While on a recent trip to southern California, I met up with an old friend who just graduated from law school. While in law school, he really enjoyed his criminal classes and decided that he wanted to be a criminal defense attorney. While I was talking with him, he told me how long his days are and how he would get calls in the middle of the night from his clients needing help because they had just been arrested for something. I began to tell him about how easy personal injury law is and why he hadn’t decided to be a PI attorney. “The money is easy and you work 9 to 5″ I told him.
He told me that the reason he had stayed away from personal injury law was because there were too many PI attorneys. It was a highly competitive industry. If you don’t believe me, open the phone book and look at how many personal injury attorneys there are.
So why are there so many personal injury attorneys? Below is the main reason there are so many attorneys and I will offer a challenge to the insurance companies to cut that number in half:
Greed – Insurance companies don’t want to give you the information you need to settle your injury claim. The more information you have, the more money you will demand for your injuries. If you have no idea what you are doing, you will be leaving money on the table. That extra money goes to the insurance company as profit.
Instead of assisting you in your claim, adjusters are trained to deny and delay. The goal is to get you frustrated. If they can get you to throw your hands in the air and toss in the towel, they will have won. You will be chomping at the bit to get your claim over with that you will accept whatever offer comes your way. Winning to the adjuster means bigger profits for the insurance companies.
Because the main objective of insurance companies is to line their pockets with record breaking profits, they created a country full of personal injury attorneys. The money is easy for personal injury attorneys because they know what they are doing and the insurance companies are making it easy for them to get clientele. They are practically forcing these injured people to seek out the help of a personal injury attorney because the insurance companies don’t want to provide that assistance or give them guidance. They are more concerned about chasing that elusive dollar.
If the insurance companies wanted to wipe out half of the personal injury attorneys in this country, all they need to do is change their policies. Treat the injured person with respect instead of looking at them as a criminal trying to make a fraudulent claim. Give the injured person a real offer instead of a quick $500 dollars to see if the “sucker” will take it. It’s really that simple, but I have a feeling this country will be full of personal injury attorneys for a long, long time.
