Atlanta Personal Injury Attorney

We frequently see people come into our office who have caused damage to their personal injury claim without even knowing it. The first mistake we often see people make is not calling the police and filing a police report when an accident occurs. It’s essential to have the police arrive and make a police report so that, one, the claim is documented – what occurred, where it occurred and when it occurred – and, two, that we have the information necessary to pursue a claim against the at-fault driver. If no police report is taken, those drivers may disappear, and we may never be able to locate them to pursue your claim.

There are a lot of things to take into consideration when hiring a personal injury attorney. First, you want to make sure that the attorney you hire dedicates his or her practice solely to personal injury lawsuits. There are many attorneys out there who may spend significant time handling other types of cases, such as criminal cases or bankruptcies, but will also handle a personal injury case too if it comes along. You’re not doing yourself a service if you hire a law firm that doesn’t handle injury cases every day. At Gunnels Injury Law , we exclusively handle personal injury lawsuits.

When people call us to discuss claims, one thing they often want to know is why they need a personal injury attorney to handle their Georgia claim. The reason is insurance companies are not going to treat them fairly without the representation of an attorney. Attorneys that practice personal injury law know how these claims work and know how to build a case. They know the steps that need to be taken in each situation to maximize the recovery of the case. Insurance companies are just going to assume that general individuals who are not attorneys don’t understand these steps, and they’re going to try to take advantage of that in every situation.

We often get calls from people who thought that they could handle their personal injury lawsuit on their own but realized after beginning discussions with an insurance company that they weren’t going to be treated fairly without the representation of an attorney. This happens often, and insurance companies will take advantage of you if you’re not represented by an attorney.

We’re often asked by clients whether they should give a recorded statement to an insurance company that has requested one after an accident has occurred. The answer to that question is no. While people think they may be doing their case a service and making it better by telling their side of the story, they are at a disadvantage in those types of claims. The insurance companies have adjusters who are trained to ask questions and get information from the injured party that could be harmful to the case later on. We want to make sure that the insurance companies do not ever get a chance to speak with our client without us present and available. To the extent that we ever do have to give recorded statements, always wait until you have an attorney to participate in the recorded statement with you.

When people call us over personal injury cases, one of the things they often ask is if there’s a minimum amount of medical bills that they need to have sustained in order to support a claim. The answer to that is, no, there’s no rule about how much is required in medical expenses before a claim is viable. There are certainly cases where the amount of injuries and medical expenses that have been suffered just don’t warrant the time and expense of pursuing a case. However, there are some claims, that can be very significant, that involve a very small amount of medical expenses relative to what the injury is. One example that we’ve dealt with recently is a multiple finger amputation. There’s simply not much that can be done, other than covering the wound and sewing it shut, to help one of those cases. You can often have a lot more expenses in dealing with a – relatively speaking – back or neck injury than you may have with something as severe as fingers being amputated. Obviously in that situation, the finger amputation case would have a lot more value because of its permanent damage. While a lot of how these cases are viewed involves the amount of medical expenses that have been suffered, it’s not always a determining factor.

I regularly get calls from people who want to know whether a preexisting injury prevents them from pursuing a personal injury lawsuit. The state of Georgia protects people whose existing injuries have been exacerbated by a personal injury. With preexisting injuries, it’s extremely important to use an attorney who has experience handling these claims; they are very different from an injury such as a broken arm or a broken leg where the source of the injury can clearly be traced to the accident. In injuries involving a neck or back, often, those injuries are not visibly apparent and it takes a lot of work to establish a timeline for when injuries occurred and when they were made worse.

When we reach the point of negotiating to resolve a claim for our clients, one of the first things clients want to know is whether they should take the insurance company’s first offer. In almost every situation, the answer to this question is no. One of the reasons that we spend so much time building our cases and preparing them for trial at the Gunnels Injury Law is that we want to be prepared to persuade the instance company to put their best offer on the table. That never happens at first. We have to use the information that we have gathered and present it in a form that’s persuasive to the insurance company; that may involve a process of mediation before we even get to the point of going to court.

When clients come to see us for their Georgia personal injury cases, one thing they want to know is what the process for filing a lawsuit is. Filing a lawsuit is a process that is undertaken by the attorney without a lot of involvement for the client, other than providing us with the factual background of the case. The first thing we have to do in evaluating a claim is find where the defendant is living so that we know in which county the case can be filed. In Georgia, the case has to be filed – when there is an individual driver – in the county in which that driver resides.

We see a lot of clients who tell us upfront that they don’t want to go to court. They don’t want their case to be put before a jury, and they don’t want to have to go before a judge. We handle cases like this all the time, but we have to advise our clients that it can greatly minimize the compensation that they receive in the end if they’re not willing to put the case into a lawsuit and potentially go to trial.

Something that all of our clients ask us at some point during their representation is whether their case will go to trial. The answer is we never know until the end. Insurance companies largely dictate how much compensation they are willing to give prior to a trial in any given case. At the Gunnels Injury Law , we prepare every case we have for trial so that we are prepared, in the event that the case is not able to settle and we do need to put the claim before a jury to decide the proper amount of compensation. All claims get worked up in the same diligent manner, and if we are able to resolve the case for a reasonable sum prior to going to a jury trial, we do so. However, it is our goal to make sure every case that we bring in and we litigate is prepared to go to trial in the event that it is needed.