Discovery is a process that comes about if your attorney is unable to settle the claim with the insurance company in what’s called pre-litigation. 97% of cases will be settled in pre-litigation.
This means that the insurance company has accepted liability on the part of their driver, and your lawyer goes ahead and collects all of your medical and other important relevant records, like police reports, and he or she sends them to the insurance company. They evaluate them, make an offer and then it settled. That’s how the overwhelming majority of cases actually go by the wayside. There’s never a day where you really have to go to court because the entire system is built towards avoiding court.
Typically, the reasons why you would go into litigation is going to be either a valuation situation in which case the insurance company feels that the injury and the wreck don’t dictate the sort of demand that you’re claiming for your auto accident, or it’s a question of liability and they actually feel like you contributed in some way to your own collision.Those are the sorts of issues that you typically see litigated at the context of your car accident.
Discovery is the process that happens once your lawyer actually files a lawsuit. The problem with discovery specifically in Charleston County is that you’ve got to look at how long it’s going to actually take to get into court. Because of the backlog of cases and common pleas in Charleston County, the typical wait is about a year before you can even get on to the list of where you might be called for a jury trial, and the whole point behind discovery is that prior to that, both sides are going to exchange information such as: medical records, prior medical records, your police reports, past driving records, past criminal records etc.
Anything and everything that could possibly be discovered will be discovered and that’s because the nature of discovery under South Carolina law is incredibly broad as far as what you can actually pull.
Therefore, it’s not just going to be the medical records that are actually relevant to this particular car accident. In all likelihood, the insurance company is going to go back and get at least five years of your prior medical records. The reason being is they want to go back and look and see if they could find some reason why you were injured previously to that part of your body and that way they can say, “We’re not responsible for this. This is just a re-aggravation of an injury that you had two or three years ago that shows up in your general practitioner’s medical records.”
All of that kind of goes into the pot, and discovery is that pot. It's essentially everything that could possibly be relevant, and anything under the sun is considered relevant and as soon as that summons and complaint is filed, your entire life is basically open to discovery from both sides and that can be a good thing and a bad thing. Some people find it invasive and that’s why a lot of people are more inclined to go ahead and settle their case in a pre-litigation context, to not worry so much about the valuation and not worry about going into a lawsuit. Plus they don’t want to wait a year.
A lot of these things are considerations that a lawyer is going to sit down and talk to you about before you ever get to the point where you file a lawsuit. It’s definitely a conversation that needs to be had and I would strongly encourage you to talk to a lawyer if you’re in that situation.
If you have questions about discovery, I would strongly encourage you to pick up the phone and call The Hartman Law Firm at 843-300-7600 and speak with me today.
No comments:
Post a Comment