Video Summary
This video explains the personal injury claim process in Louisiana, highlighting the advantages insurance companies have in experience and information over individuals. The attorney outlines how legal representation assists with property damage, including hidden mechanical issues and diminished-value claims, as well as securing rental vehicles and arranging medical treatment. Attorney Lee Rudin emphasizes the need to seek medical attention to document injuries (“showing your work”) and warns against accepting quick, low settlement offers before the full extent of physical and vehicle damage is known. The video also explains that attorneys work to relieve clients of financial stress, such as lost wages, and operate on a contingency basis, meaning they profit only if they improve the client’s settlement outcome. Finally, it reassures viewers that seeking compensation targets the insurance company, not the individual driver.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- Why should I hire an attorney instead of handling the claim myself?
Insurance companies and adjusters have significantly more experience and information than the average individual, having handled these claims “millions of times.” An attorney levels the playing field and knows the entire process from start to finish. - What if I don’t have health insurance or don’t want to use it?
Many personal injury lawyers have relationships with medical providers and physicians who are willing to treat people injured in car wrecks, even if they do not have health insurance or prefer not to use it. - Can I get financial help if I can’t work after an accident?
Yes. An injury attorney can connect you with a company that provides an advance on your case to cover expenses like rent and bills while you are unable to earn income. - How do insurance companies assess vehicle damage?
Insurers may ask you to use an app to take photos and videos for a remote assessment, or they may send you to a body shop. However, photo analysis might not reveal hidden damage lurking underneath the hood or frame. - What is “diminished value”?
Diminished value refers to the loss in a vehicle’s resale value resulting from an accident. Attorneys can use tools to compare the vehicle’s pre-accident and post-accident value to recover the difference from the insurance company. - Will the insurance company pay for my rental car immediately?
Not necessarily. If you rely on the other driver’s insurance, they may delay authorizing a rental until they investigate liability, which requires a police report. This process can take days or weeks, so having your own rental coverage is highly recommended. - Why is it important to see a doctor immediately after an accident?
You need to document how the accident affected you physically, mentally, and emotionally. If you do not seek treatment, the insurance company will argue that you were not hurt, regardless of how you say you feel. - Why shouldn’t I accept a quick settlement offer from the insurance company?
Insurance companies often make low initial offers to avoid paying more later. Injuries or hidden vehicle damage (like expensive sensors) may not become apparent until days after the accident. - How long do I have to file a lawsuit in Louisiana?
In Louisiana (and Texas), you generally have two years from the date of the wreck to file an injury lawsuit, giving you time to properly assess your damages before settling. - Do I have to pay the attorney if they don’t get me more money?
The firm’s policy is to review any offer the client received; if the attorney cannot secure a better net result (after fees and costs) than what the client was already offered, they will advise the client to take the original offer. - Will suing for an accident hurt the person who hit me?
Generally, no. Most drivers carry insurance for this exact purpose. The compensation comes from the insurance company, which can afford to pay, rather than directly from the individual who made the mistake.
Transcription of the Video
From car accident to payout, what’s the injury claim settlement process in Louisiana? So if you’ve been in a car accident or any kind of accident, the first thing that’s going to happen in your mind is you’re going to say, “Well, what do I do?” And that’s where we come in. The insurance company, whether it’s your insurance company or the other driver’s insurance company, they’ve been down this road millions of times collectively as a big company, or maybe even the individual adjuster that you’re working with. You’re already up against someone with more information and experience than you have; that’s why it’s good to hire a lawyer like us who knows how the whole process works. But for your benefit, we’re going to explain, from A to Z, what the entire claims process is like, and then, if God forbid, what the lawsuit process is like.
So let’s go back to the beginning: you get into a car wreck, what are some of the issues? Your car is damaged; you may need a rental or just need it repaired. It’s drivable, but it needs repairs. Okay, that’s part of the process, part of what an injury attorney and the firm will help you with. Then you’re saying, “Well, wait a minute, I don’t feel so great, what do I do about that?” If you have health insurance, you can certainly go to your doctor or your chosen hospital and use it, but many folks don’t have insurance that would allow them to see certain doctors, or they don’t feel comfortable using it. Lawyers like us have relationships with different providers around town that we know will treat people who have been in car wrecks or other types of injury-causing incidents, cuz some doctors won’t; they don’t want to be involved. So that’s why it’s good to reach out to an attorney to see if they have any contacts among physicians or other medical providers who can help you.
