Greenville Personal Injury Lawyers

If you’ve been injured because of the negligent or careless actions of a person or company, you owe it to yourself to find out if you can file a personal injury lawsuit. Examples of claims include, but are not limited to: motor vehicle accidents, work injury, and medical malpractice.

If you’re reading this, you’ve probably suffered from a personal injury that was someone else’s fault. You may still be in pain. You’ve probably missed enough work to worry about your finances. You may be looking for a person who can answer your questions about a personal injury claim.

We are here to help. Our firm offers free legal advice. Call our Greenville personal injury lawyers today.

Don’t hold off because you’re worried you’ll need cash to pay for answers to your legal questions. Give us a call as soon as you can and schedule your free legal consultation.

Nearly 100 Years of Combined Experience

When you’ve been injured due to someone else’s negligence, you face the possibility of a long legal battle to recover the compensation you deserve. From taking time off from work to covering medical expenses, your bills can add up, causing unnecessary stress and anxiety when you should be focused on recovery. At Christian & Christian Law, we are here to help.

Time and again, our experienced Greenville Personal injury lawyers beat the odds on behalf of our clients. We have pursued and obtained compensation for numerous accident and injury victims from well-funded opponents, including workers’ compensation insurers and other large companies.

Trusted. Respected. Committed.

Our attorneys are skilled problem solvers, with in-depth knowledge of the law and the experience to back up our representation. We take the time to carefully investigate your accident, whether you have suffered due to healthcare negligence, a slip and fall, a drunk driving accident, or something else.

Don’t pay for an accident that was not your fault. Your losses do not have to permanently affect your future. Our Greenville personal injury lawyers listen to the needs of our clients to help create a workable strategy to get you compensation.

No Recovery, No Fee.

With nearly 100 years of combined experience, our Greenville personal injury lawyers have helped recover millions of dollars for our clients. If you’ve been hurt, you have nothing to lose. Our “no recovery, no fee” policy ensures that we don’t get paid unless we are able to get you compensation. And our legal consultations are completely free. Don’t suffer in silence. With experienced representation from Christian & Christian Law on your side, we make sure you and your family always have a voice, both inside and out of the courtroom.

Christian & Christian Law assist people with personal injury matters in the following locations: Anderson, Clemson, Easley, Fountain Inn, Greenville County, Greer, Mauldin, Simpsonville, Spartanburg, and Travelers Rest.

Why Should I Hire a Personal Injury Lawyer?

By hiring a personal injury lawyer, you can get the backing of a professional in the legal field. This serves two important purposes:

• It protects the value of your claim so the insurance company can’t pay you less than they should.
• It allows you to rest and focus on recovery without having to figure out how to take on big insurance and win.

There are several ways hiring an attorney will help you protect the value of your claim.  You get more compensation than going it alone. People often make the mistake of thinking that they will somehow save money by skipping an attorney. This is almost always a myth, because the professional skills of an attorney allow them to:

• Conduct an accident investigation to support your claim and make the necessary connections between who was at fault, the negligent acts they committed to cause the accident, and the injuries you sustained as a result.
• Correctly assess your damages. This includes connecting your injuries to all of the ways your life was harmed by them. It also ensures you don’t ask for less than you deserve when requesting compensation.
• Avoid the tricks used by insurance companies to confuse and trip-up injury victims. The process insurance companies use to communicate with accident victims is designed to produce inconsistencies during interviews that can be used to suggest the injured party may be mistaken or untruthful. This is something a personal injury lawyer can easily avoid, through extensive experience in knowing what to include and leave out of conversations with the insurance company.
• Get taken seriously by the insurance company. When you show up with a skilled trial attorney, the insurance company knows they can’t take advantage of you. Avoid delay tactics and unfair denials by having someone on your side who is clearly capable of filing a lawsuit against the insurance company if they fail to negotiate a fair settlement in good faith.
• Give you assistance in evaluating settlement offers. When you are on your own, it is difficult to know whether passing up a settlement offer is wise. You have nothing to gauge the offer by, and you’ll likely be afraid there may not be any additional offers if you pass the first one up. But when you’ve got an experienced Greenville personal injury lawyer to help you, you will receive the guidance you need as to which offers are worth considering and which are not.
• Get the compensation you deserve in court, if necessary. An experienced personal injury trial lawyer will be ready and willing to go to court on your behalf, if necessary, to bring you the compensation you deserve.

