How Will Your Case Proceed?

So how will your case proceed?

You have called our office. It is a case that has a fact pattern that we can help you with. You have been injured seriously.

It is somebody else’s fault. It is an area of law that we work in.

It is important to understand. What are the real specific next steps? What is going to happen next? Let me go through that.

First, we are going to send out an investigator to your home or the hospital - wherever it is convenient for you, at a time that is convenient for you, to get more information about what happened in the case, to get retainer documents signed and some releases signed.

These are documents that help us build the file, so to speak. We get the medical records, get the police report, get the other materials that are necessary for us to really tell the story about what happened.

In some instances, we are also interested in what happened before the accident, so we can compare your life before the accident with your life after the accident. How did this affect you? How did this affect your family?

We will do everything possible to try to settle the case. There will be an effort made to make good-faith settlement with the insurance company. We will try to negotiate this and get the maximum value possible, without going into the court system, without filing a lawsuit.

If we cannot get the appropriate value – and at the end of the day, the decision is yours whether or not you want to accept an offer we get from the insurance company - we file a lawsuit.

At that point, the case moves into the civil litigation system, into the court system, where the deadlines are established by the judge and by the courts, and we are able to proceed with this case in a slightly different direction.

We will take depositions from all the relevant parties and the witnesses who observed the accident. A deposition is an informal proceeding. It is frequently done in our office, where there is a court reporter. The other attorney for the defendant is present. We take testimony, we record the testimony from all the relevant people involved in the accident or involved in the treatment of our client. Doctors, physical therapists, and the like, are also typically deposed under oath.

We then may end up in court in a trial. This is very, very unlikely. Very few of our cases - this is consistent across all plaintiffs’ trial firms - ever really go to court. It is a very small percentage – two, three, four percent at the most ever go to court.

This is a basic summary of how things will proceed. Call us if you have questions about your case. We would like to help you, to tell you how we see your case proceeding.

We are ready to help you. So call us and put the Bernstein Advantage to work for you, today.

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Actual Client - Michigan Car Accident Case

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