You know the timeline in a typical case really varies case-by-case but there's a natural life of a case. you know somebody gets injured or cheated and the person usually doesn't want to come to a Personal Injury Lawyer but they do because they're basically forced into it and so someone could walk sin to a Personal Injury Lawyer's office and they explained their problem.
The personal injury attorney takes the case on and from that moment that's usually about a year and a half at the outside some cases take longer and a lot of cases take less time than that once the case is signed up and once we start pursuing it.
We get all the records and we look into the facts of the case and the details and we see if there are any witnesses we need to talk to a lawsuit gets filed and then most of the life of a lawsuit is a process called discovery and discovery we take depositions of the witnesses people who know things and we get their testimony under oath and we record that whenever I take a deposition.
I almost always recorded by video because as much as the words I want the facial expressions and the pauses and so we we get the depositions and we see who these people are who are the players who are the characters in the store in addition to that we'll get the documents all of the documents whether the contracts whether they're medical records whether they're maintenance and repair records unit.
We get the documents and we look at what is the case really about we hire expert witnesses if we need to and we look at areas of expertise that so if there's an engineer whether that's from a traffic standpoint whether that's from an insurance claims handling standpoint whether that's in a medical malpractice case where you have a doctor say look these are the rules that are required of doctors in certain situations when a mom is giving birth to a baby.
These are the rules that the doctor is doing the delivery and the nursing staff are supposed to follow so we talked to the experts about that and we then get ready for trial and trial itself is actually kind it's really a short part of the overall case usually it's only two to three weeks but it's definitely the most stressful and it's the most work and it's the most expense in every case is when you have to go to trial you'll have complex cases where.
For example you have somebody who has a long history of health issues and then something bad happens to him or her physically well when there's a long history of health issues that may relate to what the injury is there's usually a lot of fighting about that whether or not the full magnitude the injury is really caused by the collision or by the medical error or is it caused because of the the underlying health condition so factors like that will drag it out.
Sometimes you just have a dispute of liability you know you have one person saying he ran the red light and you have the other person saying well no she ran the red light well when you have a dispute of liability and nobody wants to take responsibility for what happened that'll drag the process out and so whether it's from the standpoint of what happened whether it's from the standpoint of what are the damages that can all lengthen the process the other thing that will lengthen.
The process is you generally have an insurance company on the other side of the case and insurance companies drag out the process routinely because the longer they're able to hold on to their money the more money.
They make that's why it's really important to hire a Personal Injury Lawyer that has a wealth of experience not only handling cases but taking cases to jury trial you know one of the things that most people don't know is you hire a Personal Injury Lawyer in this type of case and it's a contingency fee practice meaning the personal injury attorney doesn't get paid until the end of the case and it's a percentage of the recovery.
Almost every Personal Injury Lawyer charges the same contingency fee but you may be paying a contingency fee to a Personal Injury Lawyer who has almost no experience trying cases when the reality is you can get a personal injury attorney for the exact same percentage that has a wealth of experience trying cases take a look at the Personal Injury Lawyer make sure it's a personal injury attorney that has a track record of success who tries cases to verdict and who's successful.
I can tell you when the insurance companies see that the Personal Injury Lawyer at my firm have a case they take us seriously and they work hard to get that case done because they do not want to come up against us in trial typically they know the we're a firm that will put on time money and resources behind a case where we take on for our clients because that's what we do we fight for people we fight for our clients every single day and we fight for them outside the courtroom we fight for them in the courtroom and we do what we can to get great results you.