FAQ

How Do I Know If I Have A Case?

There are four main “must haves” before Sobel Legal will accept your case: Injury, Negligence, Causation, and Insurance (or a highly collectible defendant):

1. There must be an Injury.  We hope that you did not get hurt and that if you did, that your personal injury is minor or temporary. Realistically, from the perspective of deciding if you have a “good” case, the more severe, the more permanent your injury is, the more compensation you are entitled to. Automobile cases require that your injury be permanent before you are paid anything for your pain and suffering. Doctors can disagree about what a permanent injury is, and often, cases go to trial over such disagreements. There are many good doctors, but not all doctors know how to evaluate injuries in terms of whether they are permanent. At Sobel Legal, we remain current in all of the medical diagnostic tests which can assist a physician in evaluating the severity of an injury and whether it is permanent. When necessary, we arrange a conference with your physicians to make sure they understand the evidentiary requirements we face when we go to trial so that they can assist you in not only getting better, but showing why you won’t. Often, it is merely a function of discussing “how do we show this injury to lay people so that they can clearly understand the injury and its effects on your patient.”
2. Your injury must be the result of Negligence.  Negligence is the failure to use reasonable care. In an automobile case, the failure to follow the traffic laws can be evidence of negligence.  In a medical malpractice case, we usually ask whether the physician missed a diagnosis which reasonable doctors would have made, whether medical interventions caused an unrelated injury which, if the procedure had been done properly and with care, the unrelated injury would not have occurred; and whether the treatment method selected by your physician was what most reasonable doctors would have done.

   One Huge But …: If a defective product caused your personal injury, we do not need to prove that the manufacturer was negligent. All we need to prove is that the product failed to perform the way a reasonable consumer would have expected and that the product had not been modified before the injury. This is often called “Strict Liability,” and we do not need to prove a failure to use reasonable care.

3. Your injury must have been caused by the negligence.  Very often, cases are defended by insurance companies by claiming that the negligent event did not cause the injury. Instead, they will argue that the injury pre-existed the event or that the injury occurred due to something that happened after the negligent act. At Sobel Legal, our experience with medical malpractice cases has taught us that a solid medical understanding of an injury, anatomy and physiology, can be very useful when proving to a jury or an insurance adjuster, that it was the negligent act which caused the injury.
4. Insurance (or a highly collectible defendant). All an attorney can do in a personal injury case is get you compensated for your losses. If there is no insurance, or if the person you are suing does not have considerable assets, an attorney cannot achieve the objective of getting you compensated. What most people don’t realize is that when we file a lawsuit, we are prohibited by law from suing the wrong-doer’s insurance carrier. With one exception, we must name the person at fault in the lawsuit. Their insurance company pays for their defense and is responsible to pay up to that person or company’s insurance limit to satisfy any judgment. In a motor vehicle collision, often the person at fault does not have insurance, and if they do, it is insufficient to cover your damages. In that case, if you have uninsured motorist coverage, we also sue your insurance company.

If a case has all four of the elements above, it qualifies for our representation and we look forward to discussing your case with you. In that process, you will understand why we ask you the questions that we do, as we analyze each of those three elements and discuss them with you. If you are unsure if you have these elements, do not hesitate to call us at 954-526-7007 or use our secure online form here, we are here to walk you through what all of this means.

About Those Costs . . .

We have a built-in desire to handle your case as cost efficiently as possible, but we still spend what we reasonably believe the case requires in order to make a recovery for your injuries. First, we want you to get what you deserve and, unfortunately, that costs money. There are medical records that we have to pay for, consultations with your physicians which must happen if we are in litigation or if you have a complex injury. If “who is at fault” is being contested, we have to hire experts. Depositions require court reporters and trials require witness fees and graphic arts. Trials are very expensive. If we lose your case (it sometimes happens), we end up paying the costs and our client does not. So, we spend only what we have to, but enough to have the impact needed to convince a skeptical jury.

Costs are in addition to our fee. Our fee is paid for our education, training and experience. It is how we are able to earn a living. We do not mark up our costs. We simply pass the costs through for the amounts we are charged, and they are not a profit center.