… typical of non-lawyers and how they perceive the relationships between insurance companies, lawyers and people injured in motor vehicle accidents. There is a lot of disinformation out there. The insurance industry has spent a lot of $ making sure of it. It is very much to that industry’s advantage for people to think of lawyers as shysters, and that the whole system is rigged against them.
There are bad lawyers out there. And there are some dishonest lawyers as well. And my recommendation is to never hire a lawyer from a television ad. Too often those lawyers are great marketers, but sometimes a little short on legal skills (there are exceptions, but stereotypes become stereotypes for a reason). TV ad lawyers have to rely on volume and turnover because advertising is expensive. They don’t want your case to take a year or 18 months. That’s why often they settle it for 20/30 cents on the dollar, so they can turn it over quickly, get paid something, and move on to the next case.
Hire a lawyer based on recommendations from family and friends. We all know people who have had to hire a lawyer for some kind of accident. Go to those people and then meet with more than one lawyer before making a decision.
Your body shop guy is dealing from a very narrow perspective. He doesn’t know what is really going on. He sees only the property damage side cases where, if you hire a lawyer, they may get a % of any recovery. Most states don’t allow any recovery over and above the actual property damage caused, so - yes -in that narrow instance, a lawyer’s fees will prevent you from being made whole. But I never take a fee from the property damage side of my client’s recovery - and every reputable lawyer I know does the same. You’re only taking fees from a property damage recovery if you’re worried about volume and turnover more than your client.
If ALL you have is a property damage case (no injury), then most of the time you CAN handle that yourself. You will still likely get the run around from the insurance adjuster (their JOB is to pay as little as possible for your claim), but if you’re persistent and stand your ground, you can probably work it out so that your car gets repaired or, if it was a total loss, replaced. Just don’t expect to be overjoyed with the outcome. (I once saw training manuals for insurance adjusters - this was in the late 80s - that trained them to offer 80% of the car’s actual value and when you complained, they tell you that if you say no and hire a lawyer, the lawyer will get 1/3 and you’ll be out more $ - pretty shitty).
If you ARE injured, as your friend was, NEVER sign anything in the hospital. And you should probably never sign with any lawyer who comes to the hospital to see you unless you or a family friend invited them to. That’s sort of the definition of an ambulance chaser. And even though your friend called them, again - TV lawyer. Hire a lawyer though references.
Never talk to the other insurance company about settling your injury case until you’re out of the hospital and have your wits about you, and until you have a comfortable appreciation of how serious your injuries are. They are not your friends, and they are not trying to help you out. Again, their job is to pay you as little as possible. Don’t forget that.
And other than notifying your own insurance company that an accident occurred, don’t talk to them about your injury case either. You likely (by law) have something called Uninsured/Underinsured motorist coverage that may still pay you even when the accident was the other parties fault. In that scenario, your own insurance company becomes like the other driver’s insurance company, and they are still not your friend.
If your friend’s lawyer got them to sign a settlement agreement for injuries while they were still in the hospital, that’s condemnable. No lawyer should do that. Ever. At that point it’s unlikely they even knew how much the medical bills were! I wish them success in their claim against the lawyer. But if it was only for the property damage (reserving the injury claim for later), that’s perhaps a little more common. They still shouldn’t have taken a fee from it, but that’s sometimes the TV lawyer’s game. Don’t play that game.
Oh, and your body shop guy telling you that he pays any extra money he gets from selling the car back to the owner doesn’t mean what you think it does. He is REQUIRED by law to do that. If he wasn’t doing that, he could and should be sued and possibly prosecuted for fraud. He probably is an honest guy, but that’s not evidence of his honesty by any means.
Most accidents involving only property damage get resolved without the need for getting lawyers involved. But if you’re hurt, you need a lawyer. Get a good one and then listen to them.
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