There’s a lot more coming soon.

I promise.

Merry Christmas!

-Mike

Is there any macbook pro refreshes soon and ilife ? – title again!

seïko taki featured in soon #11 …

photography : thomas krappitz
styling : yoshiko tange

You know I am making cookies today!

I will type up a recipe for Chocolate Chip cookies!

MAKES 54 when I do it….supposed to make 60

What you need….

2 1/4 cups of flour

1tsp baking soda

1tsp salt

1 cup (2 sticks) of butter

3/4 cup of cane sugar

3/4 packed light/dark brown sugar (I use light)

1 tsp Vanilla

2 eggs

2 cups of Chocolate chips

1 cup of nuts (optional I prefer no nuts)

(Clear) Steps

1.)Preheat Oven to 375F

2.) mix flour, baking soda, and salt in a medium size bowl

3.) in another bowl beat butter,cane sugar, vanilla,and brown sugar with an electric mixer until creamy…..It may look to solid to you. Its not! DO NOT ADD WATER!!!!!!!

4.)Crack eggs in another small bowl to make sure there are no shells and the eggs look good.Stir.

5.) Pour in half the eggs and blend. Then pour in the other half. This will even out the mix.

6.) Add in the flour gradually with a 3/4 or 1/2 cup measure.

7.) Stir in the chocolate chips (and nuts)

8.) Get out an ungreased cookie sheet. Use a dinner spoon to scoop out the mix round and spread out. Cookies will grow 2-3 times there side so be aware of that when spreading out. Usually on an average sheet you fit 12-15.

9.) Cook for 9-11 minutes!

Enjoy!

The next recipe is a family recipe.

They are called “Panic Buttons”

It will be posted ASAP! So when your done making the chocolate chips you can make these

I have been waiting for this building to be completed and opened to public for so many years. I began to hear about it around five years ago, when I am still a teenager, interested in architecture, and amazed by this structure.

Year by year passes, now year 2009 almost coming to an end, and the beginning of year 2010 will be the beginning of operation of Burj Dubai too. Yes…Burj Dubai will be officially opened on 4th January 2010 to all visitors around the world. The building will be actually opening in stages, date of full opening is not confirmed yet…

The construction began few years back, and I have watched the pace, the progress of the construction of the building from zero metre high till now, over 800m tall. I love to see how this giant structure came out, slowly reaching to the sky, by its incredible height, thanks to the current technological achievements. I have never seen any other man made structure in this world with such a height.

Really wish to get there, and look at the exterior and interior architecture of the building in deep. Then, hoping to travel around the building, exploring every spaces. Finally, wishing to go to the Observatory, called as At The Top, Burj Dubai, at level 124, over 440m above ground, becoming the world second tallest observatory.

This building obtained a lot of records, mainly; world tallest building, world tallest man made structure, world tallest service elevator, world highest number of stories, world highest number of occupied floors, world highest concrete pumping, etc…Amazing, isn’t it?

It must be very expensive to get into the observatory..but really wished to get there, buy souvenirs, enjoy the facts provided, and enjoy the panoramic view of the surrounding at such a height above ground, which is never attempted before. The highest observatory that I have gone before is only Taipei 101 observatory at height level of around 380 to 390m. Current world tallest observatory is at Shanghai World Financial Center at a height of around 470m.

Wondering why they don’t want to locate the observatory space higher, to claim another title of world tallest observatory, there are so many floors above, used for corporate suites, mechanical, boradcasting and other purposes.

After some changes to the measurement of height of buildings, the official height of Burj Dubai is now changed from 818m to 825m, an increase by 7m due to the latest measurement from lowest level of pedestrian entrance to top of architectural structure (not including antenna but includes spire or pinnacle). It has 162 occupied floors and few mechanical floors above. The height of the building can be increased if it is in need too.

Check out the updated official website of Burj Dubai, www.burjdubai.com and the website containing latest information on Burj Dubai, www.burjdubaiskyscraper.com

Wondering is the official opening confirmed on 4th January 2010..?? The developers have delayed the date several times, due to delay in interior construction. The exterior has been completed with final cladding, touch-up and even lighting system ready few months ago. Will the opening be a grand ceremony, with carnivals, concerts, fireworks, etc? The opening should be grand, so that it suits this impressive structure, the Burj Dubai!

I hand make everything for Christmas for the family except for the toys I buy from time to time.  The kids are not into the wooden toys so I cannot make them.   I will post my projects after Christmas if not sooner. 

Happy Crafting!!!!

SO its been awhile since anyone has heard from me here on the site. I have been planning and discussing many things on my free time and have been working on the first issue of HiddenYou which will be out in January.

