Articles Posted in Settlements

This is the fifth and final part of the 5-part blog series about the pitfalls of trying to settle your own New York personal injury claim without a lawyer. Here’s pitfall number 5:

5. WATCH OUT FOR VULTURES. In some cases, you can’t take the settlement money without others, officially called “lien holders”, but whom I call “vultures”, holding out their hand for a piece of the pie. I call the lien holders “vultures” because they don’t participate in the “hunt”, i.e., the hard work of getting the settlement, but sit around and wait for you to make the kill, and then swoop in for a piece of the meat.

Unfortunately, this is their legal right. In a New York personal injury case, this is true especially if Medicare or Medicaid or ERISA-qualified health insurance policy paid for some or all of your treatment. Also, workers’ compensation will have a lien to recover any medical treatment or wage loss payments. If you take the settlement money, and then spend it, without first paying off the vultures, bad things will happen! They will come after you for reimbursement, and in the case of workers’ compensation, they might cut you off completely from any further comp benefits. And if you did not calculate these liens into your settlement demand, well, you’ll have to sit back and watch them eat the whole carcass of your settlement, leaving you nothing but scraps, or nothing at all.

This is the fourth part of the 5-part blog series about the pitfalls of trying to settle your own New York personal injury claim without a lawyer. Here’s pitfall number 4

4. DON’T ASK FOR TOO MUCH, OR TOO LITTLE, TO SETTLE YOUR CASE. Let’s face it; you have no idea how much your case is worth. Even an experienced New York personal injury lawyer has a hard time putting a number on some injury cases. So many factors come into play: your age, how strong your “liability” looks, how bad the injury is, and how long it will last, your state of health and whether you have “pre-existing injuries”, what county the case must be tried in, and a few dozen other factors.

You might think you know how much your case is worth because a friend of a friend had the same or a similar injury, and his lawyer got him x amount. But that friend of a friend might have had a stronger or weaker liability case than you, and he might be older or younger, and he might have had, or not, pre-existing injuries to the same body part. All these things will make your case different from his, so it is a mistake to think your case is worth what he got.

This is the third part of the 5-part blog series about the pitfalls of trying to settle your own New York personal injury claim without a lawyer. Here’s pitfall number 3:

3. DON’T BELIEVE THE INSURANCE ADJUSTER WANTS TO HELP YOU. She (or he) doesn’t. She wants to get you to settle for as little as possible, fairness be damned. Her job, especially if she knows you have no lawyer, is to try to get you to sign something called a “release”, which puts the nails in the coffin of your case, for peanuts. The adjuster might seem nice, friendly, kind. And maybe she is, in real life. But this is not real life. This is business. And her business, sorry to be so blunt, is to screw you.

Don’t befriend her. Figure out what your claim is worth and convince her to pay you that amount, and if she won’t, tell her you will hire an experienced New York personal injury lawyer to get it in court (problem: She probably won’t believe you, though, since you have managed to avoid hiring a lawyer up to this point).

This is the second part of the 5-part blog series about the pitfalls of trying to settle your own New York personal injury claim without a lawyer. Here’s pitfall number 2:

2. DON’T SETTLE TOO SOON. Would you buy a house without carefully examining every room? Of course not. So why would you settle a case without having walked through every “room” of your injury? If you are still having problems, still hurting, still getting medical treatment, then you still have not visited the “rooms” of your injury that await you in the future. What will your body feel like in a year? Will you have a permanent limitation? Will you need surgery? You haven’t visited those “rooms” yet. You can’t visit those “rooms” until you let your injury “play itself out”, and this may take longer than a year, especially if you are seriously injured. In most cases the New York personal injury statute of limitations is 3 years (but this can vary, which is another reason why you need a New York personal injury lawyer!).

So remember, WAIT TILL YOU ARE DONE TREATING BEFORE YOU EVEN CONSIDER SETTLING.

This is the first o a five-part blog series about the pitfalls of trying to settle your own New York personal injury claim without a lawyer. I don’t recommend that anyone actually do this, without at least first consulting with a New York personal injury lawyer. In rare cases, I have recommended to accident victims that they settle their claim on their own so as to avoid paying me a 1/3 contingency fee. But that’s only when the injury is minor, has totally healed, and there are no complications such as “liens”. Otherwise, having a New York personal injury lawyer represent you will almost always “pay off” because the settlement will be enhanced by far more than the 1/3 fee.

But if you want to throw all caution to the wind and settle your own claim without even consulting with a personal injury lawyer, at least try to avoid making these common do-it-your-selfer mistakes:

1. DON’T GIVE A RECORDED STATEMENT. The insurance adjuster will seem friendly, compassionate. He or she will say, “we just want to know what happened so we can pay your claim. Can we record a statement from you”? If you say “yes”, you just fell into a trap. That recorded statement, which you believe represents the total “truth” about what happened, is likely to boomerang back and hit you in the back of the head. The insurance adjuster will rely on portions of your recorded statement, which she will call “admissions”, to low ball your settlement offer, or worse yet, the insurance company lawyer will use your “admissions” to cross-examine you at trial. You, of course, won’t know what hit you because you believe there was nothing “wrong” with what you said. But there almost certainly will be. The insurance adjuster is very good at getting you to say the wrong thing.

What do health care insurance policies, such as Excellus Blue Cross Blue Shield, and others, have to do with New York personal injury settlements? Maybe nothing. Maybe. Let me explain.

If you are an insomniac in need of sleep, you might decide to pull out your health care insurance policy and read it. I guaranty that it will put you to sleep, and probably even before you get to the part, buried deep within it, that says the insured (that’s you) agrees that should you get injured through the fault of someone else, and get a settlement or a judgment against that other person, you will have to reimburse the insurer (that’s them) for all the medical costs they paid for treatment of your injury.

In other words, say a dog bites you, you sue the owner, and then settle with the dog owner’s homeowner’s insurance for $100,000. But Blue Cross Blue Shield has paid $10,000 in medical bills related to the dog bit. BCBS will claim a “lien” or a “right of subrogation” against the settlement to the tune of its $10,000.