Tennessee Personal Injury Lawyer

Here are some situations where you should consult with a personal injury lawyer to find out if you have a strong case and what you might do about it:

Your injuries are serious, may take a long time to recover from, or may lead to permanent disability or chronic pain. Any time you’ve suffered a potentially serious or permanent injury, you could be looking at multiple medical bills and the possibility you may need long-term care. Worse, what if your injuries render you permanently unable to work?

Even if you are still able to work now, it’s hard to predict what kind of toll months or years of chronic pain or other issues can have on your ability to work. Because these kinds of injuries can have serious, long-term consequences for you, it’s important to figure out who might be responsible for the financial costs.

You’re really not sure who is at fault. These situations can be problematic for multiple reasons. Maybe there are several different parties involved, and you’re not clear on who is responsible for what.

This is important to sort out, even if you don’t think you want to file a claim against anyone else. There is always the possibility someone will blame you for the accident and sue you.

If you do want to file a claim and other people were injured, there may be a risk that you won’t receive as much in damages as you’d like because there may be a limit to what an insurance policy will pay. Claims involving multiple parties can also be complicated to litigate, but an experienced attorney can help you figure out who, if anyone, you might have a claim against.

In some cases, the issue may not be the number of people involved. Sometimes, clients admit they think they may have been at fault in a car accident or other situation in which they or others were hurt.

Unfortunately, many people are not accurate judges of who was at fault in an accident. Often, people blame themselves for reasons that had nothing to do with why the accident happened.

It’s better to consult a lawyer and get an unbiased, outside explanation of how fault works in a legal sense than to take financial responsibility without knowing who’s really at fault.

You’ve filed a claim with an insurance company, and they’ve denied it. This is one of the most common reasons clients come to see us. An insurance company may deny a claim for all sorts of reasons.

They don’t cover that…even if you could have sworn your policy said they did. Well, yes, they cover that, but the accident you had doesn’t count as that.

They don’t have to pay because you were at fault, not their client, or they’re not paying because the coverage is null and void if you didn’t jump through hoops X, Y, and Z. Maybe it’s just Tuesday.

You get the idea: An insurance adjuster’s job is to save the company money, and they never stop coming up with excuses why they can’t pay your claim. This is true whether it’s your insurance company or another party’s insurer, although the reasons they deny your claim may vary.

The fact is that insurance adjusters have a lot of experience dodging responsibility for claims, so you need an equally experienced personal injury lawyer to negotiate with the insurer. In many cases, insurance adjusters become more reasonable and willing to settle once they realize you’ve secured legal representation.

On this note, if you haven’t talked with the insurance company already, it’s also a good idea to speak with your lawyer before doing so.

You are not obligated to talk with an insurance adjuster when they first contact you. It’s perfectly okay to let the call go to voice mail or tell the person on the other end that you’ll have to call them back.

The reason is that it’s easy to accidentally say something that the insurance adjuster may misconstrue and use as an excuse not to pay your claim. They may ask you irrelevant questions to make you seem unreliable, dishonest, or irresponsible.

The best way to avoid this is to let your lawyer handle conversations with the insurance company. If you do need to talk to the insurer, your attorney will advise you about staying on track and avoiding pitfalls.

No. Although retainers are common in some other areas of the law, most personal injury lawyers work on a contingency basis.

This is what we do here at the CEO Lawyer Personal Injury Law Firm. We know people struggling to get compensation for their injuries usually don’t have much money lying around to pre-pay for legal services.

We also only take cases if we believe you have a good chance of winning. For this reason, we have a “no win, no fee” structure where you don’t owe us anything if we don’t win your case.

We have a pretty good track record for winning, though! When we win your case, we simply take our fee as a percentage of the award, so you never have to pay us money upfront.

Your initial consultation is always free – if we can’t take your case, it won’t cost you anything to find out, and we’ll still answer any questions you have about your situation.

You may think that all personal injury cases are a matter of assigning fault to one person or entity – one driver causes a car accident, and the other is blameless, for example. Sometimes, this is true, but in reality, there are many situations where two or more parties make mistakes and contribute to an accident.

Comparative negligence laws recognize that multiple entities can share responsibility for an injury. As a result, you must be found to be less than 50 percent responsible for an accident to recover any damages.

If you are more than 50 percent responsible, you won’t receive anything. If you are less than 50 responsible, you may still receive an award, but it will be reduced by the amount you are found to be at fault.

So, if you are 10 percent at fault, your damages will be reduced by 10 percent. A skilled attorney may be able to refute the other party’s assertion that you were at least partly responsible, allowing you to receive a larger settlement.