http://www.727injury.com (727) 381-2300 St Petersburg Personal Injury Attorneys McQuaid & Douglas
The topic of this video is how much money should a client receive after a car accident case. So fundamentally as a client, after a car accident, what you are primarily concerned about it are really two things. Number one, getting good medical treatment. But number two, how much money really goes in my pocket? And that's really an a, a vague question. Uh, that is not a very straight forward, uh, that has given to clients after a car accident by their lawyers. And so the purpose of this video is really to explain what I believe the rule of rule of thumb should be after a car accident and how much money a client should receive out of the settlement proceeds. So let's start at the beginning. After a car accident, you're going to have the pip insurance. You're going to have at least $10,000 worth of your medical bills paid out of your no-fault insurance, and then you're probably going to have a certain portion of money that is in addition to that.
And those are called out of pocket expenses. So when it comes down to settle the case, what the insurance adjusters are looking at, uh, are, what are your out of pocket expenses and what's your pain and suffering? And then a little bit about lost wages too. You have to factor that in. But most of the time there are not significant lost wages. So out of pocket medical expenses, pain and suffering. And so what the insurance company is doing is an analysis basically, what are your injuries? Severity of the accident. They put a dollar figure on the, on the, uh, on the total settlement. But from your perspective, what is most important during that analysis is what are you going to put in your pocket? Not how much are you paying your lawyer, not how much your medical bills, what are you putting in your pocket?
So my rule of thumb and our offices, Lou, rule of thumb is at a minimum, if the attorney's fees are one third, the medical bills are one third. The clients should be getting at least one third of the gross amount of the settlement in their pockets. So what we'd like to do is we never like to take more in attorney's fees and costs than what the client is actually putting in their pocket because we just don't think that's fair. And that's the sort of guiding principle or rule of thumb that we use here at uh, uh, Bataglia Ross. And that's, uh, that's been our philosophy for, for, you know, since the time I've started practicing law here, that being said, medical bills are tough to tough to, uh, handle sometimes. So what we'll do at the end of the day is we try to get those medical bills reduced or even we'll reduce our attorney's fees in order to sort of get that equation.
And that's really sort of bare minimum most of the time you should be recovering more than your lawyer and if you're not, you really need to look at what the lawyer is doing and what the amount of the medical bills are. So again, rule of thumb, what you recover at the end of the day, at least one third for the lawyer for attorney's fees and costs one third from medical. Any, any type of out of pocket medical expenses and one third to the client, or you've got a larger settlement, it makes it a lot easier for you to recover more than one third. But that's I, as I said, that's the rule of thumb. That's what you should be thinking in your head as a personal injury client after a car accident case in terms of what you should be recovering on that claim. And if you're not, you need to have a discussion with your, uh, car accident lawyer. So hopefully that answers the question. Hopefully that gives you some guidance in terms of what you should expect at the end of the day and in terms of what you're putting in your pocket.
*The above has been transcribed by a third party service and has not been checked for accuracy
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