I am very excited about e-zine coming together and the people who have submitted.

If you would like to submit for the next issue, please email Hiddenmag@gmail.com

Best,

Latia

Today was probably the most fierce snowstorm of the 21st century here, never have I experienced such a blizzard that almost swept me off my feet and covered me head to toe in icy snow.
But it was fun though in a way, because it was just like Hoth from Star Wars, and all that remained was for me to ride a Tauntaun and see some Imperial Walkers in the distance…it would have been awesome.

- I look stoned, but I am infact very disorientated because of all the snow.

So finally the winter holiday is here and just a few days until Christmas, and then ultimately New year!
I havnt done a single bit of christmas shopping yet though, it is so hard to find stuff…
Gotta find a friend to go out with and do it

Speaking of Star Wars, I have decided to start playing JK3, or Jedi Academy Online again.
I used to play very actively before and became quite the great duelist in the online community, I went by the name of Death Child…

Lol, see the similarity?

To you:
Someday soon your soul will no longer be so restless,
You will have found everything you were searching for,
A second chance, just open your eyes and don’t be blind,
Someday soon your fire and drive will be notably more.

To me:
Someday soon I will catch those dreams I have been chasing,
I have finally been set free of everything that tied me,
My journey is continuous, and very far from over,
Someday soon my heart will give away its much guarded key.

To us:
Someday soon we will have forgotten about each other,
It is inevitable; so little time we seemed to share,
Being together never quite held its spark and shine,
Someday soon the heartfelt emotion will no longer be there.

Someday soon, realization will have set in.
Someday soon, we will know that everything fades.

Someday soon, we may understand.
Someday soon, the honesty will outweigh everything.

Someday soon, someday very soon.

WELCOME!!!!!!! These are a few pics from the C. Grand London 1st Exhibition show!!!! It was GREAT! I had so much fun, we had to set it up and then talk about it in the evening with the VIP guests!! Setting up took a lot longer than i thought it would, i was a GREAT help and i arranged the visual layout of it alongside the great designer herself Miss Charlene Grandison!!!! It was a lot of fun!!

The manequin looked HOTT i loved her shoes (extra added by none other than ME)!!!!! Also, take a peak at the GRAND weekender bag!!!! Looked amazing and was loved by ALL!!

BEST OF ALL……….EVERYTHING IS HAND-MADE!!!!!

Then later on in the evening Miss Grand won the new talent award!! Simply asked her to come on stage to say a few words then she came back with an award!! I was in shock and so was she, but we were both amazed and EXCITED!!!! CONGRATULATIONS!!!!!!!!!!

Watch out C. Grand London coming soon………….

Hit me up or go on the web-site for more details!!!!!!!!!!!!

He lit a cigarette, pressed up against the wall, sheltering from the freezing air. The cigarette would warm him. Taxis and buses clattered along the street, which was still wet from the rain. There were voices and laughter from inside the pub. It was packed. Always was at this time of year. So tiring. So much food and drinking.

Aeroplane lights crossed the starless sky. Where were they flying to? In the future no one would fly any more. And no one would eat or drink. People were scared. They talked fearfully as if it all, soon, had to end.

As you know The Christmas Party starts on Friday, but, many penguins have themed their igloos for holidays – and a bunch of reindeer, trees, and elves have been spotted helping with the construction in the Town and upstairs in the Night Club.

Keep up with all the cool stuff you’re doing to celebrate and get ready for even more. Start making plans with your buddies to cheer up a tree at the iceberg and check out a Christmas feast at the Pizza Parlor. The Lighthouse will be rocking with performances for Coins For Change, and members will get to help deliver presents!!! Awesome huh?!

~Benato2~

If you’ve had lost a loved one in a wrongful death accident in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you’ve had some time to grieve.

Soon after an accident, an insurance company adjuster, however, may be calling you to try to make a quick settlement and take advantage of your vulnerable situation. At the first moment you receive that call, the best thing you can do is to tell them you are too much in grief to discuss the loss of your loved one and to call our office for a free consultation.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, bike, 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 if you try to handle your case yourself, 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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of the medical records and bills relating to the decedent 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us to agree to their using a photocopy service to copy the records at a higher cost. Some medical providers require one fee for the bills and another fee for the medical records. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of the medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

Just obtaining all of the medical records and bills is one of the most time consuming aspects of handling wrongful death cases. And, to make matters worse, we’re still not through with the medical providers. When the first settlement offer is made by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if there is any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

One of the first things we do in a case is 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 us for free. Once we have the police report, we then determine if it will be necessary to obtain witness statements and if it is, a private investigator hired by our office obtains these statements to support your claim. If photos of the scene would be useful to help prove the liability of the other driver and if the police did not take photos at the scene, we go out and obtain photos that can be used later in the handling of your case.

