How To Find the Best Personal Injury Attorney in Nevada

How To Find the Best Personal Injury Attorney in Nevada

You could face expensive treatment and therapy when you get injured in an accident. At the same time, your injuries might disable you from working. This puts you in a difficult position. You need medical treatment so you can work, and you need to work so you can pay for medical treatment.

If your injuries resulted from someone else’s negligence, you have another option. You can hire a personal injury attorney and pursue a personal injury claim in Las Vegas and throughout Nevada. Your compensation will cover your medical expenses, lost wages, and diminished earning capacity. This will help you meet your daily needs while focusing on your health.

Here are some suggestions about finding the best personal injury attorney for your case in Nevada.

Gather Names of Personal Injury Lawyers Near You

Gather names of lawyers who practice injury law. You have many sources for names, including:

Lawyer Recommendations from Friends and Family

Talk to friends, family members, neighbors, and co-workers about the lawyers they used for their cases. Former clients often provide the most accurate reviews of lawyers because they have direct experience seeing their lawyers in action.

If you do not know anyone who had an injury case, talk to people about lawyers they know. Legal professionals often know who has a good reputation even if they practice in a different field. If possible, gather names of Nevada personal injury lawyers from judges, paralegals, or other attorneys.

Also, look for non-recommendations. If someone has heard negative things about a lawyer or had a bad experience with them, exercise caution if hiring that lawyer.

Legal Directories

Many legal directories, like Avvo and Martindale-Hubbell, give lawyer ratings based on algorithms or peer reviews. Lawyers are rated on Avvo from 1 to 10. A score of six or more is considered a good rating. You should look for an attorney who has an Avvo rating of 9 or higher, such as attorney Justin Watkins, who practices personal injury law in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Las Vegas Personal Injury Lawyer Justin Watkins Avvo Rating

As a Las Vegas personal injury lawyer, Justin takes pride in earning high ratings from legal directories because they reflect his knowledge, experience, and ethics in the Nevada personal injury law field.

These legal directories also provide client review ratings. Since prior clients can speak directly to a lawyer’s client-handling skills, you might also find these ratings helpful.

Lawyer Referral Services

The State Bar of Nevada operates a lawyer referral service. When you contact this service by phone or online, the service will help you identify the type of lawyer you need. The service then provides the name of a lawyer you can contact for a 30-minute consultation for $45.

The benefit of the lawyer referral service is that participating lawyers are members of the Nevada Bar and have malpractice insurance. The downside is that the referral service does not screen lawyers based on quality. You could receive the name of a good lawyer or an average lawyer from the referral service.

Online Lawyer Searches

Online searches can often identify the law firms with the largest and most successful practices in your area. But sometimes clients want more than the firm that advertises the most. The firms that have the most prominent websites do not always provide the most personalized service.

And online reviews are not always accurate. There is no way to verify that a Google or Yelp review was left by a client. Sometimes losing parties or other non-clients leave negative reviews to try to tank a lawyer’s online rating.

Meet With Your Prospects – Most Nevada Personal Injury Lawyers Offer a Free Consultation

After gathering the names of prospective lawyers in Nevada, schedule free consultations with as many of them as possible. The more lawyers you speak to, the better the chances are that you will find a lawyer compatible with you and your case.

During your free consultation, discuss your case and the lawyer’s process for representing you. 

Ask questions like:

Ideally, you will ask enough questions that you will have no surprises after you hire the attorney. You will have a much better relationship with your lawyer if you minimize the risk of misunderstandings.

The Process of Selecting a Nevada Personal Injury Attorney To Represent You

To pick a lawyer, you must understand what your lawyer will do in your case. When you know the skills your lawyer needs, you will have an easier time picking one.

Some skills your lawyer needs include:

Organizational Skills

Your lawyer will investigate your case and gather evidence. This evidence will help you prove the liability of the at-fault party and the losses you suffered. The law firm and lawyer you hire will need to keep your evidence organized so they can use it in your case.

Your lawyer will also need to keep track of the deadlines in your case. Missing a deadline can have catastrophic consequences, so your personal injury attorney must ensure that your filings and hearing dates get handled on time.

Knowledge of Personal Injury Law

You need a lawyer with knowledge of the law. The lawyer must take the facts of your case and apply the law to determine the likely outcome and value.

Experience Handling Your Type of Claim

The lawyer must have the experience to anticipate what will happen in your case and deal with it. While the same legal principles apply to most personal injury cases, you want a lawyer with experience dealing with your case’s specific issues.

For example, if you were injured due to medical malpractice, you should probably not hire a lawyer who focuses only on car accidents.

