8 Questions to Ask Your Personal Injury Attorney

I think that most people that call us have never been in an accident before, never called an injury attorney before. So when they get on the phone with us, they don’t necessarily know what questions to ask. Would you agree with that, Bill? I would. More often than not, the person at some point during the call says, I’ve never been through this before. I’m not sure what to do. Hi, everybody. My name is Cassidy Lewis, and I have Mister Bill O’Mara, a partner here at Cooper Hurley Injury Lawyers. And we’re just going to go over eight questions that you need to ask an injury attorney if you are ever in an accident. Now, we want you to call Cooper Hurley injury lawyers. Right. But these questions you should ask, any injury is hurting, and you should feel comfortable with their answers. Bill is going to answer them as if you were calling us. So we’re going to hop right into this. Okay, sounds good. All right, number one question I think we get when they call us, when I call you, does it cost, is the initial consultation free? The answer is yes. You’d be surprised at how many people before they’ll even let me say anything, or they’ll say anything to me. They say, how much will this cost me? And that’s just the reputation law firms have. And even though we say it real big on our website, free consultation, people want to be sure. But I can assure you, when you call Cooper Hurley injury lawyers, we will never send you a bill for a free consultation with us. Any consultation with us, we’ll gladly chat with you about your case and help if we can. Or port you in the right direction if we can. Perfect. Okay, so we got the main question, and we’re going to start moving towards some of the accident questions. Right. With some accidents, sometimes the person at fault will dispute it. Sometimes facts are vary depending on the person that you’re speaking to. Do we here at Cooper Hurley injury lawyers have an investigator that we work with? We do. He’s an exceptional investigator. We’ve worked with him for years. If someone’s too injured to meet with us in person, or they don’t have reliable Internet access to sign up with us over the Internet, we have an investigator who can come out and see you, sign you up as a client, and we can get working. He can also jump on the case right away. A prompt investigation for a case is critical to success sometimes, and he’s skilled at finding witnesses, getting people to talk to him, doing a thorough investigation to put the case in the best posture possible for success. Excellent. Excellent. Okay. There’s the accident that took place. Right. The cars involved, all of that jazz. Now, the other side of that is dealing with the insurance company. And I’ll be honest with you, before I started working here, I didn’t know half of and probably still don’t know half of all of the intricacies of insurance. Are you experienced? Are the lawyers here experienced with insurance? We are. I mean, there’s. There’s really two aspects of it. There’s knowing insurance laws and how they would apply to your case. And with that finding all the insurance possibly available to you, whether it be the insurance for the responsible person, your own insurance, or maybe a family member’s insurance, can, you know, get involved. So there’s knowing the law and how to apply it and how to use that to benefit your case. But we also have the added benefit, and I feel like edge of we have an employee here who works on files and helps files, who actually worked for a big insurance company for over 20 years. He was a manager. He knows how insurance companies operate internally, and that comes in handy very, very frequently. He knows how to speak their language. He knows how they operate. He knows what they are looking for when they’re evaluating a claim. And then we add that information to our presentation to them to hopefully leverage bigger settlements for our clients. Right. And that big insurance company, it was GeIco. So one question that we get very often when someone has called us is, have you handled my type of case before? Chances are the answer is going to be yes. Okay. We exclusively practice personal injury law from the plaintiff’s perspective. And what I mean by that is we represent the injured people. We never represent the insurance companies, the big businesses. We don’t help them. We help those who’ve been injured through another’s negligence. Common examples are just car, truck, motorcycle accidents. Negligent operation of a car, truck or motorcycle causes your injury. We also handle a lot of cases involving injuries at businesses like slip trip and falls, at hotels, grocery stores, department stores, other businesses. That’s largely what we do. But generally, any sort of harm caused to a person through another’s negligence through no fault of their own, that’s personal injury law, and we help the injured people. Now, have we handled your type of case? We’ve handled thousands of cases. Chances are we have handled a case like yours. And if not, chances are we know someone who has, and we’ll get you pointed in the right direction by either referring you to them or teaming up with that lawyer, and you’ll then get the benefit of our experience and that other law firms experience within their specialty. That’s awesome. When a person has been injured in a car accident, for example, we’ll use that. It is again, new to them and one of the most difficult times they’ve ever gone through. Ever been through, you know, possibly of missed work, car may be totaled in pain, multiple doctor’s appointments. One question that you should be asking that law firm is, how will you keep me informed on my case? How would we answer that here? Bill, as dedicated to the law as we are, and knowing the law and knowing how to apply to your case to get you a great result, we’re mindful of everything you’ve been through. So customer service, empathy, understanding what you’ve been through and being there for you is very important to us. We pride ourselves in that. So our staff is in touch with our clients on a very regular basis. Our clients have access to our emails, our phone numbers. Our paralegals have access to the lawyers calendars. So if I’m in trial or I can’t get to you that moment, they can pull up my calendar on the spot and schedule a time for you to chat with me at a time that works best for you. So we make ourselves very available to you and, you know, we give you the attention that your case and you deserve. Absolutely. When hiring an attorney, those multiple means of communication, phone, email, and text messaging. Here, the paralegals and attorneys do text a great deal as well. It’s very, very, very important. I love this question. And they, when someone gets into an accident, they call us. They word it different ways, but essentially, has your firm received any awards for anything, for their work? Has your firm received any awards? Now, what awards have, what are some of the awards that we’ve received? You know, there’s a lot of legal publications that will give awards to different lawyers for their accomplishments. Some of them, the publication decides who should get it. Others you are voided on by your peers. We’ve, I’d say, received or at least been recognized in nearly all those publications. The one I’m most proud of, though, is this year we were voted Norfolk and Virginia beach best law firm by the Virginia pilots. So that’s not just stuffy lawyers telling us how great we are, that’s the people we represent voting in these polls telling us that we’re doing a good job. And that means a lot to me. It’s the best one. One very, very, very important question is just that knowing what past clients have had to say about you now, if someone were to call our office, where would they be able to see client testimonials, reviews, anything like that, oftentimes before. They even call us, they’ve already found our reviews. But I do get this question sometimes. And you can find our reviews on cooperhurley.com. You can Google Cooper Hurley reviews, and you’ll find hundreds of reviews online, whether they’re on Avo, Google reviews. I think Yelp even has Cooper Hurley reviews on it. Facebook, they’re all over the place. You’ll be able to find them. You won’t have any issues. Okay, so we started the question. We started, we started today’s video with the question, how much does it charge when I call you? Right? When I call you that first time. We’re going to end today’s video with, how do you charge for handling my case? How do I pay you? How does someone injured an accident? How do they pay you? So, you know, lawyers can be expensive, and we don’t charge people money upfront. What we do is something called a contingency fee, okay? And what we do is we charge a percentage of the recovery, whether it be a settlement or we go to trial and we win your case in front of a judge or a jury, we charge a percentage of whatever we can get for you. So there’s no money charged to you upfront in terms of attorney’s fees. And if we’re unsuccessful, which thankfully doesn’t happen often, but it can happen, there’s no guarantees. You don’t owe us any money for our time. So that’s how our fee arrangement is. Perfect. You guys, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you, Bill, for sort of doing those faqs. If you guys have any additional questions for us, please make sure to reach out to us at 757-333-3333 or visit our website at cooperhurley.com, and we will see you guys next time. Thank you, Cooper Hurley injury lawyers 757-333-3333.