Hi, once again, I’m Joe Miller, trial attorney.  I want to welcome you back to our practice series.  Thank you for joining us.  Here again we answer many questions that have come up over the years that people often have regarding their cases.  

In this particular circumstance we’re going to discuss car accident cases, and we’re doing to discuss specifically the question that people ask probably most often – how long is my case going to take?  

As a general rule, that question is best answered really by a doctor, and not an attorney.  And the reason is that really it’s certainly not advisable to try to submit your case to the insurance company for consideration and settlement until you’re finished with treatment.  

Now the main exception to that rule is if you’ve suffered a very serious trauma, and of course, we’ve handled many cases like this over the years where someone really within the first let’s say week has incurred over $100,000 in medical expenses because they’ve been taken to the hospital, admitted to the hospital, transported by helicopter from the scene of the accident, you name it.  And between the helicopter and between the hospital bill and the various tests that they’ve gone through, and the surgeries often that they’ve gone through in the first week to repair fractures, et cetera, they’ve incurred often well over $100,000 or more in medical bills within the first week of treatment.  

In that circumstance, we would not wait really at all to at least try to submit the initial medical bills, and initial medical records to the insurance company immediately.  And we would go ahead and do that to try to discover what the coverage was.  Of course, if you had high underinsured coverage, we would also submit it to your own insurance company.  In that circumstance there would be absolutely no reason to wait until later to submit your bills because it may be that there’s not enough coverage.  

Now again, this is where insurance coverage really makes a difference.  If you were injured in a case where there is a commercial policy – you’re hit by a truck, you know, for instance from a trucking company, an eighteen-wheeler truck, we know that there’s very substantial coverage, we may want to wait until you finish treatment, because we know that there’s going to be a very, very large policy there, or maybe even more than one policy – maybe even well over $1 million of coverage – and in that circumstances even with a high amount of trauma we would want to wait until you completed your treatment in that circumstance as well.  

Sometimes we want to let you reach a plateau in your treatment and we’ll assess your coverage at that point, and determine whether or not it’s time to go ahead and submit and see what the coverage is.  Every case varies a little bit in how the attorney assesses this.  Personally I think this is a mistake that many attorneys might make, is that they don’t try to assess the situation and treat each case individually.  And really, it has to be treated individually.  Depending on what the coverage is, depending on what your injuries are.  

Anyway, I hope I’ve answered your questions as to how long your case is going to take.  I thank you for watching, and we look forward to working on your case.  I’m Joe Miller, trial attorney.  Thank you.