William Beadle: One of the questions we get here a lot is why should I hire a lawyer if I’ve been in a car accident versus trying to handle it on my own. So first off, I’m Bill Beadle with Tolbert Beadle. I’m a partner in the firm. Terry and I have been practicing for over 23 years, and this certainly is a question we get a lot.
So the benefits of hiring a lawyer versus trying to handle it on your own with an insurance company is, there’s a lot! First off, when you are negotiating an injury claim, you’re dealing with an insurance company, you’re dealing with a professional on the other side, who their job is to save their insured from A. Getting sued and B. Saving the company from spending, really what we think is the adequate amount of money to get the claim settled.
In other words, the adjuster’s job is to keep their insured out of trouble and minimize how much they pay you, the injured party. So that’s what I do for a living, just like what we do on our end is represent injured folks. That’s really first and foremost, I think, the most important thing to think of when you’re looking at hiring a lawyer versus trying to handle it on your own.
Secondly, we are lawyers, we went to school to do this. And we’ve been doing it, my partner Terry and I have been doing this for, like I said, over 20 years, we’ve seen a lot of things, we’ve gained a lot of experience, a lot of what works and what doesn’t work. So those are great things to hire us to put that knowledge and expertise to work for you.
There are a lot of different things that lawyers do in injury cases that you really don’t think about. A few off the top of my head are, number one, what am I going to do while I’m at home injured not working? How am I going to pay my bills? Secondly is medical expenses. What am I going to do about those? When do we get paid on those? How do we handle health insurance? If health insurance pays the bills does health insurance have the right to be reimbursed from what you get from a liability settlement?
Those are all really important questions. Those are things that you do not want to screw up handling on your own. And there’s a lot of benefit to hiring us, and you’re gonna pay us, but helping us help you navigate those issues and really maximize how all that interplays together. There’s usually insurance coverage that you have on your car that can help you in the short term period and also at the end of the case, such as medical payments coverage, underinsured coverage, comp collision, all that. And those are things that we look at. We review, talk to you about, and give you your options as far as that’s concerned.
There are a lot of cases that are really expert and fact-driven. So there’s a lot of things that you really want to bring us in, initially, to do investigation, to hire experts such as crash reconstructionists, medical experts, things of that nature. So those are things that we do all the time. We have experience as far as what experts are great to work with, and how that can benefit, and when it’s beneficial to your case. So those are great, I think, reasons to bring a lawyer into it versus trying to handle on your own.
Also, just peace of mind. A lot of times, folks are really too busy to deal with a lot of the minutia details as far as who’s picking up my medical bills, who’s going to take care of the wages, how am I going to format that so the insurance company will reimburse me for all that when it comes time to settle. What is my case worth? All of those little things are something that, again, we’ve done for years and years and years, and it’s something I think that it’s easy for us to do because we know what we’re doing versus you trying to reinvent the wheel or start from scratch.
So every case is unique and different. So if you have more questions on how that works or what you think that the settlement or fee would be, feel free to give us a call, and it’s something we can talk about
