It’s that time of year again when people forgo their usual sarcasms and recognize the good things in life. I know there is a lot to be sarcastic about these days and, if you watch entertainment news or The Soup, you know what I’m talking about. But there are many things to be thankful for such as good music. So, here are ten things that I’m thankful for (all music related of course): 

10. Drum Off 09: I’m thankful that there are corporations such as Guitar Center that still the value quality music, hosting events like this featuring the best drummers like Danny Carey from Tool and Brian Dailor from Mastodon.

9. Webcasts: I’m thankful for webcasts that bring festivals like Coachella and KROQ’s Almost Acoustic Christmas to my computer every year when I can’t be there in person.

8. The Beastie Boys, Vandals, and The Aquabats: I’m thankful that there are really talented musicians who resist the urge to take themselves seriously.

7. Natasha Khan from Bat for Lashes: I’m thankful this rising star thinks the Karate Kid and Stevie Nicks are important cultural icons.

6. Insanely unique musicians: I’m thankful for musicians such as Maynard James Keenan, Tori Amos, Bjork and Mike Patton, who all take music to places no one ever imagined or expected.

5. NIN farewell tour: I’m thankful that I finally got to see NIN live before Trent Reznor retired it.

4. Deftones’ resilliance: I’m thankful that Chi Cheng is still holding on and maybe someday we’ll get to see him play again.

3. The Cure still rocks: I’m thankful this band is still touring and making great music. Without The Cure, Deftones and Muse would never sound the way they do.

2. Rage Against the Machine reunion: I’m thankful that I got to see this band reunite at Coachella in 2007 with 80,000 other RATM fans.

1. Bad Religion continues to comment on American society: I’m thankful Greg Graffin is saying all the things that need to be said and is also a UCLA professor, who is actually doing his part to help mold American youth into critically thinking members of society. 

And now a Band of the Week I am very thankful for…Placebo!

I’ve been listening to this band for a while now and I am surprised that they are not as big in the states as they are everywhere else. Since the first time that I heard their cover of Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill,” I was hooked. I enthusiastically suggest anything from their 2006 album Meds, but you must hear “Lazarus” and “Drag.” They recently released a new album Battle for the Sun and I am loving “The Never-Ending Why.” I saw them live at Coachella and I highly recommend catching them live. However, this band will be on a World tour until March. Hopefully, these Brits will visit the states soon.

Until next time, protege moi. -K

Giving thanks on Thanksgiving is a somewhat artificial tradition, wherein we feel compelled by our culture to be grateful. The presumption is that without Thanksgiving, we wouldn’t remember to be grateful. This is hardly a good way to lead your life, being thankful only once a year. It’s an archaic, patriarchal philosophy. But the truth is that in times of great suffering, we hardly remember to be thankful for what we have. Thanksigiving may be a poor excuse to remember what the world has given you, but that’s what a blog is for!

I am thankful for…

The beauty, joy, and infectious relaxation that embodies North County San Diego, California

I live here

The University of Southern California, the generosity of its financial aid department, and the fact that its Admission Office believed in me

this be where i work

California State University, Fullerton, without which I would not be where I am today

The English Language and its vast, ever expanding literary canon. Most specifically, I would like to thank William Shakespeare, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, William Wordsworth, The Brontes, William Blake, Percy Blysse Shelly, Lord Byron, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Charlotte Perkins Gillman, Jack London, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and TS Eliot. I’m forgetting so many. I love you guys.

The fact that I am living in a golden age of independent cinema, where quality movies can be made on an immensely low budget without any stars, and still have a chance at stardom. Because of this, mainstream movies have been forced to grow artisitically just to compete, and film has improved because of it. This year, thanks to I Love You Man, Zombieland, Inglorious Basterds, An Education, and Where the Wild Things, and here’s to the good movies within the next month!

On that note, I must honor Flower Hill Ultra Star, La Jolla Landmark, and the Hollywood Arclight

The fact that I am living in a undisputed golden age of TELEVISION. Thank you Mad Men, Lost, my new obsession Sons of Anarchy, South Park, Weeds, 30 Rock, and all the shows I listed on my previous blog. Thanks to networks like HBO for continuing to push for quality programming.

Bonnaroo and Coachella, their very existance giving me hope for the universe.

dirty hippie-tastic

The new bands that have graced my ears this year… Airbourne Toxic Event, Arcade Fire, The Flaming Lips, The Smiths, Phoenix, Metric, Bruce Springsteen, Wilco, The National. Some of these are not new bands, I’ve just never really listened to them until this year.

