How Long Should It Take to Procure a Personal Injury Settlement?

How Long Should It Take to Procure a Personal Injury Settlement? is a post from: http://www.personalinjurylawyercalgaryinc.ca/

There is no easy answer to when you will procure your personal injury settlement. A number of factors come into play when faced with this nagging question. Generally speaking, if you recover quickly, a settlement should take place in a relatively short period of time after total recovery. Usually, this can take a month or two in a case like this. Unfortunately, in cases where one does not immediately recover and ongoing treatment is taking place, a point will be reached when all treatment and specialist referrals are exhausted, also known as MMI (maximum medical improvement).

Once you reach MMI, thorough medical and healthcare records can be obtained by your lawyer, which can be relatively time consuming depending on how long it takes each healthcare professional to respond, which can take anywhere from three to even as much as four months. If your injuries sustained have not yet taken a toll on employment income and it’s not foreseeable that they ever will, settlement discussions can commence. If the insurance company for the at fault driver is ready to discuss terms outside MMI limitations, a settlement can often be finalized in two to three months of MMI’s achievement.

The worst complication to a timely settlement is the “cap” set on personal injuries. In these matters, insurance companies perceive all injuries to be “capped” and they will tell you they aren’t able to negotiate any terms extenuating beyond a small minimum unless you secure counsel. In this case, this nearly guarantees a process in which the insurance company’s lawyer begins to question you with your counsel present about your injuries incurred and treatments necessary to remedy and ease these injuries. In realistic terms, this process can even three to even four years after the accident and settlement negotiations will most often follow this lengthy process.