What If You Fall in a Restaurant?
If you fall in a restaurant, especially if you’re not an employee, an attorney usually files a legal action. This move is the only way to obtain the money needed to pay medical bills and other accident-related costs. Furthermore, money doesn’t cause emotional distress and other such noneconomic effects disappear. But, let’s face it. Money helps victims deal with the physical and emotional injuries that restaurant falls cause. More on that below.
Usually, a Sugar Land slip and fall lawyer settles restaurant fall cases out of court. However, as outlined below, a favorable settlement is a process, not a result. In fact, settlement negotiations require almost as much preparation as jury trials. Extensive preparation sometimes delays settlement, but this delay is worthwhile in the end. No one wants a lawyer who takes the first settlement offer or looks for an easy way out.
Pre-Filing Negotiations
Informal settlement negotiations usually begin once medical treatment is at least substantially complete. Restaurant slip-and-fall injuries often include:
- Broken Bones: Fall victims normally break their arms, because they naturally extend their arms to break their falls. This reaction often almost literally causes arm bones to snap in half. Since doctors must use metal pins, screws, and other parts to reconstruct these broken bones, physical therapy is longer and more expensive.
- Nerve Injuries: The same reaction usually severs nerves in the brachial plexus bundle, which is located under the arms. Any severe injury to these nerves usually causes permanent paralysis, often in the arms or face.
- Brain Injuries: The motion of a fall causes the brain, which is about the size of an oversize coffee mug, to slam against the skull. These injuries are normally permanent. Dead brain cells don’t regenerate. At best, a physical therapist can train uninjured areas of the brain to assume lost functions.
These extensive injuries require extensive medical treatment. A Missouri City personal injury lawyer cannot begin serious settlement negotiations until this medical treatment is at least substantially complete. If a fall injury claim settles too early, and the victim incurs future medical bills, the victim may be financially responsible for these costs.
Pre-filing negotiations are difficult as well. The insurance company doesn’t have a duty to negotiate in good faith. Therefore, low-ball offers and foot-dragging are par for the course.
Filing Legal Paperwork
This move turns the tables and pressures the insurance company into settling a case. Furthermore, when a lawyer files legal paperwork, the judge often resolves key liability and damages questions, so insurance companies can’t use them as an excuse for delay.
Liability issues in a fall often include the comparative fault defense. Some fall victims are partially responsible for their own injuries, because quite simply, they don’t watch where they’re going. Damages issues usually include the amount of compensation and what medical bills are “reasonable” in that situation.
Once again, preparation is the key. Many victims don’t watch where they’re going because, often due to low light, they can’t see where they’re going. As for the amount of compensation, despite what insurance company lawyers claim, “reasonably necessary” isn’t synonymous with “cheapest available.”
Post-Filing Negotiations
A legal filing also normally triggers a court-ordered mediation requirement. Court-supervised negotiations are much different from informal negotiations, mostly because the court enforces a duty to negotiate in good faith. Mostly because of this additional requirement, civil mediation is about 90 percent successful in Texas.
Count on a Hard-Hitting Fort Bend County Attorney
Injury victims are entitled to significant compensation. For a confidential consultation with an experienced personal injury attorney in Missouri City, contact the Henrietta Ezeoke Law Firm. The sooner you reach out to us, the sooner we start working for you.
