In recent times there have been a slew of very high profile lawsuits for personal injury that have resulted in very large settlements. The resultant media attention has brought about a renewed interest in many of those who are considering following a career in law. The jet-setting lives of personal injury lawyers have also been dramatized to a great extent on television screens bringing an aura of glitz and glamour that is simply irresistible. Here’s a series of question and answers on the role and job of personal injury lawyers that will help in clearing the air.
What Does A Personal Injury Trial Attorney Do?
Personal injury lawyers essentially help people to get justice through legal means when they have been hurt physically or emotionally due to negligence by someone else. The work entails a substantial amount of relationship building with the client who wishes to institute a lawsuit against the defendant to seek justice for the impugned injury. Trial attorneys have to engage in a lot of paperwork as well as discovery of facts with the plaintiff or defendant, depending upon which side he is representing. He needs to have finely honed appreciation of personal injury law and case precedents as well as enhanced negotiating and trial skills. As a part of the legal team, he is expected to be a very good team player. Being a personal injury lawyer can be very hard work needing him to work for extended hours when preparing to go to trial. Even in the top legal firms and the bestlawsuit funding companies a weekly load of 50-70 hours is not unusual and can really vary a lot depending on the workload.
What Education or Skills Are Required?
To be a successful personal injury lawyer, you need to definitely have a college education. It does not really matter what the bachelor’s degree is but you have to top it off with a degree in law. More fundamentally, attorneys need to be extremely perceptive about what is being told to them and develop a keen intuition for the underlying facts of the case. There is a lot of investigative work that is involved, so typically personal injury lawyers need to have very keen sense of observation and deduction. An essential trait that all successful personal injury lawyers have is that they are very strongly motivated to succeed as well as have communication skills of the highest order so that they can convince the court of the genuineness of their representation. It is essential that that the attorney must have a very fine appreciation of the legal niceties involved and also the moral backbone that prevents them from stepping across the unseen line of professional ethics.
What Are the Most Challenging Aspects of the Career?
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of the lives of trial lawyers is to control their resources. Since most of the work is on a contingent basis they have to have superb analytical skills to judge if the client’s case has adequate merits that would enable a reasonable settlement to be made by the court. As the person who is also primarily responsible for the income of the firm that supports the livelihood of many other personnel, he has to be extremely judicious about the time that is being allocated to a case and in totality to all the cases that he is handling at any given point of time. It is essential that he does not become emotionally involved in the case as then not only would he be incapable of offering professional advice that is free of bias but he would end up by neglecting his own family, interests, and social life.
What Then Is The Take-Home?
To be frank, the financial rewards of a personal injury attorney can be quite handsome, however what will keep you sustained in this career after you have made your personal pile is the sense of achievement. The feeling that you get by being able to help your client fight for his rights, often against a much larger and mightier opponent, can be really immense. The knowledge that you have done a great job is perhaps the finest feeling in the world.