Right, so we’ve talked about issues with your property damage, issues with you physically. You may also have concerns about missed time from work and lost wages. An injury attorney can set you up with a company that can give you an advance on your case to hold you over until you can get back to work, because we understand that the bills don’t stop. Rent comes due, your mortgage comes due, your water bill, your power bill, your cell phone bill, they don’t stop just cuz you were in a wreck. But the wreck might have prevented you from being able to go to work, and you need that income to pay your bills, to feed your kids. We understand that, and we try to set you up so you can live as comfortably as possible under the circumstances, but understand, you know, these cases are not designed to be windfalls; they’re designed to make you as whole as possible and to compensate you for what has happened to you. Part of that may be a struggle; that is where the pain and the suffering really do come in. It’s not something we want for you, but it is a reality in many, many, many cases.
Let’s talk about the property damage. Your car gets damaged, let’s say it’s not destroyed or what insurance companies call a total loss. The insurance company’s going to want to assess the vehicle. Some companies will say, “Hey, we can do it by a photo analysis. Log in to our app. You’re going to take some photos, walk around, take a video, and then our appraiser will tell you what they think the damage is. We’ll either offer to pay you, or we’ll tell you you have to go to a body shop”. Depending upon the nature of the crash, that might be sufficient. In many instances, it’s not because what you should be worried about is what’s lurking underneath the frame, underneath the hood. Is there something you can’t see that only a body shop could see when they looked at the vehicle, went underneath, opened the hood, investigated the engine, maybe took some pieces apart? I wouldn’t accept a property damage settlement unless I knew it had been thoroughly investigated beyond that.
Beyond actually fixing the vehicle, if your car has not been in a wreck before, then the fact that you got in one will lower its value if you choose to sell it again. We call that the diminished value of your vehicle. Something we do for our clients is we have a variety of different tools to analyze your vehicle and compare what it cost before, excuse me, what its value was before the wreck, and what its value is after. And we take that, we get a report with comparable vehicles, and we’ll present that to the insurance company in what’s called a diminished value report and a diminished value claim. And say to the insurance company, “You need to pay Joe or Mary the amount of the difference,” meaning what the car was worth before the wreck versus what it’s worth now, cuz if they go to sell it, they’re not going to have that same value. So that’s the second part of the property damage claim.
When your car is in the shop, the insurance company owes you an obligation to put you in a rental vehicle if that car was your vehicle to go around town, to go to work, to take your kids to soccer practice, whatever. But that responsibility is limited, meaning that if they tell you that the vehicle is a total loss. They send you a check, you’re only going to have that rental vehicle for a short period of time. Then it becomes your obligation to find a new replacement vehicle, and they’re not going to agree to pay for that rental any more than they have to. Similarly, if your car is in the shop, that’s the length of time that you’re going to have the rental vehicle. The best thing you can do is have rental coverage on your own policy because if you go and rely on the other driver’s insurance, there will be a period of time could be a day, could be several days, it could be weeks before they even agree to put you in a rental and your car in the shop because they may say to you, “We have to investigate liability”. And the only way we can investigate who is responsible for the accident is by getting the police report. Well, in Louisiana and Texas, it can take days, sometimes weeks, for the report to be ready, so you could be without a vehicle for weeks if your car is not drivable and you don’t have your own rental coverage. I recommend you put rental coverage on your car now.
Talking about your injuries: if you’re hurt, the most important thing is to get yourself checked out. If you have to go to the ER, go. If you have to go to an urgent care, go to an urgent care. If you can wait, go to your primary care physician or come to us, and we can set you up with an initial provider who can assess what might have happened to you physically, mentally, or emotionally. You should see somebody to document how the accident, the wreck, has affected you physically, mentally, and emotionally. Once you do that, part of your responsibility is to continue to treat for as long as you are injured. If you don’t, the insurance company will say you’re not hurt. Doesn’t matter what you say or how you say you feel; if you don’t show the insurance company what actually happened to you by going to the doctor and addressing your pain complaints, they won’t give you credit for it.
