9 Tips for Finding the Best Personal Injury Lawyer for Your Claim

In the United States alone, there are now more than 53,000 firms that offer legal help to people dealing with personal injury cases.

That means there are now more options than ever before when you need advice from an expert personal injury attorney. However, it also means that finding the best personal injury lawyer for your unique situation can be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

If you have never chosen a personal injury lawyer to help you before, it can be tempting to pick someone at random. However, it can be easier than you think to sift through a long list of options and find the lawyer who has the best chance of helping you win your case. So what should you focus on as you look for personal injury legal help?

Read on to learn all about the most vital tips to keep in mind as you select a personal injury attorney!

1. Decide What You Are Looking For in Advance

Don’t make the mistake of starting by reading through the websites of different attorneys you find online. This might seem like it should help, but there are much more efficient methods you can use to finish your selection process faster.

Instead of learning more about your options, start by reflecting on what you hope you will find. This can include simple things like whether you want remote meetings with your lawyer or how far away they are. Think about your situation and write down what your ideal personal injury attorney would look like.

Even once you finish doing so, you might want to come back to this list a few times and add to it if you think of new things. Having a clear vision of what you are looking for will help in a few different ways as you proceed through your selection process.

2. Consider Many Personal Injury Attorney Options

The next thing to keep in mind is that you will have a higher chance of finding a great lawyer to help you if you consider many different options. The fewer options you look at, the lower the chance the best lawyer for your situation will ever end up on your list of candidates in the first place. At that point, it won’t matter if you do an amazing job of assessing the few candidates on your list.

Take the time to compile a longer list of personal injury attorney options. Later, we will discuss several techniques that can help you cut down a long list to size without having to put in too much effort. Therefore, feel free to make your list as long as you like for now.

The easiest way to find candidates may be to use a search engine. However, search engine results will not be based on your unique circumstances. If possible, it may be far more effective to add lawyers to your list of candidates based on personal recommendations.

3. Ask People You Know for Help

Finding a great personal injury attorney is often easier than finding a great algorithm law attorney. That is because a lot more people you know have probably worked with personal injury attorneys in the past. That means that you can learn from their experiences to finish your selection process as fast as possible.

Think about the people you know who have worked with personal injury lawyers before. There’s a good chance you won’t know all of them, so it can also be helpful to put out the word that you are interested in speaking with people who have hired personal injury lawyers before.

Once you find a friend or family member to speak with, ask them about their experience with their lawyer. You can also ask them how they went about choosing from among all of their different options.

As far as you are comfortable doing, it can be helpful to share your list of preferences as you ask for advice. When people know what you are looking for, they can assess if their lawyer might be a good choice for you or not. They may also be able to point you toward other great lawyers or tools that can help you find them.

In some cases, it can be helpful to ask the people you speak with if they recognize any of the candidates you have added to your list so far. If they do, they can tell you if they’ve heard good or bad things about them. At this point, you might decide to remove some of your lawyer candidates from serious consideration.

4. Place a Premium on Relevant Experience

At this point, you will want to start assessing which of your candidates might be the right choice for you. One of the simplest things to look at is experience. One of the first things you will find on many lawyers’s websites is how long they’ve been in business.

As a general rule, more experience means they will do a better job helping you win your case. However, some lawyers have been working as lawyers a lot longer than they have been working as personal injury lawyers. Even if someone is a personal injury lawyer today, they might have started their career working mostly in tax law or cybersecurity law.

It can help to speak with some of your top candidates and ask them about which areas of law they have the most experience with.

5. Choose a Personal Injury Attorney With Great Referrals

As you start speaking with some of your candidates, make sure to ask them for referrals. You don’t necessarily have to read these referrals right away since that will make your selection process take much longer. However, you can learn a lot about a lawyer based on how they respond to being asked for references.

Some lawyers will be able to provide you with a long list of positive references. They may even encourage you to call one or more of them because they are so confident that they will have good things to say. On the other hand, if some of the lawyers on your list of candidates struggle to provide you with a list of referrals, they might not belong at the top of your list.

6. Find the Best Personal Injury Lawyers With Online Reviews

As great as referrals are, it is often easier to look at online reviews.

Look for lawyers with great overall ratings. If a lawyer doesn’t have a good rating, you might not even want to take the time to read through their reviews. This can be a great way to remove several candidates from your list if it is still looking too long.

Once you start reading reviews, read only two or three of them at a time for each of your lawyer candidates. Then, you can make a note of which lawyers sound promising after these first few reviews. After that, you can go back through your promising candidates and read several more reviews for each of them.

Make sure to look for reviews that mention the specific services you are interested in. Although it is great if a lawyer has a lot of positive reviews related to tax law, that is not relevant to your situation.

7. Find an Attorney With Transparent Fees

When you first speak with a lawyer you are considering hiring, ask them how their fee structure works. When they finish explaining it, follow up by asking them if there are any other minor fees you might need to cover if you hire them.

In some cases, you might have to repeat this question a few times until an attorney finishes telling you about the nuances of their fees. If it seems like some of your candidates might be trying to hide some of their fees from you, you might want to remove them from your list.

8. Choose a Lawyer Who Has Time for Your Case

Even the most skilled lawyer might not be the right one for you if they don’t have time on their hands right now. Consider asking some of your top candidates about how busy they are with other clients. If some of them are swamped, they might not be able to give your case the attention it needs.

9. Look for a Lawyer You Feel Comfortable With

Although winning your case might be the most important thing to you, it can also be helpful to find a lawyer you feel comfortable with. If you end up with multiple lawyers who seem like good choices, you might want to pick whichever one you find the easiest to get along with.

Find the Best Personal Injury Lawyer for You

If you are in a rush, it is easy to give up on finding the best personal injury lawyer for your unique situation. However, almost nothing will increase the chance that you win your case as much as having the best lawyer possible on your side. It is more than worth putting in the necessary time to consider your options and find a lawyer who can provide you with expert help.

To find out more about how you can find the right personal injury lawyer for your specific needs, contact us at Sweet Lawyers at any time!