We also obtain earnings information in connection with your loved one on a wage loss form to determine the economic impact of the loss of your loved one.

We also take a good number of photographs of the car damage, and obtain copies of the vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in the accident vehicle.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When we’ve obtained all of the documentation of your loss, we 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, we discuss the injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize the medical bills, we discuss the loss of your loved one and how the loss has impacted your life, we discuss the economic aspects of the case and how we’ve determined the economic loss, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are copies of all of the 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.

The reason why, in most cases a client or family 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.

Keep in mind that if 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 the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We tell them how the loss has affected your life and tell them what you still go through today. You’ll be surprised how many adjusters will actually relate to what we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.

If you’ve had a truck accident in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you know that your injuries are going to require ongoing medical treatment.

If you aren’t hurt or if you’ve only seen your personal doctor for a checkup and you’re basically fine and won’t be needing any more treatment, you really don’t need an accident attorney. The insurance company will probably pay your medical bill and give you a couple hundred dollars in what they would consider to be a nuisance value settlement.

However, if you’ve been to the hospital and been checked out because your impact was considerable, or if your vehicle sustained $1,500.00 or more in damage and you’re sore and stiff from the accident, even if your doctor is just prescribing you pain killers and has no plans to recommend more treatment, you should see an attorney as soon as possible. Too many doctors and health plans limit the amount of treatment they will give you unless you press them into being more attentive to your injuries. A serious impact can cause significant injury and the best thing you can do is to receive the treatment that will do the most good to relieve your symptoms.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we can’t and don’t practice medicine. But we can advise you how to obtain the medical treatment you need from your health insurance plan and if you have no medical insurance or medical coverage on your car insurance, provide you with a list of doctors, therapists and chiropractors in your area who will treat you on a lien basis and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, bike, 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 if you try to handle your case yourself, 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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

The most important thing you can do as a client is to receive proper medical treatment and to start receiving it as soon after your accident as possible. If you wait more than a few days, an insurance company will claim that you must not have been very seriously hurt. If you wait a few weeks, your case is often worthless or nearly worthless. An insurance company’s view is that if you’re hurt, you’ll find some way to see a doctor and if you don’t have money and you’re hurt, you’ll at least go to a county hospital where you can be seen.

As your attorney, we can also direct you to doctors and therapists who will treat you and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case. These medical providers accept liens on your case so they know they will be paid eventually, even if you don’t have any money now.

While it’s not the policy of our law firm to suggest you receive treatment you don’t need or to build a mountain out of a mole hill as they say, we do want you to recover from your injuries and if you are truly in pain and have medical problems as a result of your accident, the best way to recover is to receive the medical treatment you need. Once you’ve recovered, you should cease your treatment. The moment an insurance company or a doctor feels you are malingering or exaggerating your symptoms, your case is ruined in our opinion. We therefore always want you to be completely honest both with us and with your medical providers.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us 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. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of your medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

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, we’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 by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

One of the first things we do in a case is 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 us for free. Once we have the police report, we then determine if it will be necessary to obtain witness statements and if it is, a private investigator hired by our office obtains these statements to support your claim. If photos of the scene would be useful to help prove the liability of the other driver and if the police did not take photos at the scene, we go out and obtain photos that can be used later in the handling of your case.

We also obtain all of 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.

When we meet with a client, we also take a good number of photographs of your car damage, and obtain from you copies of your vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When all your treatment is done, we 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, we discuss your injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize your medical bills, we discuss your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, we discuss your wage loss and how we’ve determined the amount, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are 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.

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 individuals rely on insurance companies to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay a skimpy amount on top to an individual without an attorney, those claimants are giving the insurance company 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 and goes right to the client.

Keep in mind that if 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.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We 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 we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.

If you’ve had a personal injury accident in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you know that your injuries are going to require ongoing medical treatment.

If you aren’t hurt or if you’ve only seen your personal doctor for a checkup and you’re basically fine and won’t be needing any more treatment, you really don’t need an accident attorney. The insurance company will probably pay your medical bill and give you a couple hundred dollars in what they would consider to be a nuisance value settlement.

