You see their names on billboards, printed on bus stop benches, and flashing across your screen during commercials. You probably have a sense of how personal injury lawyers communicate their messaging to people. But far less common is knowing what a personal injury lawyer does.
This is a shame because there is a fair amount of misinformation around the topic. People joke about “ambulance chasing lawyers”, but that idea comes mostly from corporate-owned media conglomerates that want a free pass to endanger the working class for profit.
What’s the Role of a Personal Injury Lawyer?
Getting into a car accident. Suffering an injury at work. Being directly assaulted and suffering bodily harm. These are all scary and isolating incidents. Lots of people don’t even know that they have a legal right to recover damages lost to events like these.
The job of a personal injury lawyer focuses on protecting your legal rights. That is not everything they do. But it is the crux of what their discipline focuses on.
Here are three things that you can expect your personal injury lawyer to do for you.
Verify Your Claims
A personal injury lawyer will likely only take your case if you actually have a case to begin with. This is why the “ambulance chaser” myth is a myth, and not reality—lawyers are specifically taught to avoid picking fights unless they are certain they can win them.
Picking a winning fight starts with verifying the claims of the client. That means examining the circumstances of, for example, a car accident you were in. They will go over insurance information, police reports, and traffic cameras to see if you were in the right.
Read Law
It is hard to truly emphasize the value of reading the law. People often imagine law in the United States as being an easily searchable Wikipedia page. But the reality of the situation is that the United States legal code (and the legal code of every other country) is so complex that it is hard to find and understand a part of it even if you know what you’re looking for.
The most important part of this duty is interpreting how the law applies to you and your case.
Some laws will be obvious, like those relating to liability in a car accident. But there might be other liabilities related to injury, insurance paperwork, or traffic that can help your case.
Acquire Damages and Remedy
So, someone hits you with a car and breaks your arm. How much money do you sue them for? Do you just sue them for the value of the broken arm as it is determined by the hospital you went to? What if you went to a Native American hospital in Oklahoma and got it for free? Does the damage to your arm go away simply because there was no financial component to it?
A personal injury lawyer will be well-versed in the financial value of whatever injury you have.
Conclusion
After you have been injured, your life can change in a lot of ways. The biggest ways are the most obvious, as injuries cause pain and inconvenience, if not financial issues.
But there are a lot of small ways as well. Time is taken up out of your day. Stress is added onto your life. These things add up. And these things are valuable. If you have suffered an injury due to someone else’s behavior, then you deserve justice. And you know who will work to get it.
