Transcription:

Hi guys, Matt Clendenin here. This week, we're going to be going over the fourth section of our personal injury case timeline. It's a new timeline pamphlet that we made for our clients that goes over each of the different sections of a personal injury case. Just to recap, we've already talked about the initial injury and the investigation. We've talked about pre-litigation and we've talked about litigation. Today we're going to be talking about the fourth stage, which is case closure.

So there's two ways of case can end. A case can end with a settlement where the parties agree to settle the case, or it can end with a jury verdict. Those are the only two ways a case can end. So if a case finishes with a settlement agreement, the parties have to agree on the terms of that agreement. And the terms are really important. This is one area, a lot of lawyers overlook. You have to go through the agreement and make an agreement that makes sense for you and your case. Once you sign that agreement, you have officially settled your case. The only thing that remains is to formally close your lawsuit with the court, but really it's that settlement agreement with the defendant and their insurance company that takes care of the case. 

After you sign that settlement agreement, you can get the check in two or three weeks, and then we do a settlement accounting with the client. So here's an example. I'll throw one up. This is a pretty standard settlement accounting, and this shows you where all the money's going. This document is not a surprise. We've been working with this document throughout your case. So, when you agree to settle your case, it's not like this as a surprise.You know how much money you're going to get, more or less when you decide to sell your case. So we get the settlement agreement, we finish your case. We formally end the case with court. After a few weeks, when you get the funds and once we've signed the settlement accounting, we issue all the checks. And that's basically how you wrap up a case. 

If the case finishes with a jury verdict, there's a lot more action that happens on the backend in terms of whether or not there's going to be an appeal, how the insurance company is going to pay it, filing motions for costs and to prevent costs and all that stuff. But it's basically the same process. Once you get the money, it's the same process of doing a settlement, accounting, sorting out all your medical bills and wrapping up the case. So that's case closure, pretty short section, we'll go through the fifth section for what happens after your case is done. There's a lot of important questions that go on there. So we're going to tackle that one in a fifth section.