2 Important Personal Injury Questions

I’ve been asked many times by clients and other people, what are the steps in filing a personal injury lawsuit? The steps in filing a personal injury lawsuit are, first, you have a lot of work to do before you ever file a lawsuit. In my mind, you have to have 80% of the work done before you ever file a lawsuit. The only way to move a case is for the plaintiff’s attorney – that’s me, as your attorney, to move the case forward. Otherwise, the case will stagnate, and defendants like to deny, delay, and defend. That’s what insurance companies do. My job is to get the case moving and keep it moving, and the way to do that is to prepare 80% before you file the lawsuit. Then as soon as the lawsuit’s filed, you keep the case moving, and you ask the court for a scheduling conference, have a trial right away to keep the case moving and keep the pressure on the other side. That’s the only way you get their attention.

There’s a lot of work to do first. The first part of getting together is a fact memo, all the information that you have, all the medical records, and then we have to have crash reports. If it’s gets that kind of case, it requires crash reports, investigator reports, the information that we can get from public agencies. All of that has to be compiled before the lawsuit is filed. Those are the steps. If you have other questions about this or anything else, please feel free to call my office.

The common mistakes that people make when they have a personal injury case in Wyoming is they, first of all, talk to the insurance company. They also sit on the case for a long time and don’t do anything. Time is your ally if you do something right away, like contacting a good competent person as your attorney to handle the case— somebody that’s National Board certified, somebody that really trains all the time and works on these kinds of cases all the time and understands the law and the courts in Wyoming, and has a lot of experience such as myself. Contact those people. Give them enough time to work on the case. In my opinion, these cases are won or lost before they’re ever filed. They’re won or lost on the 80% of the work that you need to do on the case before you ever file the lawsuit. To do that, you have to have time.

I have lectured other attorneys on why they shouldn’t take cases. One of the reason you don’t want to take a case is it’s a complex case that is too close to the statute of limitations. I can almost guarantee you, if you’re getting close to the statute of limitations and you have filed the lawsuit before you have time to think about it, you’re going to have problems down the road. You want to be able to be one step ahead. Preparation is very important in every lawsuit. You want somebody that does prepare and understands the importance of preparation, understands the importance of organization, and gets the case ready before it’s ever filed. That way, you’re always one step ahead of the opposition. Your advantage in court is to use the time properly before you file to get ready for the lawsuit, so that’s my advice. If you have other questions like this, feel free to call my office here in Cheyenne, Wyoming.