Clients and others call the office at times and ask, “How do I increase the value of my case?” There are a lot of answers to this question, so I am going to tackle it in several posts.
There are a lot of things that you have complete control over that can help your case. First, listening to your doctor and completing the recommended treatment is an important way to add value to your case. Said another way, when some people refuse to go to the doctor or simply suffer instead of going to the doctors decrease the value of their case. The insurance company, all things equal, will notice if a client goes to a first visit with the doctor and then does not show up for a month. The suggestion there is that the client must really not be hurt if there is that much of a gap in treatment. There very well may be good reason why the client did not go during that month, and certainly that could be explained to the jury in court, but this opens the door to a defense argument that the person must not be hurt if they didn’t do any treatment for a month.
Second, making sure that all of your complaints are documented will add value to your case. If for whatever reason (either you forget to tell the doctor or if the doctor mistakenly omits something) there are injuries that are not reported in an initial visit that opens the door for the defense to argue that that injury was not caused in the subject accident. For example, you go to the doctor complaining of neck and back complaints. A month later there is a new complaint of knee injury that ultimately results in knee surgery. The problem there is that, since that knee complaint was not referenced initially, i would expect the insurance company and later their defense lawyer to argue that the knee injury was not caused in the accident as it was not diagnosed initially and thus must not be related.
