existing Injury
Personal injury claims and pre-existing conditions are things that are at the forefront of most cases that are handled in Florida. Those are things that do impact cases. Insurance companies like to look at pre-existing conditions and try to blame the effects of the accident on those pre-existing conditions. Luckily, when you have an experienced attorney like us at Goldstein Buckley Cechman, Rice & Purtz, we know how to flip that argument on its head because what the law tells us is that simply because you were suffering from some form of pre-existing condition, be it a prior spinal cord injury, be it prior neck pain or back pain, just because you may have those things in the past doesn’t mean that you cannot collect damages you deserve from suffering an aggravation or an exacerbation of those prior conditions, again, things in your past that have been reignited, brought to life, and intensified as the result of the accident in question.
While it is certainly something that is at the forefront of cases when those pre-existing conditions exist, having the right attorneys to know how to deal with those situations in the right context and how to make those situations most beneficial for you folks that suffer from those sort of things in your past is so paramount and important to making sure you are choosing the right attorneys. What we do when we get a case is, we certainly ask about the accident and your injuries as a result of the accident. What we do is take a deep dive into your medical past, not in an effort to undervalue your claim but in an effort to get that ammunition we need to try and prove what we know to be true, and that’s that the accident and the injuries more times than not have caused those underlying conditions to be reignited, brought to the forefront, and you are now suffering worse than you ever had before.
3) Taking the First Settlement Offer
In Florida, insurance companies will make an initial offer generally early on in the process. More times than not, it is not advisable to take their initial offer. Insurance companies work to try to turn files over, which means get it off their desk and get you candidly out of their hair. What we do at Goldstein Buckley Cechman, Rice & Purtz is we put together comprehensive damages packets that we will send out to insurance companies at the right time. Timing is important because those first offers generally are not the best offers. We work hard to put together that information, give the insurance company all they need to evaluate your case, and the vast, vast majority of the time, we see offers increase as we continue to work through your case putting together the accident, your injuries, the damages, and how those have affected you. Holding out a little longer while time can obviously be a factor more times than not is generally in your best interest and we will be with you the full view of the way to get you to a point where you get to decide what justice is for you and what we should do with offers from the insurance company.
4) Medical Bills
To have a personal injury claim in Florida, there is no minimum amount of medical bills necessary. Medical bills are an important part of your case because when evaluating your case, as insurance companies do, they like to see what those medical bills amount to and have to say. That is not the end all, be all in your personal injury case in the state of Florida. Your damages include things like economic damages, those would be the medical bills in the past that we just discussed. There is also the need for future medical care in the future. You also have a wage loss component to your case if that comes into play and you missed work as a result of the injury sustained in the accident or the incident. Then you also have a claim for what’s called loss of future earning capacity. That would mean that the accident and your injuries have hindered you from performing and earning money in the way that you did in the past.
Above all those other economic dollars and cents type damages, there’s also damages in Florida for things called pain and suffering. It includes more than just pain and suffering. It includes inconvenience, what you had to go through as a result of the injuries, the medical care and treatment, and your ongoing issues. It includes your loss of capacity for enjoyment of life, those things that were near and dear to your heart that have been affected as a result of your injuries and your inability to perform as you did before. It also includes things like mental anguish and distress, what you have had to go through as a result of these trying times, these injuries that you’ve suffered, the medical care and treatment that you’ve had to endure.
While medical expenses are a part of your claim, there is no concrete money dollar value that you must have in order to present a claim in Florida. It is all encompassing on the person and the personal aspect of these cases and that’s why they’re called personal injuries.
Have you suffered a serious injury at the hands of someone who has been careless or negligent and have questions about personal injury case expectations? Contact our experienced Southwest Florida personal injury lawyers today for a free consultation and case evaluation.
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