There are many reasons why you might want to contact and hire a personal injury lawyer. These situations happen frequently, which is why the personal injury is an area that attracts so many attorneys. Many make a comfortable living dealing exclusively with these cases.
However, just because you approach a personal injury lawyer, that doesn’t guarantee they will take you on and pursue the lawsuit you want to bring. In this article, we’ll explain what personal injury lawyers do, why you might want to hire one, and why some of them won’t take on a case that you bring to them.
We’ll also go over what you can do if a lawyer turns you down and won’t represent you.
What is a Personal Injury Lawyer?
Before we get into why a personal injury lawyer might turn you down, we’ll first explain what this attorney does. A personal injury lawyer provides expert legal services to individuals who say that a government agency, person, business, or any other entity harmed them. This individual might hire such a lawyer if they allege physical harm, but also mental or psychological trauma in some cases, especially if that trauma profoundly impacted their life.
As you might imagine, this sort of lawsuit comes up a lot in the world. There are always individuals, companies, etc., that harm people, and those people need lawyers to represent them, assuming they have a valid reason to sue. These individuals don’t usually know the law, and they don’t know how to proceed with a lawsuit.
The personal injury lawyer can meet with the individual who alleges a sustained injury and decide whether or not to represent them. There is really no guarantee that an attorney will agree to accept you as a client, but this is normally how the process starts once you decide you’re going to try and hold someone legally liable for what happened.
Why Would You Need to Hire a Personal Injury Lawyer?
There are also nearly limitless reasons why you might want to hire a lawyer and bring this lawsuit variety against an individual or entity. For instance, maybe you fell while on someone’s property and hurt yourself. If you feel they did not maintain that property and allowed it to fall into disrepair, this is a typical personal injury lawsuit scenario.
Maybe you’ll try to hire a personal injury lawyer after a bad car wreck. You might allege that the other driver was sending a text message when they plowed into you. Perhaps the accident hurt you so badly that now you can’t work. You can sue for lost wages as well as the physical pain and suffering which you now endure.
It would take a long time to go over all the other examples, but you get the idea. It is time to consider hiring a personal injury lawyer when someone or something harms you, and you feel like you can tie that person or entity directly back to your current condition.
Why Might a Personal Injury Lawyer Turn You Down?
Just because you walk into a personal injury lawyer’s office, though, and tell them about what happened to you, that does not necessarily mean they will take your case. There are just as many reasons why an attorney might turn you down as there are for why you came to see them in the first place.
For example, maybe someone or something harmed you, but the lawyer does not feel there is any way to prove that in court. Perhaps the law states that according to what happened, you bear the brunt of all of the responsibility and not the person or entity you want to accuse in a courtroom.
The lawyer might feel like you have flimsy evidence, so you will probably lose your case. You can often hire personal injury lawyers on a contingency basis, meaning you put no money down, and you only pay them if they can win money for you. If a lawyer feels like you have little chance to win your case, they won’t bother dedicating themselves to it.
The lawyer might simply have too many other clients at the moment. Maybe they feel like you have a valid claim, but they have too much on their plate right then. It’s also possible that the attorney feels you have a good case, but your lawsuit won’t get the lawyer much money in the end. A powerful, high-profile lawyer might only take big-money suits once they reach a certain notoriety level.
What Can You Do if a Personal Injury Lawyer Turns You Down?
At this point, you may wonder what you can do if you take your case to a lawyer, and they turn you down for one of the reasons we mentioned. Maybe they don’t even give you a reason at all. That’s their prerogative.
If so, you can talk to a different lawyer. If the first attorney you approach says they feel like you have a case, but they’re too busy to take you on as a client, they might recommend a colleague. You would hope that the lawyer you talk to will be frank with you about your options.
Maybe they feel like they’re too big for your small and unimportant case. If so, you can certainly look into some other lawyers. Most of them will offer you a free consultation, and it’s in your best interest to go to at least a couple more to get a feel for whether you should continue along this path.
It’s also possible that you might drop the lawsuit idea if you see more than one personal injury lawyer, and they all tell you the same thing: there’s no one and nothing to sue. Sometimes, from a legal standpoint, you caused your own injury. If so, that might frustrate you, but there may not be any individual, group, or entity from which you can get compensatory money.
