Personal injury cases can end in a settlement, potentially saving time and money for everyone. Going to trial is expensive for defendants and takes longer for victims, who can benefit greatly from getting their damages paid earlier in a settlement. However, even settlements can take some time to get right.
A personal injury case can settle within days of filing at the earliest, but many take months or even years to get to a good settlement. Insurance companies offer low settlements at the beginning of cases, and usually only up the settlement as the case goes on. Proper negotiations typically take at least a few months, but can potentially go on as long as a year or two before final settlement.
Call our Enterprise, NV personal injury lawyers to get started on your case today by dialing Mitchell Rogers Injury Law at (702) 702-2622.
Early Settlements in Injury Cases
When you file an insurance claim or have your lawyer contact the defendant or insurance company with a demand letter, they might offer you a settlement quickly. However, these early settlements might not be enough.
In the early stages, settlement offers might not be based on the actual damages in your case. The insurance company might not have even had time to look at your bills and pay stubs to calculate damages. Instead, they might look at the big picture of the case and choose a settlement value that would be just a bit less than what it would take to pay their lawyers to fight the case.
These are often called “nuisance settlements,” belittling claims as nothing more than a fake, unsupported nuisance in the eyes of the insurance companies. Even when they do look at your damages, they might leave out pain and suffering and stick to just the documented damages (medical bills, vehicle repairs from car crashes), meaning the settlement doesn’t cover everything.
Settlements are final, so never accept money or sign a settlement before you speak to a lawyer.
When Do Injury Cases Settle?
The process of taking an injury case to court usually goes a bit like this:
- The victim is injured, gets medical care, collects basic evidence, and calls a lawyer
- The lawyer helps them file an insurance claim and gets in touch with the insurance company. The lawyer might file a lawsuit around this time, too.
- If the defendant and their insurance company refuse to settle, we will progress the case through the courts.
- In the “discovery” stage of trial, we exchange evidence, get discovery from the defendant, and take witness depositions, exposing all the evidence in the case.
- Judges may require settlement negotiations, conferences, and mediation to try to avoid the need for trial.
- If we still can’t settle, we go to trial.
Settlements can happen at any point along that timeline, but they are most common in three areas:
- Defendants settle early to prevent the cost and public attention of fighting a case in court.
- Defendants settle after discovery, after seeing how strong the evidence against them is.
- Defendants settle in the middle of trial or while the jury is deliberating to try to save themselves from a public judgment against them.
How Long Does a Settlement Take?
If your case settles at any of the three times discussed above, the time it takes to get to that settlement will vary:
- Settlements during early negotiations can take a few weeks or months.
- Cases can take 3 to 6 months to get to discovery, or longer if the case is complex. Discovery can last a few months before the defense decides to settle. Further negotiations and settlement conferences can take up to 6 months after that.
- Cases often take a year or more to get to the trial stage for last-minute, “courthouse steps” settlements.
The vast majority of cases do settle before ever progressing through the courts, and settlement generally takes 3-9 months. However, every case is different, and our Nevada personal injury cases have been involved in cases that take years before finally reaching a settlement.
What Makes Settlements Take Longer?
Cases can take longer to get to a settlement for many different reasons, but it usually involves hangups and complications on the insurance company’s side.
These basic factors can always draw out a case, just because they complicate things and take longer to gather evidence, parse facts, and calculate damages:
- Multiple defendants or victims
- Complex fact patterns (e.g., chain reactions, multi-car pileups, complex product defects)
- Cases involving complex scientific information (e.g., defective product injury cases and medical malpractice claims)
- Complex or hard-to-prove injuries (e.g., toxic torts resulting in cancer, injuries leading to CRPS and hard-to-identify conditions).
On top of this, high-dollar cases push insurance companies to be extra sure of what happened before agreeing to pay out money.
However, the insurance company might also refuse to settle for a few complex internal reasons. For one, they might know something about their client’s actions that would absolutely kill their case if you were to ever get to the discovery stage. They might also know that the facts are against them, and that if the case went before a jury, you would likely win even more than the case is worth.
In these situations, their response is often to just delay as much as they can with the hopes that you cave and accept a lower settlement. Sometimes, in those cases, the only option is to press forward in the courts and let the judge force them along through the stages of trial.
Will My Case Settle or Go to Trial?
We cannot advise on whether your case should go to trial or settle without examining the facts and damages involved in your case. However, statistically speaking, most cases will settle.
Stronger cases often settle faster because the insurance company knows they will lose, but even slam-dunk cases may take a while to get to a fair settlement if the insurance company refuses to meet the moment. Ultimately, even simple cases could need to go to trial just because of the insurance company’s refusal to settle.
Call Our Nevada Personal Injury Lawyers for Help Today
Do not delay; call (702) 702-2622 to speak with Mitchell Rogers Injury Law’s Las Vegas personal injury lawyers today.