Always Maintain Honesty With Your Lawyer
Brian O Sutter
Personal Injury
No one is really prepared for the dramatic upheavals that occur in life when a serious injury with lifelong effects strikes. It means many changes and challenges, most of them negative, and it means adjusting to a new life with new limitations on how that life can be lived. It is unfair, and nothing can actually undo the damage and make life go back to the way it was. But if you were the victim of someone else’s negligence or incompetence, then a personal injury lawyer like the ones here at allinjurieslawfirm.com can at least get you the financial compensation you deserve to meet the challenges this new life presents.A personal injury case is all about getting you what is owed for your suffering. And that is why, above all else, you must be absolutely honest with your lawyer about the extent of your suffering.
Injury Is Not Opportunity
For most people, an injury that changes the scope of the way you live is a major trauma that results in new, unwanted challenges and limitations. Hopefully, there will never be anything like it again. Because the court system understands how dramatic this change is, a good lawyer can take this case to court and secure the kind of financial compensation from offending parties that will help to make the new, costly adjustments that will be required for this new stage of life.
But some people see this kind of injury as a rare chance to get “free” money from someone else, and decide to take deliberate steps to ensure that they get as much money as they can, even if it means lying about the extent of their injuries.
While it’s understandable for someone that has been hurt to want as much compensation as they can get, deceiving your lawyer and the court about the severity of your injuries is playing a dangerous, illegal game with the system. This is especially true against experienced insurance companies and their lawyers who have encountered people in the past that have tried these methods to get more than what they actually deserve.
Insurance Fraud Is Illegal
When someone sees a chance to exaggerate their injuries in the face of an accident, this is what is known as “soft fraud.” It simply means someone is taking advantage of an unplanned incident, as opposed to “hard fraud” which is to deliberately plan and fake an accident in order to claim some kind of personal injury compensation. Soft fraud is definitely the more numerous of the two types, as many people—erroneously—believe it is easy to pretend injuries are more severe than they actually are in order to get a larger settlement or court compensation.
Unfortunately, for inexperienced individuals trying to capitalize on such events, the lawyers and insurance companies involved in such cases have a lot of experience in this area. There have been documented cases of investigations and surveillance conducted on individuals claiming to have crippling injuries, only to produce video footage of those same individuals working out on gym equipment in ways that should be impossible if they really were injured to the extent they claimed. Naturally, this means that their court case was dismissed, and people who are convicted of insurance fraud can face anything from stiff fines from the court to an actual jail sentence.
If you are injured in an accident, be honest with yourself and your lawyer about what has happened. Don’t make a bad situation worse by lying to the lawyer that is supposed to represent you, and lying to a court of law.