Personal injury lawyers tend to be the ones who catch a lot of the jokes and flack. We tease the less ethical or more desperate one for being ambulance chasers and blame them for cries demanding tort reform. Personal injury lawyers are not a unanimously good or evil bunch. We tend to blame lawyers for what their clients demand and do, but in reality they only do what their client demands. If the client has unrealistic demands for, what was in reality, just a fender bender caused by ice during the winter in Wilmington, OH the personal injury lawyer can only do so much to make those demands more realistic. While some lawyers might help drum up cases where one wouldn’t exist, people ultimately have the responsibility for whether they sue or not. If people are overly litigious it’s not the fault of the personal injury lawyers, but the fault of the people.
This all does bring up a second point, namely that people need to listen to their lawyers. You will eventually find a personal injury lawyer who will take a bad case, but if you’ve had multiple lawyers tell you there’s no case then it might be a message, that you don’t have a case. Sometimes you can feel wronged, but no actual wrong doing was done, or you don’t stand to actually benefit by taking the case forward. Sometimes the liability is too low or unclear and you need to just accept what happened. If you do have a case, it’s important to listen to your personal injury lawyer, remember they have an incentive in getting the best return on a case. If they’re advising you to settle, it might be a good idea to listen.
Personal injury lawyers do work in a crowded area of the law, this means that they have to be very wise with their allocation of resources, and are likely to have a lot of experience. The advice you get from a successful, experienced, personal injury lawyer is worth listening to; just make sure you find a good one who has the experience and expertise to advise you correctly. Despite the jokes, personal injury law is important it allows people to redress wrong doings without having to have a specific law passed to punish the guilty in each case. Imagine how much more crowded the criminal courts of even a smaller city like Wilmington, OH would be if every possible traffic injury or violation was a breach of law, instead of something handled by the tort system by personal injury lawyers.
