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“…not everyone needs a lawyer for their case, but everyone needs to talk to a lawyer about their case. People tend to think they can do this on their own, which they can but it will not work out as planned.”
As part of Avvo’s ongoing mission to provide transparent and comprehensive legal assistance, we’re pleased to launch Avvo 1-on-1, a new question-and-answer article series featuring candid interviews with attorneys in various specific fields of law.
The goal of the series is to humanize intimidating law topics for the everyday person through stories, anecdotes, and other real-life experiences shared by attorneys.
For the first Avvo 1-on-1 we spoke to Richard Hastings, a personal injury attorney who has been practicing for 35 years in the state of Connecticut.
Hastings is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and the Fordham University School of Law. He has also received negotiation, mediation and alternative dispute resolution training at the Harvard Law School, MIT, the Windsor Faculty of Law in Toronto, Canada, Quinnipiac University School of Law and the Center for Mediation in Law. He has also been trained as a negotiation instructor at the Harvard Law School.
Q: What are the first steps a person should take after being in a car accident?
A: At the accident site if the police officer asks, “Do you want to go to the hospital?” You should say, “Yes.” Number one, you want to make sure that you don’t have some horrible problem, you go home and then you later find out that the injury has gotten worse because you didn’t go to the hospital. The first thing you want to do is get checked medically.
One of the problems these days is a lot of people either have state insurance or no insurance. So, they don’t want to go to the doctor or if they have private insurance they have high deductibles. So, people are saying things like, I don’t want to use my insurance, they won’t accept my insurance or I’m going to have to pay out of pocket. So, that’s a big challenge that clients face.
You also want to tell the police officer at the accident site why the other driver was at fault. When the insurance adjuster of the at fault driver contacts you, you do not want to talk to that person because what the insurance adjuster will say is, “We’re so sorry about the accident. I need to get some more information from you before I can process your claim. I need to know what happened, what medical care and treatment you had and I need to know what prior injuries that you had.”
They don’t need any of this information from you. They can get the police accident report that has all the information, they can get the medical records that have all the information but they want to have you say that you’re responsible for this accident in some way shape or form, at least partially. Like, you could’ve hit the brakes or you were going a little bit over the speed limit or you could’ve turned left or you could’ve turned right because they want to implicate you so they don’t have to pay you as much money. It’s a business.
Q: What is the benefit of having a lawyer for a personal injury case?
A: I tell people this, not everyone needs a lawyer for their case, but everyone needs to talk to a lawyer about their case. People tend to think they can do this on their own, which they can but it will not work out as planned.
There was an independent institute that did a study on people that were represented by lawyers and people that were unrepresented and the results of the study found that people that were represented by lawyers ended up with three and a half times the money in their pockets even after they’ve paid legal fees and cost than people that represented themselves.
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