The nature of the personal injury business is such that attorneys need to be inured to disappointing offers from insurance companies. It is harder for the injured clients to accept the grossly inadequate offers as it is understandably personal to them.
In some instances insurance company offers are so low that that both the lawyer and client are furious and it accelerates the path to a lawsuit.
So why do they do this? Insurance companies are actually playing a multi-level sort of chess game. They know from their experience in thousands of car and truck crash cases that some injured accident victims are in such dire economic straits .that they have little choice but to grab the first offer that comes along.
While it is hard to quantify this group they do represent some significant percentage of plaintiffs. A second group are those people who elect to represent themselves and have no real notion of what their cases are worth. So insurance companies throw out offers that are insufficient and a fairly large population accept the offers.
If these offers aren't taken, negotiation ensues and depending upon which insurance company we are talking about, generally somewhat higher offers are made. This eliminates another fairly large group of claims particularly among the unrepresented and those cases in which the lawyers are not regulars in the personal injury trade.
Which leaves perhaps 40% to 50% of the total case population to be put into litigation. It is said that 95% of these remaining claims are settled without trial and obviously more is paid on these cases than at the previously described stages.
So from the insuarnce companies standpoint inadequate offers allow them to settle cases for less than their actual value or alternately cull the population of cases down to the limited group which have determined and capable lawyers and patient victims in them.
Which is why having an experienced personal injury lawyer is so important.
