IRC Blog
Beating Lowball Settlement Offers: How Functional Capacity Evaluations Can Strengthen Your Personal Injury Case
Insurance companies often offer lowball settlements because they can, using various tactics to justify inadequate compensation. Even with a strong case—clear liability, solid diagnostic evidence, and documented treatment—insurance companies may undervalue a claim. They see the injured party as just a number, reducing their case to a formulaic value.
To counteract this, you need more than just thorough documentation; you need compelling evidence showing how the injury impacts your client’s life. A Functional Capacity Evaluation (FCE) provides this crucial insight. This trial-tested evaluation demonstrates how your client’s impairments affect their ability to work, manage daily activities, and engage in leisure pursuits. Armed with an FCE, you can effectively challenge lowball offers and push for a fair settlement.
Does Your Case Truly Support Your Demand Letter Settlement Request?
Drafting a demand letter is an essential step in the process of resolving legal disputes. It serves as a formal request for settlement and outlines your clients’ grievances, the desired outcome, and the consequences if their demands are not met. However, before...
Your Case Is Too Important To Entrust With Amateurs
Suffering from a personal injury can be a life-altering event causing physical pain, emotional distress, and financial burden to your client. For such cases, seeking appropriate experts becomes crucial to ensuring you have the ammunition needed to properly represent your case.
The Critical Role of ‘Cognitive Functional Capacity Evaluations’ for Brain Injuries
Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) or Post-Concussive Syndrome is unfortunately a very underdiagnosed cognitive pathological condition in personal injury. Oftentimes diagnostic imaging, neuropsychological testing, and/or cognitive therapy are relied upon heavily for diagnostic and treatment purposes. While these studies and experts can certainly help diagnose the injured persons’ condition, there is typically one very important clinical presentation that is not discovered with all of this testing. That is, how the brain injured individual is functioning in real environments, promoting the ecological validity of an evaluation.
Why Cutting Corners in Personal Injury Cases Costs Millions: The Critical Importance of Expert Life Care Planning
Many attorneys spring for a “budget” report, hoping to save a few dollars, but when attorneys don’t pay for the appropriate expert to author a thorough report for their client’s case, money is left on the table and they end up doing their client a huge disservice.
Who is the “worst nightmare” of every insurance company?
As personal injury cases continue to become more complicated, insurance companies will continue to have the leverage and “hold the cards” in terms of the nature of the settlement and its amount. Attorneys today don’t exude the same “fear factor” power to get the...
The Role of the Rehabilitation Doctor in a Personal Injury Case
From a healthcare standpoint, personal injury cases can involve a wide array of professional disciplines ranging from medical, chiropractic, physical therapy, speech therapy, and psychology to name a few. The Role of the Rehabilitation Doctor in a Personal Injury Case...
Be Aware of Bogus Medical Cost Projections
Medical cost projections are designed to follow the same methodology of a life care plan. The main difference is that medical cost projections are typically drafted for non-catastrophic injuries and life care plans service catastrophic injuries. Both reports should provide the reader with a clear and identifiable pathway to understand what their client’s future care needs are and the costs associated with them.
What level of certainty is required of your medical malpractice expert?
What level of certainty is required of your medical malpractice expert? Experts on the stand define the certainty of their opinion in two similar but vastly different terms. These terms are “Possibly related” and “Probably related”. In context, they’re voiced about...
This important damages’ expert can make or break your case! Evolution of a life care planner.
Determining future medical care for your client has traditionally been calculated by either a certified life care planner or by the law firm itself. In the past, a life care planner was hired toward the end of the case’s lifecycle as a last-ditch effort to avoid trial.
What do you get when you combine a certified life care planner with a doctor that has 20 years of experience treating personal injury patients?
The answer to this question is simple. You get the only life care planner you can trust. When someone suffers an impairment they may be facing both a physical and functional abnormality, loss, or disfigurement, as well as the potential for psychological damage from...
A medical diagnosis is only as good as the functional assessment that backs it up
As you can see, while it is important to have a medical diagnosis, the diagnosis itself is only as powerful and objectively reliable as the functional assessment that backs it up. In personal injury, the hardest aspect to prove to an insurance adjuster or jury member is how the person’s accident and subsequent diagnosis affect their daily life.
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