The Beatles forever

Sublime’s cover of Bob Marley’s “No Woman No Cry”

Sublime forever

Just… thank god for the amazing combination of a guitar, a bass guitar, a drum kit and the human voice. Thank god for rock and roll.

Good sushi, Chipotle, Roberto’s, In-N-Out, Kenny’s Korean bbq, Yogurt Land, and my mom’s beef stew. The combination of chocolate and peanut butter also deserves notation.

My health, my good skin, my unique eyes that never give away my high-ness, my good eating habits, my awesome hair (it is too)

Weed. My anti-drug. Enough said. THANK GOD FOR WEED!

I love it...

My summer job and my current job at Bovard.

LONDON NEXT SEMESTER BITCH

oh hell no

THE PEARL – my freedom

Writing, my therapy

My extended family – my dad’s side for dealing with Grandfather’s passing, on my mom’s side for always being the most consistant, reliable, loving people in my life.

My immediate family, my dad for the changes I know he’s making, my step-mom who is very sweet and will make a wonderful mother

Jessica and Melissa

My baby brudder, Ryan. Wherever we go, whatever we do, we’re gonna go through it together.

My mom, her health, her happiness, her success, and her love and trust for me.

And lastly, the greatest friends anyone can have. No individual explanations nessecary, I don’t think I can properly put into words who you all make me feel. My journey through life has been marked by extraordinary friendships, strong bonds that have shattered before my eyes. I have had a habit of surrounding myself with dishonest people, with unreliable people, with people who I desperately wanted to believe in but have no reason to. For the first time in my life, I feel so incredibly loved, genuinely and wholely. I want to raise you all up, for each and every one of you to live out your dreams, for the entire planet to love you as much as I do. You are all extraordinary, beautiful people who deserve nothing but happiness. You have given me nothing but happiness, and your presence in my life means more then you can possibly understand. I cannot write anything special for each of you to put on my blog, and this is in no particular order, but I will tell you how much I love you for hours, if that’s what you need. I love you, I thank you:

Wifey, Cheniko, Kell-eh, KBalch, Julie, Christo, Steph, Jade, the USC GLBTA, Jake, Brendan, the Bovard kids, my dearly beloved roommate Erika, Lauren Cohen, and Sam

And here’s to change, the past that will never go away, and the love that still lives in me. Memories, you are my biggest thank you.

Constantly looking and seeking new music that harnesses both beauty and destruction, thanks to Mr. Yukon Cornelius (my main music consultant for discoveries and information references) we have And So I Watch You From Afar! This band hailing from Belfast, England are some more of the next generation PostRock/Metal/Psychedelic dandies that deliver ALL the power and force you always wanted Explosions In The Sky to come driving through with, complimenting their beautiful cascading textures and melodies, but they always leave you with a softy. And So I Watch You From Afar’s self titled album delivers a climatic buildup from one instrument chords and riffs turned into a full overdriven force of distorto/delay explosion even metal masters could appreciate! They take you down lightly, nice and airy like everything is alright kinda feeling. Could we call it Melodic Metal? My only comparison or relation for this band is if Mogwai had a younger cousin from the UK who is doing everything harder, better faster and uh stronger? Mogwai is still the ultimate but either way I enjoy the deep contrast of floating in space on a good one, to being taken through a lightning bolt at 1.21 gigawatts! You wont travel through space or time, but it’s definitely the closest way to try! Listen to this album in its entirety and you wont be let down or even have the urge to skip to the next song. Each song is its own emotion and feel but never short of excellent with all the fixens. These guys are on my list for Coachella 2010 “Please Book This Band.” I anticipate they produce an amazing live performance from numerous videos and reviews I’ve read. Hopefully I will get the proper opportunity for the experience.

Before you say anything, to the junkies of  the Coachella world, I am well aware of this poster being shown and posted sometime last week, and more importantly totally fake. Having said that can we please just use this for some fun amusement and a little humor. The fever is strong so even a ridiculous mess like this is worth viewing.

Yeah okay you can throw up now and get angry about why I would even show such poop, but rest easy as I assure you this is just for shits and giggles. If Michael wasn’t gone I believe he would actually be a strong candidate for a headliner. I remember stating that the year Prince played. Coachella had Madonna and Prince so who else would be left to headline on that grand of scale besides the solo gloved moonwalker himself. Sorry superhero fans, don’t see any possiblities of the X-Men of Transformers holding any credibility. They were offered more then the Smiths but they still turned ‘em down. Keep checking for more updates!

