Dealing With Defense Attorneys in Personal Injury Lawsuits

Your Orange County personal injury attorney may decide that the best way to recover damages is to file a lawsuit. If that becomes the case, you and your personal injury attorney will no longer be dealing with the insurance adjuster but rather with the insurance company’s defense attorney. This changes the negotiation dynamic considerably, and an experienced personal injury attorney will have to adapt.

The defense attorney, in trying to save his client’s money, will frequently claim that he is not authorized to raise the existing offer. Your attorney will need to be able to recognize these games if the defense attorney tries to play them. One major difference when negotiating with the insurance company’s defense attorney, as opposed to the insurance adjuster, is that the defense attorney often has much more leeway in offering settlements.

However, you must recognize that insurance defense attorneys attract business from insurance companies by winning defense verdicts, not by settling. So even if the defense attorney has more leeway to settle, he has little incentive to do so. The defense attorney will always be more inclined to roll the dice in trial than to settle. As a result, your personal injury attorney will have to convince the defense that its chances at trial are bleak.

Despite these difficulties, it is still in your best interest to settle. While some claimants wonder about the money they could have made in trial, most claimants who actually do go through with trial agree that the stress and inconvenience of the litigation process is rarely worth the extra few thousand dollars a verdict might award over a settlement. That extra few thousand dollars is probably not worth the depositions, the court appearances, and the years of your life a trial would cost you.

Ultimately, getting you the settlement, or the verdict, that you deserve comes down to having an experienced Orange County personal injury attorney handling your case and negotiating with the defense attorneys. This is a struggle that you should not and need not face alone. Call Orange County personal injury attorney Samer Habbas today for a free initial consultation.