However, if you’ve been to the hospital and been checked out because your impact was considerable, or if your vehicle sustained $1,500.00 or more in damage and you’re sore and stiff from the accident, even if your doctor is just prescribing you pain killers and has no plans to recommend more treatment, you should see an attorney as soon as possible. Too many doctors and health plans limit the amount of treatment they will give you unless you press them into being more attentive to your injuries. A serious impact can cause significant injury and the best thing you can do is to receive the treatment that will do the most good to relieve your symptoms.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we can’t and don’t practice medicine. But we can advise you how to obtain the medical treatment you need from your health insurance plan and if you have no medical insurance or medical coverage on your car insurance, provide you with a list of doctors, therapists and chiropractors in your area who will treat you on a lien basis and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, bike, 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 if you try to handle your case yourself, 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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

The most important thing you can do as a client is to receive proper medical treatment and to start receiving it as soon after your accident as possible. If you wait more than a few days, an insurance company will claim that you must not have been very seriously hurt. If you wait a few weeks, your case is often worthless or nearly worthless. An insurance company’s view is that if you’re hurt, you’ll find some way to see a doctor and if you don’t have money and you’re hurt, you’ll at least go to a county hospital where you can be seen.

As your attorney, we can also direct you to doctors and therapists who will treat you and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case. These medical providers accept liens on your case so they know they will be paid eventually, even if you don’t have any money now.

While it’s not the policy of our law firm to suggest you receive treatment you don’t need or to build a mountain out of a mole hill as they say, we do want you to recover from your injuries and if you are truly in pain and have medical problems as a result of your accident, the best way to recover is to receive the medical treatment you need. Once you’ve recovered, you should cease your treatment. The moment an insurance company or a doctor feels you are malingering or exaggerating your symptoms, your case is ruined in our opinion. We therefore always want you to be completely honest both with us and with your medical providers.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us 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. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of your medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

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, we’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 by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

One of the first things we do in a case is 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 us for free. Once we have the police report, we then determine if it will be necessary to obtain witness statements and if it is, a private investigator hired by our office obtains these statements to support your claim. If photos of the scene would be useful to help prove the liability of the other driver and if the police did not take photos at the scene, we go out and obtain photos that can be used later in the handling of your case.

We also obtain all of 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.

When we meet with a client, we also take a good number of photographs of your car damage, and obtain from you copies of your vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When all your treatment is done, we 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, we discuss your injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize your medical bills, we discuss your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, we discuss your wage loss and how we’ve determined the amount, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are 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.

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 individuals rely on insurance companies to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay a skimpy amount on top to an individual without an attorney, those claimants are giving the insurance company 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 and goes right to the client.

Keep in mind that if 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.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We 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 we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.

If you’ve had a pedestrian accident in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you know that your injuries are going to require ongoing medical treatment.

If you aren’t hurt or if you’ve only seen your personal doctor for a checkup and you’re basically fine and won’t be needing any more treatment, you really don’t need an accident attorney. The insurance company will probably pay your medical bill and give you a couple hundred dollars in what they would consider to be a nuisance value settlement.

However, if you’ve been to the hospital and been checked out because your impact was considerable, or if you’re sore and stiff from the accident, even if your doctor is just prescribing you pain killers and has no plans to recommend more treatment, you should see an attorney as soon as possible. Too many doctors and health plans limit the amount of treatment they will give you unless you press them into being more attentive to your injuries. A serious impact can cause significant injury and the best thing you can do is to receive the treatment that will do the most good to relieve your symptoms.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we can’t and don’t practice medicine. But we can advise you how to obtain the medical treatment you need from your health insurance plan and if you have no medical insurance, provide you with a list of doctors, therapists and chiropractors in your area who will treat you on a lien basis and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, bike, 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 if you try to handle your case yourself, 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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

The most important thing you can do as a client is to receive proper medical treatment and to start receiving it as soon after your accident as possible. If you wait more than a few days, an insurance company will claim that you must not have been very seriously hurt. If you wait a few weeks, your case is often worthless or nearly worthless. An insurance company’s view is that if you’re hurt, you’ll find some way to see a doctor and if you don’t have money and you’re hurt, you’ll at least go to a county hospital where you can be seen.

As your attorney, we can also direct you to doctors and therapists who will treat you and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case. These medical providers accept liens on your case so they know they will be paid eventually, even if you don’t have any money now.

While it’s not the policy of our law firm to suggest you receive treatment you don’t need or to build a mountain out of a mole hill as they say, we do want you to recover from your injuries and if you are truly in pain and have medical problems as a result of your accident, the best way to recover is to receive the medical treatment you need. Once you’ve recovered, you should cease your treatment. The moment an insurance company or a doctor feels you are malingering or exaggerating your symptoms, your case is ruined in our opinion. We therefore always want you to be completely honest both with us and with your medical providers.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us 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. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of your medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

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, we’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 by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

One of the first things we do in a case is 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 us for free. Once we have the police report, we then determine if it will be necessary to obtain witness statements and if it is, a private investigator hired by our office obtains these statements to support your claim. If photos of the scene would be useful to help prove the liability of the other driver and if the police did not take photos at the scene, we go out and obtain photos that can be used later in the handling of your case.

