Should You Pursue a Personal Injury Claim?
This is a transcript of a podcast posted April 16, 2006.
 We’re speaking with Attorney Joseph Matthews, an expert on personal injury lawsuits, and the author of How to Win Your Personal Injury Claim, published by Nolo.
NOLO: Joseph, all of us suffer injuries from time to time as a result of the actions of others. But how does a person determine that they deserve to be compensated for that injury? In other words, are there any simple ways to determine whether or not a person should pursue a personal injury claim?
JOSEPH MATTHEWS: When you’re deciding whether to pursue an insurance claim for a personal injury -- and I want to make very clear here that we’re not necessarily talking about a legal action or a lawsuit, but simply a claim against an insurance company for the injuries that you’ve suffered -- you have to determine whether or not the injury is worth your time pursuing. That is, unless you have received some treatment for the injury, or have lost time at work or school, then, in general, you’re going to have to say, “This is not something that’s worth my time and energy to pursue.” However, if you have received any kind of medical treatment for your injury, or if you’ve lost any time at work or school, then you move into the category of a valid claim.
The question of whether or not you can collect on that claim depends then on who was at fault for the accident. But this is not any kind of scientific calculation; the sense of who was at fault is a combination of common sense -- who’s done something careless and who’s been careful -- on the one hand, and the insurance system as it’s set up, which is, that people pay into insurance companies precisely to compensate people who are injured, so that insurance companies are there, ready to make payments to people if they present a logical and sensible claim that they have been injured as the result of somebody else’s carelessness.
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