Mistakes You Can Avoid to Protect Your Claim

There are several ways you can help protect the value of your claim, before and after hiring an attorney. Check out what you can do to help ensure you receive all the compensation you are due.

Go to the Doctor

It may seem obvious that a person would need to see a doctor after a serious injury, but the human body’s protective fight or flight response can prevent us from feeling an accurate level of pain in the first several hours after an accident. Thus, it’s critical to always get checked, as internal injuries you may not yet feel and cannot see can be life-threatening.

In addition to protecting your health, going to the doctor will create a medical record that proves you were examined after the accident. This will help to support your claim of being injured by the accident. And the sooner you get examined after the accident, the stronger the evidence that your injuries were caused by that accident.

If you skip the exam or wait to get checked, the insurance company will use that to help weaken your claim. They may claim you mustn’t have been too badly injured because you didn’t seek out a doctor. If you did but waited before getting checked, they can suggest you could have gotten hurt after the accident and are now trying to falsely pin your injury on the accident. Don’t give them the chance to sidestep their obligation to compensate you. Get examined as soon as possible.

Follow the Treatment Plan Your Doctor Gives You

After you’ve seen the doctor, you’ll probably be given a treatment plan to follow. This is a list of ways you can assist in your own recovery. It is likely to include a variety of treatment approaches, such as taking medications, stretching, physical therapy, ice, heat, plenty of rest, or any number of other activities. What matters is that you adhere to it.

It’s a mistake to assume that the notes you are sent home with don’t matter. Whether or not you think following this plan will help you, the insurance company is going to take advantage of any shortfall in your adherence to it.

If you don’t go to your occupational therapy sessions, for example, the insurance investigator can find out and suggest you aren’t doing your part to recover. The same goes for catching you on surveillance video doing activities you are not yet medically cleared for. Anything they can use to shift blame from them to you is going to help them pay you less.

So, take your treatment plan very seriously. It’s going to benefit you or the insurance company, depending on how well you adhere to it.

Don’t Agree to Providing the Insurance Company with a Recorded Statement

When the accident claim is filed, the insurance company is going to seek you out to provide them with a recorded statement. This is not for the purpose of advancing your claim. It is their way to seek information they can use to lower your claim’s value.

If you take this call, expect them to ask you the same questions repeatedly in different ways. They are looking for inconsistencies they can use to try and prove you are lying, confused, or mistaken. If you speak to them and they succeed, they’ll lower your claim as much as possible if they can’t outright deny it.

Do not help the insurance company deprive you of the compensation you deserve. Let your attorney handle the communications with the insurance company for you.

Don’t Put Off Hiring an Attorney

Once you realize it’s to your advantage to hire an attorney, don’t delay. The longer you do, the better the possibility that crucial evidence will disappear.

Accident scenes get cleaned up, and sometimes evidence disappears with it, whether intentionally or not. The sooner your attorney can check out the scene of your accident themselves to look for supporting evidence, the better your chance for a strong claim.

This is also true of witnesses. People move and change contact information. The longer you wait, the greater the chance someone will relocate and become impossible to find, or they’ll simply forget important details. Give your lawyer the best chance for success in building your claim by reaching out so they can get started as quickly as possible.

Make Sure You Hire the Right Attorney for Your Claim

Not all attorneys are the same, including personal injury attorneys. Some of them work in “settlement mills.” These are firms that operate by settling as many claims as possible without going to court. It’s a high volume, quick turnover business plan that does not take the client’s highest compensation into account.