We also obtain all of 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.

When we meet with a client, we also take a good number of photographs of your car damage, and obtain from you copies of your vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When all your treatment is done, we 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, we discuss your injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize your medical bills, we discuss your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, we discuss your wage loss and how we’ve determined the amount, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are 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.

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 individuals rely on insurance companies to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay a skimpy amount on top to an individual without an attorney, those claimants are giving the insurance company 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 and goes right to the client.

Keep in mind that if 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.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We 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 we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.

If you’ve had an accident in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you know that your injuries are going to require ongoing medical treatment.

If you aren’t hurt or if you’ve only seen your personal doctor for a checkup and you’re basically fine and won’t be needing any more treatment, you really don’t need an accident attorney. The insurance company will probably pay your medical bill and give you a couple hundred dollars in what they would consider to be a nuisance value settlement.

However, if you’ve been to the hospital and been checked out because your impact was considerable, or if your motorcycle sustained $1,000.00 or more in damage, you had to lay it down or if you’re sore and stiff from the accident, even if your doctor is just prescribing you pain killers and has no plans to recommend more treatment, you should see an attorney as soon as possible. Too many doctors and health plans limit the amount of treatment they will give you unless you press them into being more attentive to your injuries. A serious impact can cause significant injury and the best thing you can do is to receive the treatment that will do the most good to relieve your symptoms.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we can’t and don’t practice medicine. But we can advise you how to obtain the medical treatment you need from your health insurance plan and if you have no medical insurance or medical coverage on your motorcycle insurance, provide you with a list of doctors, therapists and chiropractors in your area who will treat you on a lien basis and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case.

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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

The most important thing you can do as a client is to receive proper medical treatment and to start receiving it as soon after your accident as possible. If you wait more than a few days, an insurance company will claim that you must not have been very seriously hurt. If you wait a few weeks, your case is often worthless or nearly worthless. An insurance company’s view is that if you’re hurt, you’ll find some way to see a doctor and if you don’t have money and you’re hurt, you’ll at least go to a county hospital where you can be seen.

As your attorney, we can also direct you to doctors and therapists who will treat you and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case. These medical providers accept liens on your case so they know they will be paid eventually, even if you don’t have any money now.

While it’s not the policy of our law firm to suggest you receive treatment you don’t need or to build a mountain out of a mole hill as they say, we do want you to recover from your injuries and if you are truly in pain and have medical problems as a result of your accident, the best way to recover is to receive the medical treatment you need. Once you’ve recovered, you should cease your treatment. The moment an insurance company or a doctor feels you are malingering or exaggerating your symptoms, your case is ruined in our opinion. We therefore always want you to be completely honest both with us and with your medical providers.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us 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. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of your medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

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, we’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 by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

One of the first things we do in a case is 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 us for free. Once we have the police report, we then determine if it will be necessary to obtain witness statements and if it is, a private investigator hired by our office obtains these statements to support your claim. If photos of the scene would be useful to help prove the liability of the other driver and if the police did not take photos at the scene, we go out and obtain photos that can be used later in the handling of your case.

We also obtain all of 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.

When we meet with a client, we also take a good number of photographs of your car damage, and obtain from you copies of your vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When all your treatment is done, we 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, we discuss your injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize your medical bills, we discuss your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, we discuss your wage loss and how we’ve determined the amount, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are 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.

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 individuals rely on insurance companies to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay a skimpy amount on top to an individual without an attorney, those claimants are giving the insurance company 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 and goes right to the client.

Keep in mind that if 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.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We 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 we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.

If you’ve had a dog bite or been the victim of an animal attack in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you know that your injuries are going to require ongoing medical treatment.

If you aren’t hurt or if you’ve only seen your personal doctor for a checkup and you’re basically fine and won’t be needing any more treatment, you really don’t need an accident attorney. The insurance company will probably pay your medical bill and give you a couple hundred dollars in what they would consider to be a nuisance value settlement.

