Florida Personal Injury Lawyer Blog
The Risk of Rejecting a Fair Florida Car Accident Settlement Offer
A central part of resolving any Florida car accident case is negotiation with insurers. You may not need to go to trial or even file a lawsuit. But you will almost certainly be negotiating with at least one insurer at some point. Some folks feel comfortable handling this themselves, but for reasons laid out in this blog post, they might want to think twice. If you botch the negotiation by turning down a fair car accident settlement offer from the insurer, you could lose everything – even with a winning case.
For one thing, it’s common for auto insurance companies to lowball claimants. If you accept that initial offer, you will forgo any chance of collecting more in the future, even if you later realize your damages are much greater.
For another thing, Florida statute explicitly incentivizes parties to accept a fair car accident settlement offers. It also penalizes those who don’t. F.S. 768.79 says that in any civil action for damages filed in state court, if one side offers the other a settlement that isn’t accepted and the subsequent final judgment of the court is within 25% of that earlier settlement amount, the side that rejected the settlement has to pay the other’s court costs and attorney’s fees.
For example, let’s say you’re suing for $100,000, and the defendant extends a Florida car accident settlement offer of $80,000. You reject it, take the case to court, and the final judgment is for $90,000. That is within 25% of what you were offered to settle. Even though you won, you now have to pay the defense attorney’s fees (as well as your own) out of your winnings. If costs and attorney’s fees amount to more than the final judgment, the court will enter a judgement in favor of the defendant and you’ll owe them.
The trickiest part of all is that without an experienced car accident lawyer, you won’t have a strong sense of what is truly fair and what isn’t. If you aren’t confident about what your case is really worth, you could end up with far less than you deserve – either by accepting far too little and forgoing your right to ask for more OR refusing a settlement that’s totally fair based on the facts.
By working with a knowledgeable Cape Coral car accident attorney, you get the assurance of knowing when an insurance settlement offer is reasonable and when it isn’t.
Proper Valuation of Florida Crash Cases
Proper valuation of a crash case for purposes of determining a fair car accident settlement isn’t simple math. Some of the factors that weigh into what a case is worth include: Continue reading