If an insurance company is unable to entirely deny a claim but refuses to pay a compensation request, your only choices are a lawsuit or to accept a lower settlement. If you don’t have a lawyer, you’re going to be faced with accepting a low offer. Unfortunately, this is also true if you’ve hired a lawyer who refuses to go to court on your behalf. These are the lawyers who make a living by settling many claims for low settlement amounts. This is not fair to you.

Get what you need by hiring a tenacious and capable trial attorney who will go to court on your behalf, if necessary, to bring you the compensation you deserve.

Our Greenville personal injury lawyers over 100 years of combined experience, and we won’t charge you a dime until your settlement is over.

Greenville Personal Injury Client Story

This client story is for educational purposes only.

We are sharing the following client story to help you get a better idea of what to expect in a personal injury claim in South Carolina. The names and details of the story have been edited to protect client privacy, but the value of the information remains helpful. Please read it through and call us to schedule your free legal consultation.

On a sunny fall morning in Greenville, South Carolina not so long ago, Sal Mele pulled up in front of his uncle Paul’s apartment complex and helped him into his car for their monthly lunch date. Paul had been a father figure to Sal since Sal’s dad had died when he was in college back in New York. The two remained close after Sal’s graduation, despite Sal leaving New York to begin his career in South Carolina.

When New York winters began to wear on Uncle Paul, Sal convinced him to move south to a warmer climate. To his pleasant surprise, Paul had agreed, and became a regular part of Sal’s life, enjoying time with his new wife and young kids.

Paul adapted quickly to the warmer weather. The only thing that was missing, he said, was a good old-fashioned Italian butcher shop run by native New Yorkers. That’s when Sal located just such a place and began their monthly Saturday pilgrimage for sandwiches, cuts of prime rib, and a wedge of fontanelle.

“We’ve been down here for more than six years now, and the best deli is still the New York butcher,” Paul said in his gravelly voice, smiling as he did every Saturday, anticipating picking up his monthly order.

“It’s the best, Uncle Paul.” Sal nodded as the old man eagerly watched the streets roll past, happy to have his uncle with him. “Good thing for us, ‘New York’ is only fifteen minutes away.”

Sal never thought his fiercely independent uncle would leave New York, but after Aunt Nina died, it was time. And Paul truly seemed happy in his new home, especially since Sal had married and now had young children of his own who called his uncle, ‘Grandpa Paulie.’

Though the die-hard Giants fan would never embrace the Panthers, Paul had found his happy place. In fact, Sal couldn’t wait to surprise his uncle with tickets to the Giants/Panthers game up in Charlotte for his upcoming birthday.

Traffic was light and moving swiftly as Sal drove from I 85 onto Woodruff Road. It wasn’t long before they came up to the left turn into the shopping center. Sal slowed to a stop and was about to turn left when a black heavy duty pickup slammed into his car from behind.

That evening, Sal woke up in the hospital with a herniated disc in his back and whiplash. His uncle also had whiplash, as well as a bruised spine and fractured right hip.

Sal was discharged three days after the accident, returning daily to visit his uncle until Paul was transferred to a rehabilitation facility three weeks after the accident. The day after his transfer, Sal visited Paul with Attorney Harold Christian of Christian & Christian, Attorneys at Law.

How much does it cost to hire a lawyer?

Though Sal had prepared Paul for the visit with the lawyer, he anticipated resistance. He was right to expect it.

“What is this going to cost?” Paul said, waving his hand at Attorney Christian. “I’m not made of money,” he added, eyeing the lawyer with suspicion.

Attorney Christian smiled and explained that the firm worked on a contingency-fee model. “There are no up-front costs to you to retain the firm,” said Christian. “We cover all expenses during the case, from start to finish. In the end, we only get paid when we’ve successfully resolved your claim.”

“What about this meeting?” asked Paul. “My nephew tells me it’s ‘free.’ Is this really so?”

“It is, yes,” said Christian. “One hundred percent and without obligation. I’m here to answer your questions about a personal injury claim.”

