What mistakes should I avoid with my personal injury case?

The most common mistake to avoid when you’re filing a personal injury claim is to just contact the first lawyer that you find on Google. Sometimes I’m the first lawyer that you find on Google, so I say that knowing I might be the first person that pops up. But you’ve got to do more than call the first phone number that pops into your head or click on the first link that Google shows you.

There’s a wide range of lawyers out there, and unfortunately, there are a lot of them who will practice personal injury law when it’s sort of their side hustle and not really their main gig. So, you want to get someone who does that as their main gig, and you want to get someone who files cases in court. If you look around and find that a large law firm in your area is well-known but they’re not actually filing many cases, that’s usually a warning sign.

Ways that I would use to choose a lawyer—because it can be a difficult thing—include having an in-person consultation at the attorney’s office. Videos are fine, but I don’t like phone calls as much for trying to get a sense of who people are. I want to make sure that they’ll sit down with me, that the person I can talk to is someone I’m actually going to be working with on the case. I want to know that they can explain things to me in a way that I understand and that they’re going to take the time to do so. I want to ask them questions about what their policies are in the office for calling people back and for creating communication to let me know how things are going.

Once you’ve chosen an attorney, the next mistake that I think people make is not really appreciating the timeline and the cost that’s involved. If you’re going to file a personal injury lawsuit, yes, your attorney should be doing most of the heavy lifting for you, but that doesn’t mean they can make it a fast process. Most court timelines to get to trial are more than a year out. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to have any involvement at all.

In particular, you may see that while the attorney gets most of the medical records, one provider is not providing them, and therefore, you’ve got to go and assist in getting those medical records because sometimes the provider will respond better to the patient than they will to the patient’s attorney. You may also see that you’re going to attend depositions, mediations, and trial itself. I’ve seen clients get worried about those things or frustrated that they have to be involved in them, but they are necessary parts of the process.

The final thing that I would say clients can sometimes make a mistake on is not having a reasonable expectation. I think most of us in this day and age have been filled with stories about how the personal injury system can be sort of a lottery, and that’s not as true as the newspapers would have you believe. It’s actually something that is fixed to very specific hard numbers most of the time.

If you go in expecting that you’ve got some kind of case where all these other people have hit the lottery and now it’s your turn too, you’re liable to be disappointed by the result. So again, we try to set very reasonable expectations for people in the beginning so that they know what they’re getting into and limit some of the pie-in-the-sky expectations that I think the last 25 years of media history have created for people.