As a Coachella Auto Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Wrongful Death Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Wrongful Death Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Truck Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Truck Accident Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Personal Injury Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Car Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Pedestrian Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Pedestrian Accident Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Motorcycle Accident Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Motorcycle Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Dog Bite Homeowner Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Auto Accident Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Car Accident Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Car Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Bicycle Accident Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Bicycle Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Auto Accident Insurance Lawyer with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Auto Accident Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

As a Coachella Accident Insurance Attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar plus settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Coachella, other nearby cities and internationally, I know many of you are attempting to settle your own personal injury, dog bite and wrongful death cases by yourselves for the maximum and the biggest settlement you can to save the cost of an attorney.

In this article I’ll tell you the secrets of how attorneys negotiate for top dollar and I’ll also tell you why insurance companies lick their chops and rub their hands together with glee when individuals try to settle their claims without an attorney and why, in most cases, you’ll receive a larger, much greater amount in your pocket or in the trust fund you set up for any children injured in the accident, even after an attorney’s fee and costs if you hire a reputable and experienced personal injury attorney.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, truck, pedestrian, bicycle, or auto accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been the victim of a dog bite or animal attack, you can visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com for more information and call us at any of the numbers easily found on our website.

First, you need to know that insurance companies evaluate cases two ways. As soon as you begin negotiating with the insurance company yourself, they evaluate your case, unfortunately, in terms of a nuisance value matter. They’ve settled tens or hundreds of thousands of cases with individuals before for paltry amounts and they will expect they can settle your case for a measly amount as well.

Why do they look at you as if you’re chopped meat? As soon as you tell them you are negotiating your own settlement, they know you’re trying to save money. To them, that means you may even be desperate. They also know you won’t be as knowledgeable about their tricks and tactics and like those tens or hundreds of thousands of people before you, they know how they can play you until you either become so frustrated you settle for their bad offer or become panicked that your time is running out.

The second way they evaluate a case, namely one presented by a lawyer, is an analysis of what the case’s true settlement value is based on the attorney’s skill and experience, how prepared the case is for litigation in the event it doesn’t settle, and the actual value of the injuries and associated pain and suffering, wage loss and other out of pocket expenses.

To settle your case for the largest amount possible, which may be the policy limits of the insurance policy, depending upon the severity of your injuries, you need to get the insurance adjuster to evaluate your case in the same manner they would as if an attorney were negotiating with them. While most insurance companies, unfortunately, simply won’t do that, here’s what you need to do to try to obtain the maximum settlement value.

First, you need to obtain all of your medical records and bills. You can’t rely on the insurance company to do this. As soon as you tell the insurance company you want them to do this or agree to having them do it and tell you how much your medical bills come to and what your medical records say, you are giving up control of the situation. I can’t stress this enough.

You will need to sign authorization forms to obtain your medical records and bills and pay the cost of obtaining those medical records and bills (the cost of which can range from $15 to hundreds of dollars) from each hospital, ambulance company, doctor, chiropractor, radiologist, emergency room billing service, etc. Some medical providers require you to use their authorization forms. Some require you to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy your records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for your bills and another fee for your medical records.

Just obtaining all of your medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling personal injury cases. And, to make matters worse, you’re still not through with your medical providers. When your treatment is complete and you have all of your medical records and bills and the first settlement offer is made to you, you’ll need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and you can expect to be on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases you will need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell you this information.

You will need to obtain a copy of the police report. This is a much simpler process. Some police departments charge between $10 to $40 for a copy, while other departments provide them to you for free. You can pick it up at the police or CHP office yourself or request one by mail with an authorization form and a check for the proper fee.

You’ll also need to obtain your wage loss information on a wage loss form from your employer if you suffered any wage losses or had to use up valuable sick time, personal time, or vacation days.

You should obtain witness statements if there is any issue as to the liability of the other driver for the accident and you should take photos of the scene if there was something wrong with the road conditions or other unusual circumstances.

You will also need to obtain a number of good photographs of your car damage, copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

Here’s a secret. In California you are entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. It’s automatic. Just tell the insurance company the make and model or find out the cost for the make and model child seat and the insurance company will send you a check for a new one, even if the old one wasn’t broken. Why? It’s in the California insurance code. The insurance companies, however, don’t volunteer this information. Why? They’re in business to make money, not pay it out.

Finally, when all your treatment is done, you will need to put together a demand package with a demand letter reviewing the facts of the accident and the negligence of the other driver that made him or her at fault, a summary of your injuries and medical treatment (from your medical records), an itemization of your medical bills, a discussion of your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, a discussion of your wage loss and how you determined the amount, and finally the amount of your demand and a time limit (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer. The demand letter should be a minimum of four pages in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter should be copies of all of your medical records and bills, color copies of the car damage photos, copies of the repair bills and estimates, any wage loss documentation and any other relevant items such as witness statements, etc.

