Personal injury lawyers stand to benefit from helping to settle a claim. Their fee could be higher, if the client’s case were to go to trial, but settling does not force them to sacrifice much of their time. How do the clients benefit by settling?
The clients’ money gets into their hands sooner.
A trail can take many months, perhaps as much as a year. Furthermore, litigation takes place if an effort to settle a dispute has failed. Hence, any money promised by a court-ordered judgment does not get into a client’s hands until long after an attorney’s client has become injured in an accident.
Lawyers get paid less for helping to achieve a settlement.
A personal injury lawyer in Fort Erie takes only one-third of a client’s compensation, if those funds have resulted from achievement of a settlement. Yet the same attorney would take at least 40% of the same client’s court-ordered judgment, if the case in question were to move on to the trial stage.
The conclusion to pre-settlement negotiations proves more predictable than the conclusion to a trial.
The negotiations start with the presentation of a demand. Normally, the insurance companies seek to lower that demand, but shy away from doing so to any great degree. In contrast to that level of predictability, no one can predict what a jury might decide, after having heard the arguments in personal injury case.
Both lawyers and clients manage to retain more control of their time, if a case settles before the claimant has chosen to pursue litigation.
A personal injury case does not advance directly from the stage of negotiations to the one where the disputing parties meet in a courtroom. In some locations, the disputing parties must first take part in a mediation session or an effort at arbitration. If those fail, it then becomes necessary for the client-lawyer team to prepare for a discovery session.
Sometimes a piece of evidence that gets revealed in the discovery session causes one of the parties to elect to settle the case. Cases for which a plaintiff has filed a lawsuit do not have to advance to the point where the opposing sides face each other in a courtroom.
If a case remains unsettled, following a discovery session, then the lawyer-client team must prepare for the trial. That could mean obtaining expert witnesses. It usually means organizing displays, which can be shown to the jury. All of that preparation requires time and effort. It is much easier to simply negotiate, with an intention to settle. That is what most experienced lawyers have learned about the benefits that are linked to a readiness to work towards the settling of a personal injury claim.