Articles Posted in Personal Injury

One of the first things people do after being in an accident is to call their insurance company. The company will ask some basic information about how it happened and who was involved. Eventually, the insurance company might ask if you will agree to a recorded statement.

A recorded statement is just what you think it is: you tell the insurance company what happened while it’s being recorded. These are almost always done over the phone. While they may seem like a harmless way to get the insurance company the information it needs to quickly resolve your claim, they can be hidden traps for the unwary.

The first thing to remember is that you aren’t required to give a recorded statement. The insurance company cannot force you to give a recorded statement.

When you’re injured and pursuing a claim, it can come as a surprise that the insurance company is requesting your medical records from before the injury. Why do they need to go through your medical history?

In most cases, they don’t. Often, insurance companies are just fishing for an excuse to say that they don’t have to pay for your injuries. They’ll scour your medical records to look for anything that they call a “preexisting condition,” even if it has nothing to do with your injury.

Sometimes, it is reasonable for an insurer to request prior medical records. For example, if someone has knee surgery a few weeks before a car accident, the accident can re-injure the same knee. In that case, it’s reasonable for an insurance company to get the records of the surgery to make sure that everything went as planned.

Proving a case is like building a house. The foundation is built, and then the walls, and then the roof. If you go in the wrong order, the house is not going to be very sturdy. Proving an injury case has the same complexity. One of the building blocks in many cases are expert witnesses. They’re used to fill in the gaps that prove an element of the case. For example: an engineer can explain what makes a product defective. Similarly, a driving instructors can explain what the rules of the road are. Other times, a doctor is used to explain how someone’s injury is likely to be permanent, and how that will affect him/her on a day to day basis.

Regardless of the type of expert, a lawyer’s job is to make sure that experts are used properly. Experts can be expensive, so its important to pick the right lawyer who knows when to use them, and also when not to use them. At Marcotte Law Firm, we have the experience of having hired hundreds of experts. We know when to hire them, and we know when to deploy them.

When injured in an accident, many people do not want their health insurance paying their medical bills. They think that the person who caused the accident should be paying medical bills as they come in. Unfortunately, that’s not how it works in Massachusetts. Most times, the person who causes an injury doesn’t make any payments until the case is settled. In the meantime, doctors and hospitals want to get paid.

This is why most clients will use their health insurance to pay the bills. That is why they pay their health insurance premiums every month: their medical bills get paid as they go, and doctors don’t have to wait until the end of a lawsuit.

Of course, if you end up getting money in a settlement for medical bills that were paid by someone else, your lawyer will have to coordinate the payments to make sure the bills are paid properly. This process of making sure medical bills are paid properly is one of the many parts of a case that involve attention to detail so that every penny goes where it should.

One of the most frequent questions we get when we settle cases for our clients is whether the money our client receives is taxable. In injury cases, most settlements are not taxable. The IRS has declared that all damages that stem from a person injury do not have to be declared on your taxes. That means that all the money you receive, no matter what it’s for, is tax-free. Even if you receive lost wages as part of your settlement, you get that money tax-free.

One of the only times we worry about taxes with personal injury settlement is when the insurance company requests a confidentiality clause. This is something where after you settle, you’re not allowed to tell anyone about the settlement. In a famous case involving Dennis Rodman (yes, that Dennis Rodman), the IRS determined that any payments for confidentiality are taxable.

This creates a situation where an otherwise tax-free payment could be deemed taxable because it includes a confidentiality clause. So, when confidentiality clauses are necessary, we always make sure to craft them in a way that eliminates that the IRS will be looking to get a portion of your tax settlement. A little extra work ends up saving our client the headache when they file their taxes.

If you’ve been in an accident and are making a claim for injuries, treat your social media just as you would when you are applying for a job. Insurance companies are constantly looking at Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to see what injured people are doing.

What they’re first looking for are obvious pictures to show that someone is or is not injured. If you’re claiming that you have a bad ankle, but you post a picture running a 5K, the insurance company is going to question whether you’re really hurt.

The dangerous part is when a picture doesn’t tell the whole story. For example, many people who are injured miss out on enjoying family functions such as weddings. Injuries mean you miss out on joining in on the celebration and dancing. But, if you muster the strength to go out onto the dance floor for one song, the insurance company is going to use that to say that you’re not injured at all.

If you’re in an accident, one thing you’ll notice is that you’ll start to get a lot of calls from insurance companies. Most of the time, they’ll start with an adjuster asking to make sure that you’re OK. They’re trained to do that to get you comfortable.

After that, there will be many questions. Where did the accident happen? How fast were you going? Who was in the car? Who was in the other car? Were you drinking?

Some are legitimate questions aimed to get your claim processed. Others are more sinister. The insurance companies will ask many questions hoping that you slip up and say that the accident was your fault or that you weren’t injured.