Why Injury Claims Often Take So Long To Settle

When someone hires a personal injury lawyer, one of the first issues that has to be discussed is how long the process might take. In many cases, claims can take months or even years to be approved and to be paid out. Let's consider how that conversation with a personal injury attorney might go.

Getting All the Medical Information

This is one of the biggest reasons a claim may take a while. Barring something really unusual, such as fraud by the at-fault party, you're extremely unlikely to have more than one shot at getting compensation for your injuries. Once you settle or once a judgment is handed down, you have to make do with the money you receive. If it turns out that a head injury, for example, was accompanied by undiscovered brain damage, you could end up in a major mess if you've already accepted compensation.

For a personal injury lawyer, this means they want to be extra careful about getting all the medical information together before they submit a claim. Exploratory medical work, such as initial surgeries, scans, X-rays, and diagnostics, can take months to come through. This is especially the case if you need to talk with a specialist about something like neurological damage.

Finding and Contacting Witnesses

People move on much more quickly than you might expect. It can be a challenge to find and contact witnesses, particularly if it wasn't possible to get names on the day of an incident. Even names that show up in reports, such as those of EMTs, police officers, firefighters, and other first responders, can be harder to track down than you might anticipate. If a personal injury attorney needs to get statements from witnesses, it may take time to arrange interviews. That goes double if a sworn deposition has to be taken down.

Identifying Evidence

While the discovery process in civil injury law makes it possible to seek a lot of evidence, identifying what you need and then gathering it is time-consuming. Suppose you had a slip and fall at a shopping mall and the nearest camera was on a bank's ATM. It may take time to find the owner of the ATM and then serve them with papers for the production of video from that day.

Multiply that by all the potential bits of evidence in different types of cases. That may mean acquiring maintenance logs, hiring records, cellphone texts, and more. While it may take along time, getting compensation for your needs can be very helpful. Speak to a personal injury attorney like one at Winstein, Kavensky & Cunningham, LLC. to learn more about the process. 


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