Some steps take place before the negotiations; some take place after the negotiations.
Step 1: A decision
The victim-lawyer team must compose a demand letter. Before their creation of that letter, the claimant must decide on the lowest acceptable offer.
—That figure could get changed as the negotiations progressed.
—Claimants should hold that figure in their mind, and not share it with anyone.
Step 2 : The insurance adjuster makes a move.
Adjuster studies demand letter and makes an opening bid. The claimant does not accept that opening bid. The claimant-lawyer team prepares a written response. In that response, the same victim-injury lawyer team in Kingston explains why it has rejected the finial bid.
Steps that lead to agreement on terms of settlement
There is no set number for that group of steps. The claimant and the insurance company keep exchanging the demands and counter-demands until both of the negotiating parties have agreed on one of the suggested figures. At that point, the negotiators move on to the next step.
Steps used to confirm terms of settlement
The claimant, with a lawyer’s help, writes a letter to the insurance adjuster, in order to confirm the details of the settlement, the one that had emerged from an earlier phone conversation. In that same letter, the claimant asks when the promised compensation should be ready for delivery to the claimant’s attorney.
The insurance company responds to the claimant’s letter, and also sends a release form to the claimant’s attorney. The attorney must study that form, in order to check for any wording that could cause his/her client to be the target of an unfair deal.
Once the attorney has approved of the wording on the release form, he/she gets the appropriate client to sign it. Then the signed form gets sent back to the insurance company.
Last official step
The insurance company sends the awaited check to the claimant’s lawyer. The same lawyer uses some of the money in the check to pay off any liens. Then the attorney takes an agreed-upon percentage of the money received, and counts it as the fee for his/her services.
The remaining funds get sent to the lawyer’s client, the accident victim. That usually brings and to the process.
The process might contain some additional tasks for the lawyer-claimant team
If the name on the check were to differ from the name on the claimant’s bank account, then the lawyer would need to make changes in the issued check. That is a simple procedure, and it should not cause a long delay, before the awaited funds finally get into the hands of the injured victim.
Ideally, that victim had recovered to the point where he/she had achieved maximum medical recovery.
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