However, if you’ve been to the hospital and been checked out because your injuries are more severe, even if your doctor is just prescribing you pain killers and has no plans to recommend more treatment, you should see an attorney as soon as possible. Too many doctors and health plans limit the amount of treatment they will give you unless you press them into being more attentive to your injuries. A serious dog bite can cause significant injury and the best thing you can do is to receive the treatment that will do the most good to relieve your symptoms.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we can’t and don’t practice medicine. But we can advise you how to obtain the medical treatment you need from your health insurance plan and if you have no medical insurance or medical coverage on your car insurance, provide you with a list of doctors and other medical providers in your area who will treat you on a lien basis and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, bike, 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 if you try to handle your case yourself, 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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

The most important thing you can do as a client is to receive proper medical treatment and to start receiving it as soon after your accident as possible. If you wait more than a few days, an insurance company will claim that you must not have been very seriously hurt. If you wait a few weeks, your case is often worthless or nearly worthless. An insurance company’s view is that if you’re hurt, you’ll find some way to see a doctor and if you don’t have money and you’re hurt, you’ll at least go to a county hospital where you can be seen.

As your attorney, we can also direct you to doctors and therapists who will treat you and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case. These medical providers accept liens on your case so they know they will be paid eventually, even if you don’t have any money now.

While it’s not the policy of our law firm to suggest you receive treatment you don’t need or to build a mountain out of a mole hill as they say, we do want you to recover from your injuries and if you are truly in pain and have medical problems as a result of your accident, the best way to recover is to receive the medical treatment you need. Once you’ve recovered, you should cease your treatment. The moment an insurance company or a doctor feels you are malingering or exaggerating your symptoms, your case is ruined in our opinion. We therefore always want you to be completely honest both with us and with your medical providers.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us 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. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of your medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

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, we’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 by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

We also obtain all of 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.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When all your treatment is done, we 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, we discuss your injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize your medical bills, we discuss your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, we discuss your wage loss and how we’ve determined the amount, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are 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.

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 individuals rely on insurance companies to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay a skimpy amount on top to an individual without an attorney, those claimants are giving the insurance company 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 and goes right to the client.

Keep in mind that if 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.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We 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 we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.

If you’ve had a bicycle accident in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you know that your injuries are going to require ongoing medical treatment.

If you aren’t hurt or if you’ve only seen your personal doctor for a checkup and you’re basically fine and won’t be needing any more treatment, you really don’t need an accident attorney. The insurance company will probably pay your medical bill and give you a couple hundred dollars in what they would consider to be a nuisance value settlement.

However, if you’ve been to the hospital and been checked out because your impact was considerable, or if your vehicle sustained $1,500.00 or more in damage and you’re sore and stiff from the accident, even if your doctor is just prescribing you pain killers and has no plans to recommend more treatment, you should see an attorney as soon as possible. Too many doctors and health plans limit the amount of treatment they will give you unless you press them into being more attentive to your injuries. A serious impact can cause significant injury and the best thing you can do is to receive the treatment that will do the most good to relieve your symptoms.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we can’t and don’t practice medicine. But we can advise you how to obtain the medical treatment you need from your health insurance plan and if you have no medical insurance or medical coverage on your car insurance, provide you with a list of doctors, therapists and chiropractors in your area who will treat you on a lien basis and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, bike, 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 if you try to handle your case yourself, 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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

The most important thing you can do as a client is to receive proper medical treatment and to start receiving it as soon after your accident as possible. If you wait more than a few days, an insurance company will claim that you must not have been very seriously hurt. If you wait a few weeks, your case is often worthless or nearly worthless. An insurance company’s view is that if you’re hurt, you’ll find some way to see a doctor and if you don’t have money and you’re hurt, you’ll at least go to a county hospital where you can be seen.

As your attorney, we can also direct you to doctors and therapists who will treat you and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case. These medical providers accept liens on your case so they know they will be paid eventually, even if you don’t have any money now.

While it’s not the policy of our law firm to suggest you receive treatment you don’t need or to build a mountain out of a mole hill as they say, we do want you to recover from your injuries and if you are truly in pain and have medical problems as a result of your accident, the best way to recover is to receive the medical treatment you need. Once you’ve recovered, you should cease your treatment. The moment an insurance company or a doctor feels you are malingering or exaggerating your symptoms, your case is ruined in our opinion. We therefore always want you to be completely honest both with us and with your medical providers.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us 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. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of your medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

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, we’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 by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

One of the first things we do in a case is 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 us for free. Once we have the police report, we then determine if it will be necessary to obtain witness statements and if it is, a private investigator hired by our office obtains these statements to support your claim. If photos of the scene would be useful to help prove the liability of the other driver and if the police did not take photos at the scene, we go out and obtain photos that can be used later in the handling of your case.

We also obtain all of 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.