You know, I think back to when I was a kid, and you were doing a math problem in school, the teacher would say, “I don’t care if you got the right answer, I need you to show your work”. That’s a lot of what we do with injury claims. We need to show the insurance company, and, if we ever get there, the other lawyers, that this client was hurt, and look what they did to try to get better. Look what they did to try to lessen the amount of lost wages they had. Look what they did to try to get their vehicle fixed or at least assessed as quickly as possible. You know, under the law, you and we have an obligation to try to get you back to where you were before the accident as best we can, as quickly as we can. We know that that’s not a reality for everybody, and you need the assistance of the other insurance company or the law firm, and that’s really what we’re here for.
You know, our job is to unburden you, to take all of these new stresses in your life off of your shoulders as much as we can. You didn’t ask to be hit by someone else’s vehicle or to fall on someone else’s property. Nobody wants to get in these situations, no matter what you see on TV, talking about how bad plaintiff lawyers are, or injury lawyers are, or how bad people are who make claims. We know that you didn’t ask for this, you don’t want to be here, but you are, and you need help, and that’s what we’re here for. Anytime you think you can go it alone, I challenge you: go to the insurance company and get the best offer they’ll give you. I just had somebody call me and say, “OH, I got into a wreck yesterday, they offered me $1,000 for my injury, they told me they would pay up to $3,000 for my medical bills, and less than a thousand for my car”. And I said to them, “Do you know if you’re hurt yet? The accident was yesterday. Do you know if in a day or two or a week or two your back’s not going to bother you, your neck’s not going to bother you? Have you had your car looked at? Do you know what’s going on with the damage?”
All of that sounds great initially, but these insurance companies, they’re not charities. They’re not making that offer to you because they want to be Robin Hood, robbing the rich and giving to the poor; that’s not what they’re doing. What they’re doing is trying to prevent them from having to pay out more money down the road, which is often what happens: your injuries start to surface after a couple of days, once the adrenaline wears off. Or your car gets looked at by a professional, and they say, “Wait a minute, that hit that you thought only hit your bumper, well, it also affected the sensor in the car, and that sensor is $5,000, not just a $1,000 bumper”. There are so many things that can happen with time. There really isn’t a rush; in Louisiana and Texas, you have 2 years to file an injury lawsuit. So that’s 2 years from the day of the wreck until you ever have to go to court, as people say. You have time to see how you’re feeling, what happens with your property damage, and decide, “Hey, is this offer from the insurance company the best offer, or do I have to file a lawsuit to get what I’m actually entitled to?”
And that goes back to the point I was making before: if the insurance company wants to make you an offer, get the best offer, bring it to us. If we can’t do better after we take out our fees, after we pay back all the costs to the medical providers, to any sort of police department to get a police report, if we can’t do better, we’re going to tell you, “Take the offer, that’s a fair offer”. You know, we’re not in the business of making money at our clients’ expense. That is how we work: we get a portion of what we collect for you, but our job is to make you as whole as possible and to gather as much as we can, because that’s how we make our money. It’s also how we protect people who might otherwise get taken advantage of by insurance companies or by other companies that insure themselves, cuz they know more about what has happened than you do, because they’ve done this once or twice or dozens or hundreds of times.
Okay, so don’t think that because you got into a wreck you shouldn’t do anything, cuz you don’t want to sue somebody or go after somebody. Most people on the road have insurance; they have it for situations like this. They did something they didn’t mean to do, but they did it, and they are responsible, and they have insurance. These insurance companies don’t have their names on significant buildings and football stadiums because they’re not doing well. They can afford to pay people like you who got hurt, no fault of their own, what they’re entitled to, and it’s not going to blow back on that individual who hit you, so you don’t have to feel sorry for them. And frankly, why should you suffer because they made a mistake? They should own up to their mistakes, be responsible, and you should get taken care of in whatever way you have to be. So again, if you find yourself in this situation, hire an attorney, hire this firm. We know what we’re doing, we are here to help, and we want to make sure that you get taken care of so you don’t get taken advantage of.
