If you’ve suffered a personal injury and are in the process of finding a lawyer to help you recover money for lost wages, pain and suffering, and medical bills, you may be facing the question of whether to settle the case outside of court or to go to trial. Settling a case outside of court means that both parties come to a resolution without having to take the case to trial.
If the other parties are willing to settle, there are some strong benefits to settling matters pertaining to personal injury outside of court.
For one, you can save money. Expert witnesses, discovery fees (depositions, testimony, and other documents), can take time, energy, and be costly to acquire. In choosing to settle outside of court, you also eliminate some of the stress of having to undergo a trial and face a date in court.
Additionally, you can save time by settling outside of court. The appeals process can sometimes take years before it is finalized. When you settle outside of court, you eliminate the time of lengthy appeals. Additionally, when you settle outside of court, you don’t have to necessarily adhere to the same rules and procedures required inside of court. With a skilled personal injury lawyer on your side to legally and fairly hold discussions and mediations outside of court, your settlement can sometimes actually be better than one attained in court. It doesn’t even matter if you live on the other side of the country that you had your accident in. Solutions like RemoteLegal.com now make it possible to hold videoconferences within legal regulations so clients can have discussions and mediations over the incident.
In fact, a New York Times article reported on a study in the Journal of Empirical Legal Studies that found that individuals who passed up on settlements and took the case to court actually ended up receiving less money through the courts than they would have received had they accepted the settlement. Despite this study, it is important to note that a lawyer’s experience is more important than statistics and your lawyer will be the best judge of whether you should settle or not.
Even so, settlement comes with other advantages aside from money. If you settle outside of court, the matter remains private. Should you take the case to court, the matters discussed become part of the public record.
All told, there are still some cases where you may decide to take a case to court. Your personal injury lawyer understands the scope of the law and can help you decide if an offered settlement is reasonable or unreasonable. In the case where you are being offered a low settlement, it may be prudent to take the case to court. Additionally, it might be useful to take a case to court if you feel that the case might have societal benefits or set important precedents to protect others in the future. For example, lawsuits against Tobacco companies, like one case in which a widow received 23.6 billion in punitive damages against R.J. Reynolds, set important precedents for other cases.
The Law Office of Martin T. Montilino are personal injury lawyers in Minneapolis, Minnesota who can help you determine when it is in your best interest to settle or not to settle. Contact us today to learn more.