How long a slip-and-fall accident settlement takes depends on several variables. Simple cases that do not involve serious injuries often settle within nine months to a year, while cases involving more serious injuries can take a year or more.
Other factors that can affect how long a settlement can take include:
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To better understand how these settlement timing variables work, let’s take a look at how a slip and fall case develops from settlement preparation through possibly taking your case to trial.
Medical treatment for your slip and fall injuries is not only a matter of taking care of your health.
It is also important because when you present your claim to the property owner, medical treatment records and your bills for medical expenses will be extremely vital evidence to support your claim for damages.
Depending on your relationship with the property owner, you might engage in informal communications first to see if that person or business will compensate you for your injuries.
If you are fortunate, the property owner may outright agree to pay for your treatment costs.
Many times, however, the property owner will refuse to accept responsibility for the hazardous condition(s) on the property that caused the accident and may even blame you for the accident.
If this happens, you can continue to represent your own interests, or you can hire a slip and fall attorney. Many people choose the latter option because they understand it will often take increased leverage to get the property owner to take your claims seriously.
Your slip and fall lawyer will understand the need to support your claim with evidence.
Evidence can be physical, such as photographs or video recordings you may have taken of the accident scene, or testimonial in the form of statements from anyone who witnessed the accident.
It can also be documentary, like your medical bills, or circumstantial, which connects the accident to the property owner’s negligence.
Once your attorney has gathered the evidence, he or she will help you assess whether you have a legal claim for premises liability against the property owner.
If you do and want to pursue your slip and fall claim, then formally notifying the property usually takes the form of a letter of representation and a demand letter that your attorney will prepare on your behalf. A demand letter will state that the attorney represents you, set forth facts including the date and circumstances of the accident, identify the harm you have suffered, and present a demand for compensation.
The demand letter will usually have a deadline for the property owner to comply with the demand or face the prospect of being named as a defendant in a lawsuit.
Sometimes this works.
However, most times, the property owner will refuse to comply with the demand and hire an attorney. At this point, the property owner’s insurer will also be notified that a possible insurance claim exists.
Settlement negotiations usually begin informally between your plaintiff’s attorney, the property owner’s attorney, and the insurance company.
If these do not achieve a settlement of your personal injury claims, then the attorneys and the insurer might agree to more formal settlement means, which could include non-judicial forms like mediation.
Trial preparation may happen simultaneously depending on when you began the settlement process and how well settlement negotiations are going.
For example, to preserve your right to make a legal claim, your attorney will need to file a lawsuit within the applicable statute of limitations. If a lawsuit has been filed, the pretrial process might include depositions, exchanging interrogatories, requests for production of evidence which are also subject to legal deadlines.
Eventually, settlement negotiations will reach a point where you and the property owner will agree on a settlement payout or in the alternative reach an impasse.
In most slip and fall cases, the parties agree to settle.
In the approximately 5% of negotiations that do not settle, you must decide whether to proceed with a civil lawsuit.
Here are some specific considerations you could encounter when settlement negotiations begin that can play a role in how long it takes to reach a settlement in a slip and fall case.
When negotiations begin, you will need to provide your supporting evidence to the property owner and the insurance company, giving them reasonable time to review it so they can decide on their own negotiating position. The more evidence you have, the longer it will take them to review it.
If you have a considerable amount of evidence that is highly persuasive in pointing out the negligence of the property owner that led to the slip and fall incident, then it is worth your while to let the other side digest that evidence thoroughly.
It may make them more flexible in reaching a negotiated settlement and more willing to consider a higher payout amount.
If you suffer minor injuries from a slip and fall, like sprains, strains, scrapes, bruises or other soft tissue damage, then your needed treatment will not be as intense and your recovery period not as long as in cases when you injure your spinal column, fracture your ankle, or experience a traumatic brain injury.
For more complex injuries that take a long time to heal or which may have permanent effects, determining your true settlement claim value will depend in part on when you reach your point of maximum medical improvement. This is when your treating doctor concludes that further treatment will not have any more appreciable effect in restoring you to the condition you were in before the accident.
If you have reached maximum medical improvement, or are close to it, this will factor into the evidence the property owner and its insurance company need to consider when negotiating your claim.
If your injury treatment costs are expensive, then it can pay to let your treatment progress for a while instead of basing your settlement compensation demand on incomplete information or prior to completing your medically necessary treatment.
Your slip and fall lawyer can help you make the best decision on the timing of your settlement claims. This will allow you to balance maximizing your settlement claim value with the goal of receiving settlement compensation as soon as possible.
Economic damages, like medical treatment expenses and lost income, are fairly easy to prove. You provide evidence in the form of medical bills and wage statements, coupled with proof of periods when your injuries kept you from working.
Non-economic damages are indirect in nature. They include types of harm that do not lend themselves to precise numerical calculation.
Examples of non-economic damages include:
In settlement negotiations, this difficulty in objectively proving non-economic damages means that it can take longer for both sides to agree upon a value for them.
Often, slip-and-fall settlement agreements include provisions for non-economic damages. These can take the form of an agreed-upon sum in addition to calculated direct damages or a multiplier of the economic damages amount.
For example, if your settlement payout includes $100,000 for economic damages, and both sides agree to establish a 1.5 multiplier to account for pain and suffering, the total settlement payout will be $150,000.
Slip-and-fall incidents often involve conflicting views of what caused the accident and who was at fault.
A common defense tactic in settlement negotiations and at trial is for the property owner to allege that you were at least partly to blame for the accident.
In Arizona, this is known as “comparative negligence.”
Comparative negligence is an affirmative defense. If it applies to you, then it will not preclude you from recovery through claim settlement, but it can reduce how much you recover.
In a trial, if the defendant can prove that you were partly at fault for the accident, then the court assigns your percentage of fault and deducts that percentage from your judgment award.
For example, if your judgment is for $100,000, but your percentage of comparative negligence is determined to be 20%, your judgment will be reduced to $80,000.
Comparative negligence can similarly factor into settlement calculations. Determining whether you were partly at fault for the slip and fall, and if so, by what percentage, can slow down the negotiations.
Once your personal injury attorney and the defendant property owner agree on a settlement for your slip-and-fall claim, then before you receive a settlement check, your settlement will take into account and pay any current expenses in connection with your medical treatment, including amounts your own health insurer may have already paid for.
This can delay your receipt of your settlement funds.
Because so many slip and fall cases settle outside of court, it is important for any slip and fall lawyer you hire to be a good negotiator and not just a good litigator.
When you hire one of our Phoenix slip and fall injury attorneys at Stone Rose Law, your lawyer will help you negotiate with insurance companies and their attorneys from the strongest possible position. We will help you gather the evidence you need to support your claims, including your medical bills, costs for rehabilitation, lost wages, property loss values, and more.
We handle all aspects of your settlement, including communicating with the other side’s insurance adjusters and lawyers, who might otherwise be eager to talk to you so they can persuade you to accept a low-ball settlement offer or try to get you to say things to them that can decrease your claims value.
And if, for any reason, we cannot obtain for you through negotiations what you seek to recover for your injury, our Phoenix personal injury lawyers are experienced litigators as well.
If we must take your case to trial, we only get paid if we recover money on your behalf.
Call us today at (480) 631-3025 or use our contact form to get in touch with one of our experienced personal injury attorneys.
