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Selecting the Right Personal Injury Lawyer
By Phil Edwards
In today's world, there are a dozen reasons you might need a personal injury
lawyer. You may be in an accident, either due to another person or due to a company;
you may find yourself the victim of medical malpractice; or you may be the victim
of defamation or libel. Regardless of the source of the injury, you were harmed,
and it is not just that you should suffer for it and that the guilty party in
the situation should blithely walk away. You need a lawyer, and you need an expert
in the area of your injury.
A personal injury lawyer who works with accidents knows how to deal with the
paperwork, the judges, and your personal trauma. Whether your injury was due
to negligence on someone's part or willful stupidity, you deserve to be
compensated for it. Accidental injuries include cases where you've been
in a car accident and have suffered either obvious trauma or are suffering from
the pain of untreatable and undiagnosable soft tissue injury.
Especially if you have the infamous soft tissue injury, you need a lawyer.
Soft tissue injury is notoriously difficult to prove, and you are probably up
against an insurance company, whose paid staff doctors can look at your x-rays
and say that there is no injury as far as they can tell. Of course, you know
better, and your back tells you that every morning. A personal injury lawyer
can set things straight for you. He knows how insurance company doctors work,
and he knows how to find professionals who are expert in soft tissue injury
and who will testify on your behalf.
It's also possible to be injured by excess stress, especially at your
workplace. In the last few years, a new philosophy of planned stress has become
part of the management mantra: if you keep your employees under a constant low
level of stress, you will get increased productivity. And it works – to
a point. The problem is, just like putting too much stuff on shelves, there
are people who can't bear that much weight, or who already have excessive
stress from other parts of their lifes. It's not their fault; but it happens.
And a stressful workplace is, frankly, a hazardous working environment for which
your employer may be held liable.
Another quite different type of accident is one caused by a company. For instance,
a company making asbestos may put people working either in its mines or processing
plants, or in certain lines of work that require direct contact with asbestos,
at risk for asbestosis or mesothelioma, both debilitating and eventually killing
lung diseases that are caused by asbestos damage to the lungs. If you have been
harmed by asbestos, it is very likely that you can sue for medical bills and
for personal damages.
A common case right now is injury due to the malpractice or negligence of a
pharmaceutical company. Pharmaceutical companies aren't perfect; they
test drugs on perhaps thousands of patients prior to releasing them to market.
Unfortunately, some drugs aren't tested enough, and turn up with negative
side effects. In other cases, drugs are released to market that have been tested
and proven to have negative side effects that are hidden by researchers. There's
a lot of money in bringing new drugs to market, and sometimes the bonuses and
the prospect of selling a drug patent are enough to cause people to do dishonest
things, especially if they can justify it in their own minds as actually doing
good – not hard to do with a drug, since they do good as well as ill.
Regardless of the reason, we have lately seen a number of drugs released on
the market that are too injurious to have been approved, and those who have
been injured are justified in seeking damages.
Though we wish it was not true, there are professionals who -- aren't.
Doctors who mistake themselves for God, lawyers who are overworked and thus
don't pay enough attention to their smaller cases, therapists who try
out unproven therapies on already-fragile patients, all these people are potentially
causing injury through negligence and professional malpractice. If you are injured
by their acts, you may be able to seek compensation; you are certainly justified
in trying.
In the case of defamation and libel, if someone prints something in the media
provably untrue that injures you, your company, or your loved ones, you should
seek legal assistance immediately. Injury to a person's honor is in many
ways much more tangible and harmful than injury to one's person. This
sort of damage is also much more difficult to assess than tangible harm, so
some very odd court settlements come out of these cases.
What To Expect
If you file a personal injury claim, you should probably be ready for a long
wait for compensation. Your personal injury lawyer will ask you many, many questions
prior to investigating your case; he will gather as much information as he can
regarding the nature of your injury and expected medical costs, your past lost
wages, your future earning potential, the damage to your quality of life, and
justified punitive damages before he can put a dollar cost on your settlement.
This process may take him or her some time, so be patient.
In most cases, your personal injury lawyer specializes in this sort of court case. He will take your
case on contingency – this means if he loses your case, you pay nothing,
but if he wins, you pay a specified percentage of your damages. This will all
be clearly specified in a contract prior to his formally taking your case. In
Great Britain, you can also find lawyers who will take your case for no up-front
fee; instead, they will take out personal injury insurance, arranging it with
the lawyers on the other side so that the winner of the case is the one who
pays the final insurance fees.
Basically, if you take your case to a personal injury lawyer, you are probably
doing it at no risk to yourself. You won't have to invest a penny; all
your lawyer will ask of you is time and information.
More information available at http://www.personal-injury-accident-claim.com
About the Author Phil Edwards is a writer and author, living and working in London, UK. Currently writing for Accident Claims, he also writes for The UK Directory and Swimmingpools DIY
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