Maryland Crash Injury Victims 2021. More of the same ?

Thankfully, it is a new year and hopefully covid will recede from its profound societal effects. Here at Clark and Steinhorn, LLC, we are plugging away on behalf of our wonderful clients and consequently our thoughts focus on settlement or trial of their cases in 2021.

Unfortunately, the pandemic continues to cause chaos in the legal system, which is not helpful. Across the span of Allan and my careers, the insurance industry has steadily eroded the value of cases  to a point where run of the mill cases are worth 1/3 of what they were 25 years ago.

Covid has taken this to a new low. The present personal injury world often consists of insurance companies making offers that aren't calculated to fairly compense victims and we have often shrugged our shoulders, filed suit and forced the insurance companies to either make fairer offers or risk trial.

Trial is where we excel and while it can be stressful for our clients, the reward is a fair verdict from a jury of one's peers.There is some delay in litigating cases rather than settling but the payoff is fair compensation.

Unfortunately, covid 19 has meant that courts have been fluctuating between moving towards reopening and shutting down again. This has meant that virtually an entire year of trials have been delayed  with still more yet to be postponed. This has encouraged some insurance carriers to make even less adequate offers without any immediate risk to them of a far larger verdict.

Newly filed cases in many Maryland district courts aren't being fully processed as issuing a summons for the at-fault defendant requires a trial date which the courts are unable to presently provide. This is no critcism of the courts which are in an utterly untenable position but the problems which afflicted injury cases in 2020 may worsen.

So our prediction for 2021 is that case values will contnue to decline, trials will be delayed, injured crash victims will contnue to be apprehensive about getting necessary medical care and perhaps the latter half of the year will see a gradual return to semi-normalcy.