When we meet with a client, we also take a good number of photographs of your car damage, and obtain from you copies of your vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When all your treatment is done, we 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, we discuss your injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize your medical bills, we discuss your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, we discuss your wage loss and how we’ve determined the amount, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are 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.

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 individuals rely on insurance companies to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay a skimpy amount on top to an individual without an attorney, those claimants are giving the insurance company 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 and goes right to the client.

Keep in mind that if 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.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We 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 we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.

If you’ve had a bicycle accident in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you know that your injuries are going to require ongoing medical treatment.

If you aren’t hurt or if you’ve only seen your personal doctor for a checkup and you’re basically fine and won’t be needing any more treatment, you really don’t need an accident attorney. The insurance company will probably pay your medical bill and give you a couple hundred dollars in what they would consider to be a nuisance value settlement.

However, if you’ve been to the hospital and been checked out because your impact was considerable, or if your vehicle sustained $1,500.00 or more in damage and you’re sore and stiff from the accident, even if your doctor is just prescribing you pain killers and has no plans to recommend more treatment, you should see an attorney as soon as possible. Too many doctors and health plans limit the amount of treatment they will give you unless you press them into being more attentive to your injuries. A serious impact can cause significant injury and the best thing you can do is to receive the treatment that will do the most good to relieve your symptoms.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we can’t and don’t practice medicine. But we can advise you how to obtain the medical treatment you need from your health insurance plan and if you have no medical insurance or medical coverage on your car insurance, provide you with a list of doctors, therapists and chiropractors in your area who will treat you on a lien basis and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, bike, 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 if you try to handle your case yourself, 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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

The most important thing you can do as a client is to receive proper medical treatment and to start receiving it as soon after your accident as possible. If you wait more than a few days, an insurance company will claim that you must not have been very seriously hurt. If you wait a few weeks, your case is often worthless or nearly worthless. An insurance company’s view is that if you’re hurt, you’ll find some way to see a doctor and if you don’t have money and you’re hurt, you’ll at least go to a county hospital where you can be seen.

As your attorney, we can also direct you to doctors and therapists who will treat you and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case. These medical providers accept liens on your case so they know they will be paid eventually, even if you don’t have any money now.

While it’s not the policy of our law firm to suggest you receive treatment you don’t need or to build a mountain out of a mole hill as they say, we do want you to recover from your injuries and if you are truly in pain and have medical problems as a result of your accident, the best way to recover is to receive the medical treatment you need. Once you’ve recovered, you should cease your treatment. The moment an insurance company or a doctor feels you are malingering or exaggerating your symptoms, your case is ruined in our opinion. We therefore always want you to be completely honest both with us and with your medical providers.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us 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. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of your medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

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, we’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 by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

One of the first things we do in a case is 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 us for free. Once we have the police report, we then determine if it will be necessary to obtain witness statements and if it is, a private investigator hired by our office obtains these statements to support your claim. If photos of the scene would be useful to help prove the liability of the other driver and if the police did not take photos at the scene, we go out and obtain photos that can be used later in the handling of your case.

We also obtain all of 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.

When we meet with a client, we also take a good number of photographs of your car damage, and obtain from you copies of your vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When all your treatment is done, we 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, we discuss your injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize your medical bills, we discuss your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, we discuss your wage loss and how we’ve determined the amount, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are 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.

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 individuals rely on insurance companies to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay a skimpy amount on top to an individual without an attorney, those claimants are giving the insurance company 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 and goes right to the client.

Keep in mind that if 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.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We 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 we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.

If you’ve had an auto accident in the city of Ladera Ranch or in a nearby community, you may be wondering when is the best time to hire a Ladera Ranch Accident Lawyer. As an accident attorney with millions of dollars in settlements and multiple million dollar or larger settlements from over thirty years of experience in or around Ladera Ranch, other nearby cities and internationally, the answer is as soon as you know that your injuries are going to require ongoing medical treatment.

If you aren’t hurt or if you’ve only seen your personal doctor for a checkup and you’re basically fine and won’t be needing any more treatment, you really don’t need an accident attorney. The insurance company will probably pay your medical bill and give you a couple hundred dollars in what they would consider to be a nuisance value settlement.

However, if you’ve been to the hospital and been checked out because your impact was considerable, or if your vehicle sustained $1,500.00 or more in damage and you’re sore and stiff from the accident, even if your doctor is just prescribing you pain killers and has no plans to recommend more treatment, you should see an attorney as soon as possible. Too many doctors and health plans limit the amount of treatment they will give you unless you press them into being more attentive to your injuries. A serious impact can cause significant injury and the best thing you can do is to receive the treatment that will do the most good to relieve your symptoms.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we can’t and don’t practice medicine. But we can advise you how to obtain the medical treatment you need from your health insurance plan and if you have no medical insurance or medical coverage on your car insurance, provide you with a list of doctors, therapists and chiropractors in your area who will treat you on a lien basis and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case.

