If you’ve been injured in a car wreck, a trucking collision, or have another kind of personal injury claim, you may wonder how your case is going to resolve. The truth is, most cases do NOT need to go to trial. The vast majority of cases settle before a lawsuit is filed.  These are usually called “pre-litigation” claims. Of the claims that are filed as lawsuits, the vast majority of those settle or are dismissed by the courts rather than going through a full trial. In reality, it’s likely that less one percent of all personal injury claims are ever considered by a jury.

There are often many benefits to settling your case before a lawsuit is filed. Pre-litigation settlements are usually much faster, much cheaper, and give you as the client more control over how and when the claim resolves. However, as you’ve seen in other blogs from the Miller Law Group, insurance companies are often not fair. Additionally, North Carolina does not recognize a duty of good faith in negotiations between you and an insurance company when a personal injury claim is at stake. Sometimes, the only way to get the insurance companies to accept responsibility and pay what they should is to file your claim as a lawsuit, and sometimes the only way to get a fair outcome is to go to trial.

When selecting a personal injury lawyer, the bottom line is: you want attorneys that take cases to trial. You don’t want someone who takes every single case to trial: that means they don’t know how to select a case, and also means they probably aren’t advising their clients well. You also DEFINITELY don’t want a lawyer who doesn’t try cases at all: the insurance companies know who they are, and they simply don’t take them as seriously as lawyers they know will take your case all the way to a jury verdict.

At the Miller Law Group, our lawyers try cases. We don’t try them all, and we certainly don’t file them all, but we know how to evaluate a case, and we can often tell at your first meeting if your case is likely to require going partly or all the way to trial. If it’s in your best interests to settle, we’ll help you with that. But if you case has to go to trial, we’re ready, willing, able, and experienced. Our lawyers have tried over 100 cases to juries across North Carolina, and have represented clients across the Southeastern U.S. and several foreign countries. Contact our lawyers for a free consultation. Let our award-winning attorneys put more than 50 years of experience to work for you.  We’ve got your back.