The Truth About Personal Injury Cases
The civil justice system in the United States was created to ensure citizens a mechanism for enforcing legal rights. Without such a system, all power lies with those in the best position to assert it-usually corporations with money and resources not available to the average person. Those corporations-among them several major insurance companies-have recently used their money and power to wage a campaign against personal injury plaintiffs, personal injury lawyers, and the personal injury system in America.
That campaign has been very successful in creating myths about personal injury law in the United States, myths that not only impact voters and legislators, but that may discourage people who have suffered personal injuries and have legitimate costs and losses from pursuing compensation.
That's good news for the corporations and the insurance companies-it means that they're less likely to have to live up to their responsibilities and pay what they owe. It's bad news, though, for victims who only want a reasonable personal injury settlement to pay medical bills and compensate for lost work time, and who may be discouraged from seeking what they're owed.
It's bad news for society, too, because as personal injury claims are limited, capped, and discouraged, big corporations and insurance companies have greater freedom to put people at risk without consequences.
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If you're uncertain about pursuing a personal injury case or speaking with a personal injury attorney, consider the truth behind some of the most popular personal injury myths:
Personal Injury Myth # 1:
Personal Injury Lawyers Get Rich Filing Frivolous Lawsuits
One of the most popular ideas advanced by the insurance lobby is that personal injury lawyers are getting rich on your dime-that frivolous lawsuits are costing the average citizen thousands of dollars a year in insurance premiums, taxes to support the judicial system, and other expenses.
The lobby likes to paint a picture of opportunistic personal injury attorneys and opportunistic plaintiffs stealing verdicts from poor, victimized corporations and insurance companies. While it's a compelling picture, it's not an accurate one-and it's one that badly underestimates the American justice system. The court system is designed to screen out such cases, and does so very effectively. A personal injury case that is without merit can be dismissed by the judge, with or without a motion from opposing counsel. Perhaps more importantly, provisions in the law and court rules impose sanctions on personal injury lawyers who file frivolous claims. Thus, the personal injury lawyer who truly does file unwarranted claims in an effort to pressure a corporation or insurance company into coughing up cash to which he knows his client is not entitled may be subject to fines or other sanctions imposed by the court, and may be required to pay his opponent's reasonable attorney fees.
Of course, no personal injury lawyer gets rich by paying fines and attorney fees-and no personal injury lawyer wants to be sanctioned by the court in which he makes his living. Thus, it's in the best interests of the personal injury lawyer and the personal injury plaintiff for the attorney to make good, reasonable decisions about the validity of a claim before he files the case. In those few cases where a personal injury attorney doesn't honor those boundaries or makes a bad decision, the justice system quickly weeds the case out and moves on to the valid claims of legitimate personal injury victims.
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Personal Injury Myth # 2:
Punitive Damages Make it Too Expensive for Companies to do Business and Cost Consumers Money
In a sense, this one is true. Punitive damages do make it more expensive for companies to do business-but not in the way you've been led to believe. The reason punitive damages make it more expensive for companies to do business isn't because they're paying out huge, unwarranted punitive damage awards, or even because their insurance premiums are escalating. Punitive damages make it expensive for a corporation to do business because punitive damages make it dangerous for a corporation to disregard consumer safety.
Corporations make business decisions based primarily on profitability. In many cases, it's more profitable to cut a few corners and take a few risks, and major corporations have repeatedly proven themselves willing to take risks with the lives of a few customers here and there in the interests of profit. They're somewhat less willing to take risks with their own money, and so the scepter of punitive damages-where punitive damage statutes haven't been gutted-forces them to make decisions more in line with the public interest. Often, those decisions do cost these corporations money, but that money is spent making safer products.
One of the most dramatic examples of this kind of corporate thinking came in the early 1970s when Ford Motor Company discovered that the Ford Pinto was designed in such a way that the fuel tank was susceptible to leakage and catching fire in low-speed, low-impact collisions. Evidence emerged that Ford had been aware of the defect, and had conducted a cost-benefit analysis in which it determined that it would be less expensive to pay damages for the projected burn deaths the design defect would cause than it would be to recall and repair the cars. Thus, Ford decided not to correct the problem, and people burned to death in relatively minor Pinto collisions-or were horribly burned and did not die. Without the intervention of personal injury attorneys who represented early victims of these accidents, Ford might have waited much longer to recall the cars, or never have recalled them, and many more deaths and injuries might have occurred. The plaintiffs in those early cases and their personal injury lawyers undoubtedly saved lives.
Punitive damages in litigation against Ford at that time were intended-as explicitly stated by jurors-to make certain that it was not profitable for Ford to have engaged in that kind of thinking, and to discourage Ford and other companies from expecting to profit from that kind of decision-making in the future.
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Limitations on punitive damage awards in the past several years have impacted this scenario in two important ways. First, they have largely removed the possibility, in many states, of punitive damage awards significantly impacting a company's cost of doing business. Unfortunately, that change has resulted in a new ability on the part of those companies to comfortably disregard consumer safety.
Personal Injury Myth # 3:
Punitive Damages Give Personal Injury Plaintiffs an Undeserved Windfall
Another common objection to punitive damage awards is that the plaintiff in the personal injury case doesn't "deserve" all that money. The purpose of punitive damages, of course, is to discourage the wrongdoer and not to provide the personal injury plaintiff with a windfall, but many people are still uncomfortable with the idea that some personal injury victim is going to "get rich off" a personal injury claim.
If the occasional personal injury victim did get more than he deserved in the effort to discourage corporations from playing fast and loose with consumer safety, it would probably be a small price to pay. The truth, however, is that such windfalls are increasingly rare. One reason is that many states have enacted provisions whereby a portion-often a large portion-of any punitive damage award is paid over to the state or to some kind of victim's fund. The other is that many states have capped punitive damage awards either at a fixed dollar amount or in some sort of proportion to actual damages.
Personal Injury Myth # 4:
Only People Who Want More than Their Fair Share File Personal Injury Cases
In a perfect world where every business and insurance company honored its commitments and obligations, this myth might hold true. Unfortunately, that's rarely the case. The vast majority of personal injury cases involve insurance companies, and insurance companies make their money by collecting premiums and then not paying out claims. The more they have to pay out in claims, the lower their profits. That means that insurance company representatives are trained to encourage personal injury victims to accept less than they're entitled to, to believe that they don't have legitimate claims, to delay payment of medical bills and other pressing expenses as a means of putting pressure on the victim to accept a lower personal injury settlement. Some insurance companies even interfere with medical treatment by refusing to authorize procedures or delaying payment.
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Thus, hiring a personal injury lawyer is often the only way a personal injury victim can get his legitimate expenses covered by the person or company responsible for his injuries. Insurance companies are well aware of this, and so train their representatives to make every effort to discourage-or even prevent-injury victims from retaining personal injury lawyers. So it's true that personal injury victims who work with personal injury lawyers are more likely to receive larger personal injury settlements. It's not, however, because those personal injury lawyers are "holding up" the insurance companies; it's because victims who aren't represented by personal injury lawyers often get cheated.
Don't Let These Myths Keep You From Getting the Help You Need
If you've been the victim of a personal injury and you believe someone else was responsible, find out more about your rights and options today, before you talk to the insurance company representatives and put your claim at risk. Call us toll free at 1 (877) 288-7564 or fill out our free online case evaluation form to arrange a free consultation with a personal injury attorney in your area.