Things Your Personal Injury Lawyer Need To Know

Fellow trial lawyer Bob Kraft, who is Dallas injury lawyer, had a guest post on his blog this morning about things a potential client should tell a personal injury lawyer.

The author identified three things:

• Medical history and pre-existing conditions.
• Whether you have a criminal history.
• Whether you are having financial troubles or have filed lawsuits in the past.

The post had a number of details about why each of the items is potentially important, and I’m not going to detail the reasons.  But I think the post is a good reminder about the importance of fully disclosing everything to your lawyer or potential lawyer.

A number of times clients or potential clients withhold information because they’re embarrassed about something or they don’t want to disclose something that they think will hurt their case.  That’s a mistake.

In most situations, if we know something up front, even if you think it’s bad, we can work around it.  We have techniques, tools and strategies that can help minimize the potential consequences of most problems if we know about the problems and can start planning from the start.

But problems do arise when we don’t know about issues, start our strategy, and then find out about these issues from the insurance company.  And you can be assured that the insurance company will know about the issues.   Insurance companies invest boatloads of money into systems designed to discover things about people making claims.  If you have skeletons, the companies will likely find them.  And if the insurance company finds out before we know about it, then it’s often too late.

Don’t let the insurance company take advantage of you.  Be honest with your lawyer so the lawyer can best help you pursue your claim.