Excellent Communication Skills

Lawyers must have skills in two forms of communication. When talking to you, the lawyer must objectively assess your case and provide unbiased legal advice. When negotiating with insurance adjusters or arguing before a judge or jury, the lawyer must advocate for your position.

When you have your free consultation, note the lawyer’s ability to explain the law and how it fits your case. If a lawyer can explain things clearly to you, they will probably do a good job explaining things to a claims adjuster, judge, or jury.

Hire the Best Nevada Personal Injury Lawyer for Your Case

When you settle on a lawyer, ask for a copy of the lawyer’s fee agreement. Under Nevada’s Rules of Professional Conduct, the agreement must explain how the lawyer will calculate their fee and what you will owe at the end of the case. Review the agreement carefully and discuss any questions with the attorney.

Once you sign the fee agreement, the lawyer will start working on your case. If you choose the right lawyer, you should have a productive relationship as you pursue fair personal injury compensation.

Persistent Pain After a Car Accident: What to Do Next

Persistent Pain After a Car Accident: What to Do Next

Pain can make your life miserable and prevent you from working, performing daily activities, or even sleeping. It can also affect your mood and alter how you interact with the people around you.

More importantly, pain is your nervous system’s way of telling you that something has gone wrong. Pain after a car accident can come from many sources, and most of these possible forms of pain should signal you to take action to find their source.

Learn what to do if you experience persistent pain after a car accident.

The Body’s Pain Response

Your nerves produce pain signals that travel to your brain, which interprets them in a surprisingly detailed way. Your brain can often tell you the nature of the pain’s sensation, its intensity, and its location.

Knowing these details will help you describe your pain to your doctor. For example, different conditions cause sharp pains and dull aches. Likewise, a pain that feels like a throbbing pulse has dissimilar causes from a pain that feels like an electric shock.

These pain sensations all share a common purpose: allowing the nervous system to alert your brain that something has gone wrong in your body. Sometimes, pain is the direct result of injuries, but other times, your pain will come from diseases. Pain can even warn you of environmental dangers, such as hot surfaces or sharp objects.

The effectiveness of the body’s pain response depends on what you do with the information it provides you. When you experience pain, your body is signaling that it needs help, and if you ignore your body, you risk worsening an injury or condition that has already set off your internal alarm system.

Types of Pain

Doctors classify pain in several ways to help them identify the source of your pain and its potential treatment options. Some important pain classes include:

Acute vs. Chronic

Acute pain comes on suddenly due to an injury, disease, or condition. It goes away once doctors address the cause of the pain.

Chronic pain has a longer-term, possibly constant, duration. It may arise from an untreatable condition like rheumatoid arthritis or multiple sclerosis. It can also come from an injury that did not heal properly or is healing slowly. 

For example, a car accident can tear the cartilage in a joint. Cartilage heals very slowly, and replacement cartilage usually lacks the strength and flexibility of the original cartilage. As a result, you might have ongoing (chronic) pain in the joint.

Somatic vs. Visceral

You experience somatic pain in your musculoskeletal system. When you feel achy joints or tense muscles, you’re experiencing somatic pain.

Visceral pain comes from your organs. Examples of visceral pain include a stomach ache or chest pain.

Local vs. Referred

Local pain occurs at an injury site. If your seat belt bruises your chest in a car accident, your sternum and ribs will hurt.

Referred pain occurs somewhere different than the injury site and usually occurs due to nerve damage. You have referred pain if your neck injury causes pain in your hands and fingers. 

These characterizations make the distinction between local and referred pain one of the most important when diagnosing the cause of your pain.

Steps to Take if You Have Persistent Pain After an Accident

Pain can arise suddenly after an injury, but it often only occurs after an accident where swollen and damaged tissue sets off your body’s pain response.

A concussion happens when a jolt to your brain causes it to swell. Often, you might not experience a headache or other concussion symptoms until hours or even days after your accident.

Persistent pain after an accident can signify a severe injury. You should not assume that your pain is unrelated to your accident. You should also not believe your pain will disappear because it came on late.

If you experience persistent pain after an accident, you should do the following:

See a Doctor

A doctor can try to diagnose the source of your pain. Often, your doctor can prescribe a course of treatment or physical therapy to relieve your pain and repair your injury.

Doctors can also eliminate other causes of pain that might signify more severe injuries. Car accidents often cause seat belt injuries that usually involve a bruised chest, strained muscles, or fractured ribs. 

While painful, these conditions will not kill you; however, chest pain after a car accident could also signify internal bleeding or lung damage. These conditions can kill you without medical treatment. Seeing a doctor about your pain after a car accident could save your life.