If you’ve been the victim of a car, motorcycle, bike, 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 if you try to handle your case yourself, 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 even 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 and they will only do that if you actually have an attorney representing you.

The most important thing you can do as a client is to receive proper medical treatment and to start receiving it as soon after your accident as possible. If you wait more than a few days, an insurance company will claim that you must not have been very seriously hurt. If you wait a few weeks, your case is often worthless or nearly worthless. An insurance company’s view is that if you’re hurt, you’ll find some way to see a doctor and if you don’t have money and you’re hurt, you’ll at least go to a county hospital where you can be seen.

As your attorney, we can also direct you to doctors and therapists who will treat you and wait to be paid until the conclusion of your case. These medical providers accept liens on your case so they know they will be paid eventually, even if you don’t have any money now.

While it’s not the policy of our law firm to suggest you receive treatment you don’t need or to build a mountain out of a mole hill as they say, we do want you to recover from your injuries and if you are truly in pain and have medical problems as a result of your accident, the best way to recover is to receive the medical treatment you need. Once you’ve recovered, you should cease your treatment. The moment an insurance company or a doctor feels you are malingering or exaggerating your symptoms, your case is ruined in our opinion. We therefore always want you to be completely honest both with us and with your medical providers.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, we obtain all of 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 us to use their authorization forms. Some require us 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. Whatever fees there are, we pay them. Obtaining all of your medical records and bills is crucial to the proper handling of your case.

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, we’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 by an insurance company, we need to call each of your medical providers or their billing offices again to learn if you have any balance owing (and we are often on the phone repeatedly and for long periods of time to learn this information) and in many cases we need to send them another authorization form before they’ll tell us this information.

One of the first things we do in a case is 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 us for free. Once we have the police report, we then determine if it will be necessary to obtain witness statements and if it is, a private investigator hired by our office obtains these statements to support your claim. If photos of the scene would be useful to help prove the liability of the other driver and if the police did not take photos at the scene, we go out and obtain photos that can be used later in the handling of your case.

We also obtain all of 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.

When we meet with a client, we also take a good number of photographs of your car damage, and obtain from you copies of your vehicle repair bills and estimates and receipts for any items damaged in your vehicle.

In California you’re entitled to the cost of a replacement child seat if one was in the accident. If one was being used by a child in your case, we’ll obtain the cost for a replacement.

When all your treatment is done, we 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, we discuss your injuries and medical treatment (based on what you’ve told us and what’s contained in your medical records), we itemize your medical bills, we discuss your pain and suffering and how the injuries impacted your life, we discuss your wage loss and how we’ve determined the amount, and finally, based upon our experience we determine the amount of our demand and provide the insurance company with a deadline (40 days – the time allotted under the insurance code) for the insurance company to respond with their offer.

The demand letter varies in length. Some of ours have been close to twenty pages. Accompanying the demand letter are 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.

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 individuals rely on insurance companies to pay your medical bills, and then simply pay a skimpy amount on top to an individual without an attorney, those claimants are giving the insurance company 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 and goes right to the client.

Keep in mind that if 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.

At the Law Firm of Sebastian Gibson, Sebastian Gibson 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 to refute the talking points their insurance companies train their adjusters to use in negotiations. For that reason we don’t employ paralegals with questionable negotiating skills to handle our cases. When you retain Sebastian Gibson to handle your case, Sebastian Gibson is the attorney that negotiates your settlement.

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.

With thirty years of experience, we know there’s no need to be unpleasant to an adjuster. Yes, we often hear an insurance adjuster evaluate a case to be worth much less than we think it’s worth. But we also know when they do, that’s just their first offer. We continue to talk and communicate with the adjuster on your case. We 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 we tell them.

Unfortunately, just as there are bad attorneys out there, there are also some unsympathetic insurance adjusters and insurance companies to deal with as well. They’re supposed to get back to an attorney in 40 days with an offer after it’s presented to them with our demand package. Some take longer. And once they make their first offer, it can take weeks sometimes to reach the adjuster again to make a counter-offer. Sometimes the negotiations can take months, sometimes only days. If you want to get the most you can for your case, you need to be patient. One of the things we always try to do, is to get an 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.

The law firm of Sebastian Gibson handles personal injury cases in Ladera Ranch, 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 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 Ladera Ranch.