Frequently Asked Questions About Severe Personal Injury

Answers from a Dallas Personal Injury Lawyer

After a wrongful injury in Texas, there are always questions about what to do next. The Dallas personal injury attorneys at The Lenahan Law Firm have provided some of those frequent questions and answers. The truth is these answers may not be the ones you ultimately need. We’ve never seen two cases that are exactly alike. Severe injuries deserve premiere care, and we specialize in providing the best care for our clients. Call and let’s talk about it. Be sure to ask for Marc.

What Should I Do After an Accident in Dallas?

The answer to this one isn’t obvious, but it is simple enough, and we feel strongly about it. There are two important steps. One, make every medical care decision by completely IGNORING the possibility of any legal battles ahead. Instead, let all the medical choices be guided only by the question of, “What is right thing for us medically?” If your law firm can’t find a way to help you, or if they secure a billion dollars, neither result will matter as much as knowing that you put health first.

But, how are you supposed to IGNORE the legal issues when you’re worried about the future and the injustice? Won’t evidence be lost if we don’t choose a lawyer right away? Aren’t the defendants already at the location studying the details? Yes and yes. That’s why you should then move on to step two. The way you ignore the legal battles is to choose a law firm that you trust. That way you can just focus on the healing.

What Qualifies as a "Severe" Injury Case?

The Lenahan Law Firm is different. Because we believe severe injuries deserver premier care, we only represent a handful of clients at a time. The billboard firms can have thousands of clients per attorney. Here, pretty much always less than 10 clients per attorney. What’s the threshold? If an injury resulted emergency surgery, or worse, then we consider it severe, which means that you deserve premiere care.

How Much Is My Personal Injury Claim Worth?

The answer to this points to a common failing of law firms. Most severely injured clients will be told that the maximum value of their case is the amount of insurance of the person who caused the injury, plus any extra insurance the injured person might have. In the instance of a car collision, that number is often $30,000 or $60,0000. For 18-wheelers it is typically $750,000 or $1,000,000.

Why do we consider that a "failing?" Well, because there might be more, way, way, way more; but attorneys with hundreds of thousands of clients do not have the time to try to find out. You will be told to take what you are first offered, and you will never know if that advice was correct. It is true that we can’t find “way more” nearly as often as our clients deserve, but we certainly try to, and we have succeeded many times.

How Long Will It Take to Resolve My Lawsuit?

Give us a call and, together, we can make an educated guess about what we see as the most likely scenarios. But, during that call, expect us to mention that two of our largest cases had very different timelines. One took almost four years to secure over $6.5m (we were told there was only $50,000 in insurance), while the other took only four months to secure $10,000,000. To talk through our thoughts on your case, call the team at The Lenahan Law Firm.

How Much Will It Cost to Hire a Dallas Personal Injury Lawyer?

When you’re not working and facing a mountain of medical bills, how in the world can anybody want to add a legal bill to the pile? At The Lenahan Law Firm we have never asked a single client to ever write us a check. Never. We take cases on a contingency fee basis. Meaning that you won't pay for our legal services up-front or out-of-pocket. In fact, you won't pay at all unless we are successful in reaching a favorable resolution on your behalf.

Simply put: if we don't recover compensation for you, we don’t get paid.

When we are able to secure recoveries for our clients, we get paid by retaining a percentage of the recovery, plus our expenses. "What about your expenses if you don’t get a recovery for me?" Then we give you an apology for letting you down. An apology, not a bill. Our investment in your case is our gamble. If we can’t make it work, that gamble is our loss, not yours.

How Long Do I Have to File a Claim?

According to the Texas Civil Practice & Remedies Code Section 16.003, there is a two-year statute of limitations on personal injury cases. This means you have two years from the date of your injury to file a claim, or you may lose your right to compensation. There are some exceptions to this two-year rule, including if the injury victim was a minor at the time of injury. In this case, they have two years from the date of their 18th birthday to file a claim. Likewise, if an individual is found legally mentally incapable at the time of injury, they have two years from the date of mental recovery to file a claim. Last, if the defendant leaves the state after the accident and before the case can be filed, their time of absence is usually not counted in the two-year time limit.

What Damages Can I Recover?

There are three main types of damages, or compensation, that injury victims can pursue after sustaining an injury, economic, non-economic, and punitive. Economic damages, also called special damages, compensate for financial losses associated with suffering an injury such as medical expenses, any future medical expense, and the inability to work. Non-economic damages, as the name suggests, compensates for more abstract losses such as pain and suffering and emotional distress. Given the fact that non-economic damages are abstract in nature and not easily quantifiable, they are also called general damages. Punitive damages, the last type of compensation available, differs from the first two in that their main purpose is to punish the negligent party as opposed to compensate the injured party for a loss. As such, punitive damages are not often awarded and are usually reserved for cases where the defendant knew their actions would cause harm but did them anyway.