Why do Personal Injury Claims take a long time to resolve?



There are several reasons why a personal injury claim may take several weeks to months to resolve.


  1. Your personal injury claim is contingent on your bodily injuries. Sometimes a person is highly injured due to a fall or car wreck. Those injuries may take months to heal. Considering the treatment and the doctors involved, personal injury attorneys may chose to wait until your treatment is complete to order all medical records and bills to send to the other party’s insurance company.
  2. Medical records and bills retrieval takes a long time. Some hospitals and doctor’s offices take weeks to get the medicals records and bills to the requesting attorney. The attorney, like a personal injury or car accident lawyer Arlington TX trusts, also has to ensure that the records received are complete.
  3. Review of Medical Records is a must. Personal injury attorneys, via their paralegal or assistants, have to review all of the records and bills to ensure the information they seek is in the records. In order to meet the causation element of the negligence claim, the attorney should be able to prove that all of the injuries claimed are related to the incident. Medical records (doctor’s notes) are the best way to prove that element.
  4. Drafting a demand. Depending on a particular law firm’s demand drafting requirements, it may take a few days to draft a demand. Some law firms only include a couple of pages of information in their demands, while others thoroughly review and include all medical treatment information related to the incident to ensure a readable summary for the adjuster to consider.
  5. Correspondence with insurance company. Adjusters typically handle bodily injuries claim for traditional insurance companies. In a commercial policy case, an attorney may handle. Every adjuster has several hundred bodily injury claims they handle for the insurance company. Sometimes it takes them a couple of weeks to get back to the attorney’s office with an offer or denial of a claim.
  6. God forbid, litigation. If an offer is a low-ball offer, or complete denial, and your attorney recommends that you file suit in order to get compensated for your claim, that could take at least 1-2 years, if not longer, to come to a close. Litigation runs on 5 different calendars – your attorney’s, yours, opposing attorney’s, opposing party’s, and finally, the Court’s calendar. You can only imagine how hard it might be to get everyone on the same date together to litigate your matter, as well as conduct hearings and mediations.


brandy-austin-law-firmThanks to our friends and contributors from Brandy Austin Law Firm, PLLC for their insight into personal injury claims.