If all of this is too much work for you to accomplish (and it is a lot when you are just trying to get better, get on with your life, raise a family and still go to work to put food on the table) you may want to hire our law firm to represent you.

The reason why, in most cases you will receive more, even after an attorney’s fees and costs are taken out, is that insurance companies offer much more to an attorney handling your case than when you are attempting to settle it yourself. In addition, an experienced and reputable lawyer can also obtain reductions from your health insurance company and from any medical providers with a balance with regards to what amount has to be paid back to them out of any settlement.

When you rely on the insurance company to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay you a skimpy amount on top, you are giving them the right to determine what bills they think were “reasonable” and to obtain any reductions in the bills to save themselves money. When an attorney obtains a reduction in your bills or your health insurance company lien, the amount the attorney saves increases the amount of your net settlement.

Keep in mind that as soon as you start negotiating your claim by yourself, it’s almost impossible for an attorney to persuade the insurance company to evaluate your case in the higher category type of claim. At our law firm, while we’ll take on a case that may be months old where the injured victim has simply been receiving medical treatment, we won’t take on the case in most cases if the victim has already received a bad offer from the insurance company. At that stage it’s usually too late for an attorney to make much of a difference.

Hopefully, this article has provided you with some insights as to how to obtain the maximum settlement from an insurance company for an auto, car, motorcycle, bicycle, pedestrian, truck, dog bite, or wrongful death claim. There is much more that an experienced attorney does, especially in the negotiation stage to maximize the settlement and this is where an attorney’s experience kicks in.

An attorney such as Sebastian Gibson who has been negotiating these cases with many of the same adjusters for decades, knows the tactics and negotiating style of them and their companies and knows how refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations.

What causes many attorneys to be unable to settle their cases and who then find themselves with no alternative but to file a lawsuit in court and face two to five years of litigation before the matter settles or goes to jury, is to get angry (some even scream and yell) with the adjuster, box themselves into a corner and tell the adjuster something along the lines of, “If that’s the best you can do, we’re filing suit.” The adjuster’s response to this is naturally, “go ahead.”

An insurance company doesn’t really care if they have to dump your case onto the case load of their attorneys who are already handling tens of thousands of such cases. One more case, makes no difference to them at all. They also know, you may give up or settle for even less when you learn from an attorney how much just the court costs will be. Just to file a lawsuit in most courts alone incurs a $350.00 or larger filing fee. Depositions can cost over a thousand dollars if they are lengthy. And all such court costs come out of your settlement, even if you have a contingency fee attorney handling your case.

Sadly, many of these same lawyers take this step or let their improperly trained staff members (secretaries and clerks) force the matter to such an impasse and then file suit without properly informing the client of the negotiations that took place and led them to that point.

If you are negotiating with an insurance company yourself, there’s no need to be unpleasant. Yes, you are probably going to hear that the insurance adjuster has evaluated your case to be worth much less than you think it’s worth. But you’re forgetting that, that’s just their first offer. Communicate with the adjuster. Tell them how the injuries affected your life and tell them what you still go through today with the pain you still have. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what you tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some lousy insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to you in 40 days with an offer after you present them with your demand package. Some take longer. Some will sound unpleasant, even snotty. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make your counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. Your job, just as it is the job of your attorney, is to get these unpleasant insurance adjusters to warm up. I ask them how the weather is, how they’re doing, if their busy, anything to get them to open up to me. You’d be surprised how far a little kindness goes.

We wish you good luck and a speedy recovery from your injuries. You’ll find that your health, in many cases, will drastically improve, once you remove yourself from the stress of handling your case and resolve it either yourself or with the assistance of our law firm by way of settlement. If on the other hand, your case goes into litigation, as do the cases of many lawyers who don’t have the settlement experience or negotiating tools to settle their cases advantageously for their clients, your stress level will almost certainly rise.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Coachella, and throughout Southern and Central California and handle wrongful death cases throughout the state. To learn more about Sebastian Gibson and the other areas of law handled by the law firm, visit the Sebastian Gibson website.

We invite you to visit our website at http://www.sebastiangibsonlaw.com and call us if you’ve been seriously injured in a personal injury auto, motorcycle, car, truck, pedestrian, or bicycle accident, lost a loved one in a wrongful death or been injured in a dog bite or animal attack in Coachella.

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