How Do I Get Money Faster? (In a Personal Injury Case)

Marry a 70 year old!

Why?

In a personal injury case, the goal of lawyer for the plaintiff (the injured person) is to get the case to trial as fast as possible. The trial is the ultimate weapon of the personal injury lawyer. If you can’t try a case, you have to take the insurance company‘s last offer.

A trial is the great equalizer. Once a case gets closer to trial, the insurance company is much more likely to settle. The old saying is that “the heat of the courthouse melts the gold.“

In New York, one way to get a trial quicker is to be granted a special trial preference. There are a few ways to get a preference. One way in which a preference is automatically granted is if the injured person is 70 or older.

The preference counts for any plaintiff in the case. So, if someone is under 70, yet they are married to someone 70 or over, they both get the preference.

This would be for a case where the older spouse is not physically injured but has a loss of consortium claim.

Loss of consortium, or loss of services means that the non-injured spouse has a claim derivative of the injured spouse’s claim. The non physically injured spouse may have a claim that she now has to do more house work, more childcare, and/or is now unable to have sexual relations due to the other spouse’s injury.

So, when my clients ask me how to get to trial faster, I tell them “Mary a septuagenarian!”