The Costly Road To Recovery
Michael Babboni
Premises Liability
Recovering from a severe injury is not a simple thing. A broken bone can take weeks to mend, and in the meantime your arm or your leg has to be completely immobile. A deep cut can cost you a lot of blood, and depending on what got cut you may never return to 100 percent mobility. If you’re particularly unlucky you may lose a hand or a foot completely, or if you take a blow to the spine you may be left paraplegic for life. Then there’s the insidious brain injury which might not show its effects for days or even months.If you’re “lucky” enough to be injured on the job, you’ve got the advantages of workers’ compensation going for you. A severe injury is never a fun ride, but at least with the no-fault insurance program you’re guaranteed to get some money to cover your medical bills and a percentage of your usual wage to cover food and other bills. If you receive your injury elsewhere, such as at home, on the road, or out on a sidewalk, you’ll instead have to rely on your own health insurance and the insurance of whomever else may be responsible.
The Tradeoffs Of Litigation
There are certain advantages to suing a responsible party over accepting something like workers’ comp, but they carry some disadvantages, too. The biggest advantage is that, if you can prove that the defendant is liable and at fault for your injury, you can expect to get more out of them or their insurance than through a no-fault program. That’s regardless of whether you go to court or settle early, no less.
However, you have to be able to prove that the defendant is entirely at fault in order to get even a halfway decent settlement. Depending on the circumstances, getting that proof could take months or even years, and in the meantime your medical bills are piling up and you don’t have an income because you’re too injured to work. Insurance companies will often take advantage of this financial distress to offer a relatively tiny settlement that’s nevertheless enough to satisfy your short-term financial needs. You may know that you deserve more and you could get more if you only stuck it out for a while longer, but without the money to go the distance you simply have no choice but to accept a settlement on their terms.
Getting Good Help
It’s because of this situation, this financial back foot, that it’s incredibly important to hire only the best personal injury law firm to represent you. You need a firm that has the resources and the expertise it takes to dig up and secure all the evidence you need to win your case, and to do so as fast as possible so that you won’t be backed into a corner before you can negotiate for what you deserve. And even though most civil cases never make it to court, you need a firm that can go all the way if necessary because insurance companies typically know which firms can pull it off and which ones are only bluffing.
If you’re facing a personal injury case in or near St. Petersburg, Florida, you can rest assured that here at the office of the St. Pete Lawyer, we don’t bluff. Instead, we do everything we can to secure the settlement you deserve from every responsible party. A severe injury may be cause for a lot of stress and sleepless nights, but we don’t think getting compensation for your loss should have to add to either count.