What is my personal injury claim worth?

Paul looked uncertainly from Attorney Christian to his nephew. “What is a claim like this worth, you think?”

“The value of your claim is going to depend on the outcome of two things,” said Attorney Christian. “The first is your accident investigation. We begin by carefully examining what happened to cause the accident, identifying all guilty parties, and gathering evidence to support your claim.

“After that, we’ll need you to reach maximum medical improvement,” said the lawyer. “This is the point at which you will have recovered as much as you are able to. It won’t be reached until your doctors are sure you’re through with surgeries.

“When you get there, the doctors will have a solid idea of how your injuries may affect you in the future. Taking a careful look at all the ways your life has been negatively affected by the accident is necessary to know how much to request in compensation,” said Christian.

“Who pays for all of this?” asked Paul, waving a hand around the room. “This fancy place. I doubt Medicare is going to pick up the tab.”

“That’s an excellent question, Mr. Mele,” said Attorney Christian. “Having us to help coordinate your incoming medical expenses with the fact that you are in the middle of a claim is one of the benefits of retaining an attorney. You don’t have to juggle this all on your own.

“To answer your question about the ultimate expense, the goal is to have the insurance company of the guy that rear ended you pay for your treatment: the operation, the rehabilitation, all of it. On top of that, we would pursue damages for your pain and suffering. A broken hip at 68 is not an easy thing to deal with,” said Christian.

“So, when you reach maximum medical improvement, we’ll combine all of our information from the accident investigation with the information from your damages and determine the true value for your claim,” said Christian. “Until then, your job, Mr. Mele, is to rest and focus on recovery.”

How long will my personal injury claim take?

“How long does a claim like this take?” Paul asked, beginning to consider the possibility that a claim might be a good idea.

“That’s going to depend first on how long it takes you to reach maximum medical improvement. We won’t be sure we have all your damages considered until we know just how capable you will be of recovering back to your former level of health.

“Your pain and suffering and medical expenses are all important factors, but so is any gap between how healthy you were before the accident and where your health ends up because of that accident. We need to know this information to make sure you receive enough compensation for your damages,” said Christian.

“When you reach maximum medical improvement, we’ll send a demand letter to the insurance company for compensation. From that point on, how long your claim takes to resolve will depend on how they respond to our request. If they work with us, we’ll wrap it all up quickly. If they fight us, we’ll sue them and fight for your money in court.

“As you may imagine, your case will take longer if it needs to go to court, but we’ll be ready to fight for you, either way,” said Attorney Christian. “This is why I urge you to hire a personal injury trial lawyer, whether it’s our firm or another. You need someone who isn’t going to settle your claim for cheap because they don’t want to go to court. As you’ve already said, surgery, hospital care, and rehabilitation are expensive. You deserve to be compensated for these expenses and for your suffering.”

Can we both file a claim with the same attorney?

Paul’s jaw worked as he thought about what Attorney Christian had said. He looked at his nephew. “What about this guy? He was injured too. What if he needs a claim? Can he do that if I make one?” Paul asked.

“Yes, you can both file a claim. There is no conflict of interest here, as the accident was not in any way Sal’s fault. Our firm can represent each of you,” Attorney Christian assured Paul.

“I already started my claim, Uncle Paul. That’s how I know these guys are so good. I checked them out for the both of us while you were in the hospital.” Sal smiled.

Paul was satisfied with the information Attorney Christian provided him. He retained Christian & Christian Law, and Attorney Harold Christian won each of their claims for several times more than the amount the insurance company initially offered.

Call Our Greenville Personal Injury Lawyers Today

We hope you’ve gotten useful information from the content above. No two claims are exactly alike, so please call our Greenville personal injury lawyers as soon as possible to schedule your free legal consultation. Let us be there to guide your claim and bring you maximum compensation. We will defend your right to fair compensation to help you get your life back. Contact Christian & Christian Law today to learn how we can help.