Keep in mind that the insurance companies have teams of lawyers and adjusters who begin evaluating your injury claim right away. Because of this, it is essential that you retain a personal injury lawyer immediately if you are injured in a car collision in order to level the playing field.
Facing a team of professional attorneys that work full-time for billion-dollar insurance companies isn’t a wise move. It is possible to go at it alone, but you are literally at their mercy; they may give you a thousand dollars, a few hundred bucks, or possibly even deny your claim. It is up to them since you don’t really know what legal rights you have, what alternatives you could use, or what to do to fight them. They spend every day, all day, fighting claims on behalf of their employers (insurance companies) so facing them on your own with no experience has an obvious outcome.
It is important to note that not all personal injury law firms are the same. In fact, many of the biggest advertising firms are little more than settlement mills. A settlement mill is a firm that relies on heavy advertising as the lifeblood of their business and litigate a disproportionate amount of their cases. Such firms do not rely on current or former clients to refer cases via word-of-mouth and can thus afford to employ a mill mentality to their handling of cases.
In fact, settlement mills tend to leave money on the table at the time of settlement as they are more concerned with resolving a volume of personal injury cases each month to pay their expensive advertising budget. Keep in mind that even an average trial lawyer is superior to a settlement mill as the insurance carrier must spend money defending a trial or a case that has advanced far in litigation. The goal of any insurance carrier is to save money and forcing them to run up costs gets their immediate attention.
