Mʏᴇʀs & Cᴏᴍᴘᴀɴʏ
Anyone Can be Slow
My dad was fond of saying: "Anyone can be slow."
A substantial amount of childhood was spent learning how to sweep up quickly, effective patterns for blowing leaves, how to avoid the "lazy man's load," etc.
Those lessons wired my mind for efficiency. One of the bedrock principles at our firm is finding out insurance limits as soon as possible. And then sending demand letters.
A client decided to hire a lawyer because the lawyer’s office was close to the client’s house.
Sidebar: Geography shouldn’t be a decison-maker when it comes to hiring lawyers. Some people have this impression that they're going to stop in to shoot the shit. But in reality, most clients never even step inside our office.
The lawyer talked a good game and had an impressive track record. But a lot of those victories came in the 1980s and 1990s.
The lawyer didn’t do anything with the clients’ case for six months. Unlike wine, personal injury cases don’t get better with time. And clients need money now, not later. Delay only benefits insurance companies.
The client got impatient and hired us. Within weeks we’d settled the client’s case for policy limits from both the at-fault driver and the client’s own UIM carrier.
What made this possible? Was it because we knew more about the law than the attorney who crushed 30 or 40 years ago?
No. I'm sure we don't know more about the law.
But what we do know is that anyone can be slow. What was really important in this case was to find out the policy limits. We found out that the limits were low and our clients damages were high.
There was no reason to strategize, gather more information, interview doctors or track down witnesses. The insurance limits told the whole story.
It makes sense to find out how much money there is to get and ask for it as soon as possible. And that’s exactly what we did.
Two claps for following childhood lessons. The same principles that apply to yard work are amazingly transferrable to running a personal injury practice.