When and Why Should I Hire a Personal Injury Lawyer?

The name of the game for insurance companies is to pay you as little as possible for your injuries and losses. The best way to protect yourself against being taken advantage of is to get an experienced Boulder personal injury lawyer to be your advocate, because an experienced personal injury lawyer knows the rules of the insurance game, as well as the law, to make sure that you are treated fairly. With this said, we recommend hiring a personal injury lawyer as soon as possible after your accident so that you will be in an optimal situation when it comes time to resolve your claim with the insurance company.

So how can we help put you in an optimal situation to resolve your claim? We do this by focusing on three main areas:

1. Avoiding gaps in treatment and following your doctor’s advice so that you get better;
2. Paying for your medical bills the best way given your circumstances; and
3. Conducting a thorough investigation so that liability is either a non-issue or minimized.

Let’s take a look at these areas in more detail below:

One of the most important things an experienced Boulder personal injury lawyer can do is help you avoid the pitfall of a “gap” in treatment. In insurance lingo, a “gap” in treatment is a substantial amount of time where a person has not received medical treatment following a car accident. A gap can severely damage the value of your case, because insurance companies believe that if you didn’t go to see a doctor, then you must not be injured (of course, insurance companies are wrong). While people have many reasons why they may not have gone to see a doctor after a crash, almost all of them are invalid in the eyes of the insurance company. An experienced Boulder personal injury lawyer can make sure that you are getting to a medical professional to get the treatment you need so that you will get better, avoid gaps in treatment, and be able to show a consistent and medically-documented path of recovery when presenting your claim.

Another big issue for those who have been injured in an accident is how do you pay your medical bills? We see people all the time who wonder, “shouldn’t the person who hit me have to pay my bills?” On top of this, people are often confused how to deal with “Medical Payment coverage,” health insurance, Medicaid or Medicare. And what if someone has no health insurance at all? These are questions an experienced Boulder personal injury lawyer knows inside and out, and can explain to you in a simple way that makes sense. If you have these type of questions, we encourage you to reach out to us for a free consultation at 303-543-1000. At Cook, Bradford & Levy, our goal is to put as much money in our clients’ pocket at the end of their claim, and this means that there is absolutely a right way – and a wrong way – to use your resources to pay your medical bills. What is the right way for you depends on the circumstances of every case and what resources are available.

Another key part to building your claim is to make sure that helpful evidence is identified and preserved. This can include interviewing witnesses, taking photos of the scene, documenting the damage to yours and the other persons vehicle, and using many other evidence gathering methods depending on your case. While certainly not every case should go to a jury trial, we have found that if we prepare our clients’ cases as if they will someday be presented to a jury, we are in better position to negotiate the claims to get top value. This is because the insurance companies know that if they don’t pay adequate value on the claim, an experienced Boulder personal injury lawyer is ready to file a lawsuit and let a jury decide the issue.