Get Treatment

Acute pain after a car accident often means you have suffered an injury that doctors can treat. Doctors can treat fractured bones, torn ligaments, and other painful injuries relatively easily. Treatment and medication can relieve your pain and set you on the path to recovery.

Even if you choose not to treat your injury, your doctor can treat the pain it causes. For example, doctors can only fully treat a herniated disc with surgery to remove it, but they can relieve the pain without surgery by administering anti-inflammatory injections into the nerves irritated by the herniated disc.

Talk to a Lawyer

Many accident victims avoid seeing a doctor and getting treatment because they cannot afford it. At the same time, their painful conditions may prevent them from working, leaving them trapped: They cannot work until they get treatment but cannot get treatment unless they work.

If your car accident resulted from someone else’s negligence, find the best personal injury lawyer who can seek compensation for your injuries. This compensation will cover your medical costs to pay for treatment and therapy. In many cases, injury compensation will help you avoid both financial and health problems. An experienced car accident lawyer will provide more insight into what you can reasonably expect from the at-fault party.

Do Not Suffer from Persistent Pain

You can seek pain relief after a car accident. You may have a health insurance policy that will cover the treatment of your injuries and include medical payment coverage that will help you pay for said treatment. 

You can pursue injury compensation for accidents where someone else was at fault. And if you were working as a driver when your accident happened, you might even receive workers’ comp benefits. Everything becomes more difficult when you experience persistent pain, but you probably have options for getting medical treatment. You should check into all of them, as you do not need to suffer from persistent pain needlessly.

How Do You Write an Effective Settlement Demand Letter?

Personal injury accidents are extremely common. New York City alone suffered nearly 10,000 motor vehicle accidents in the month of July 2021, many of them involving serious injuries. When you have a personal injury claim, you send a settlement demand letter to the defendant or to the defendant’s insurance company. This letter describes your claim and demands that the opposing party compensate you for your losses. 

The settlement demand letter is the first step in negotiations with the opposing party that could lead to a generous settlement. That is why your settlement demand letter needs to be persuasive and effective. You should ask your lawyer to draft the demand letter. If you draft it yourself, at least allow a lawyer to review it.

Writing Tips

Following are a few tips that can help you maximize the effectiveness of your settlement demand letter:

Create an Outline of Your Settlement Demand Letter Before You Write It

A settlement demand letter is usually structured something like this:

  • A brief description of the accident
  • A description of your injuries;
  • Why the other party is responsible for your injuries
  • What medical treatment you have received, and how much it cost;
  • The amount of your lost earnings;
  • The amount of any other losses you suffered;
  • Why you’re qualified to make a claim to the insurance company despite New York’s no-fault auto insurance system; and
  • A demand for compensation.

Use the foregoing as a general guide to structuring your demand letter. You might need to vary it somewhat depending on the specific facts surrounding your claim.

Use a Polite and Professional Tone

You might be very angry. In fact, if your claim is valid, your anger is likely justified. Don’t let any of that anger creep into your settlement demand letter. Human nature dictates that such a tactic is likely to be counterproductive. Your tome should be polite and professional. That doesn’t mean you can’t be firm at the same time.

Keep It Brief, But Not Too Brief

There is no point in writing a long letter that nobody is going to read. On the other hand, it is not a good idea to assume that your reader is familiar with any of the facts of your case.

The insurance company adjuster who reads your letter is probably busy with many claims. Say everything you need to say, but say it briefly, logically, and concisely. 

Issue a Compensation Demand

Depending on the circumstances, you might demand the entire policy limit from an insurance company. You might do this if the total value of your claim clearly exceeds these limits. If your claim is below policy limits, at least pad your demand to give yourself some bargaining room. Some lawyers prefer not to insert a specific dollar demand into an initial demand letter, only a general demand for compensation.

Set a Deadline for A Response

Set a specific deadline or a response from the opposing party. You don’t need to demand that the opposing party pay the settlement by that date, but you do need to demand a response by that date. If the opposing party ignores you, you might consider filing a lawsuit in response.

Keep Copies of Everything

Keep copies of every document that you receive that is in any way related to your case. Make sure you have a copy of your medical bills, for example. If you were involved in a car accident, you might request an accident report from the police department. During settlement negotiations, you will need evidence to back up your claim. 

Send By Certified Mail, Return Receipt Requested

Send your letter by certified mail, return receipt requested, to make it more difficult for the opposing party to deny that they received it.

A Lawyer on Your Side Can Make All the Difference

If you’re trying to settle a small claim, it might not be worth it for you to seek out the services of a personal injury lawyer. If your claim involves a significant amount of money, or you suspect that it does, contact a lawyer to find out for sure. Even a free initial consultation might be enough to get a general idea of the value of your claim.