In this episode of The Verdict: Road to Recovery, Clarke explains why people should never settle insurance claims on their own. Once you sign a release with an insurance company, there’s no going back, even if your medical bills exceed the settlement or future medical advances could help your condition.
You’ll hear why insurance adjusters, while not malicious, have interests directly opposed to the injured person’s, and will silently watch claimants make costly mistakes. People with personal injury lawyers recover three and a half times more on average than those without, even after attorney fees. With nearly 30 years of experience and 10 lawyers collectively holding about 200 years of expertise at his firm, Clarke will explain why navigating insurance claims is far too complex for someone to handle alone.
Here’s what we discuss in this episode:
🚫 Settlements are final—there’s no going back
💸 Early offers can be far less than what you need
🧾 Medical liens can eat up your payout
⚖️ Insurance companies have opposing interests
🧠 Experience helps avoid costly mistakes
Featured Keyword & Other Tags
catastrophic injury, medical bills, lost wages, future medical care, attorney’s fees, legal costs, victim impact videos, accident reconstruction, contingent fee, personal injury
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Transcript (Click To Read)
Clark: I’m Clark Speaks, the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict.
Carson Grace Toomer: Now, you said when an insurance company pays you, they pay you once. Now, what happens if, you know, I’m injured and, um, this insurance company says, okay, I’m gonna give you X amount of dollars. And I say, okay. I think. And I, you know, I don’t know. I’m not an injury attorney. I say, okay, and I take that. And then a year down the road, I realize that I’m still having these medical bills. And, you know, I. I’m running out of this money and I don’t have, you know, means to pay for it. Is that something that I can go back and do, or no. Is that done?
Clark: Done? There’s no going. There’s no going back. You know, so it’s, um. So this happens. We get this call, I don’t know, once a week, once a month, something like that, where people are in exactly that situation. They have accepted a claim, accepted a resolution for a claim early. And sometimes in small cases, right, it’s sometimes a severe inclusion. And they accepted 1500 bucks plus medical bills. And then they realized they shouldn’t have done that, um, and they were more seriously hurt or they shouldn’t have done that, and they should never do that. They should contact an experienced personal injury firm who can walk them through the process and help them. They’ll get better medical care, more complete medical care, better recovery physically and better recovery financially. But in the scenario that you described, yeah, there’s no going back. You know, when you. At the end of every case, uh, the insurance company will give you a release. And what that means is, no matter what happens in the future, this is all the money we’re ever going to pay you. We’re not going to pay one more dollar if your head falls off tomorrow. We are not paying you one more dollar. This is it. And, uh, and that’s an important thing to understand. And so, um, one of the things that’s always a concern for me in these catastrophic cases is, you know, so we have cases where people have been paralyzed or have lost limbs or whatever. Like, what happens if medical technology improves and there’s some basis for restoring a person’s, uh, function, you know, after a paralysis or something like that. So that’s always in the back of my mind, like, you know, because a person can’t come back, you know, there’s no coming back to the table and saying, hey, ah, they’ve. They had some new. Because if, uh, they do have that technology, you know, as you can imagine, that technology is going to be very expensive, you know, so there’s no coming back. It’s amazing some of the things they can do with medicine m now and with, uh, and with science now. But it’s just, um, you know. Yeah, there’s no coming back if once you sign that release, they don’t owe you another penny, no matter what happens to you. And so that’s another thing to consider when you’re looking at these claims. Right.
Carson Grace Toomer: So it kind of is sounding to me like the principle of I don’t necessarily know that I may need help until I ask about it kind of thing. And that’s, that’s where you would come in. Right.
Clark: So. Yeah, so. So a lot of times, um, people think again, they do their own taxes or they change their own oil. So they think, I can probably figure this out and they’ll be communicating with an insurance adjuster. And they think their insurance adjuster is like their, you know, high school injury, high school English, uh, teacher, you know, that’ll say, you know, yeah, you’re doing this right or you’re doing this wrong. You know, that’s not who they’re talking to. They’re talking to somebody who has direct opposite interest, adverse interest to you. So they will sit back in, in silence and watch you make mistakes that’ll cost you thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions m depending on the size of the claim. And so, so for example, let’s say it was a $10 million claim. What if they, they came and offer you a million dollars right out of the box and people are like, just like everybody else when they see this on the sign, they’re like, a million dollars. Great, okay. And then they don’t realize. They sign the release and then they realize, wait a minute, I have $3 million in medical bills. So the medical bill, I mean, the medical providers now have a lien against my proceeds, meaning I can’t spend that money. I have, that money goes to them and I still owe them $2 million. You see what I’m saying? How, how, how like. And you have to be able to work through that lean and deal with that lien. And so sometimes, you know, a million dollars seems like a lot of money because it is a lot of money, but it’s relative, right? A million dollars, if you’ve have $3 million in medical bills is not sufficient, even in small cases. It just, it’s not what you do, you know, and you’re going to make m mistakes. I think that m, in my experience, my opinion, is that you are going to make mistakes that will cost you thousands, um, of dollars. And, And I think there’s a statistic, uh, brought to you by one of these other insurance groups. I forget the name of it, but it says, uh, the statistic is that people with insurance, people with lawyers, uh, personal injury lawyers, recover like three and a half times more on average than people that don’t. And, and, uh, and it’s even. Even after they pay for their fees. Right. And I think that makes sense. Like, if you, if you like, I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years, and every day, every day there’s something new and different than. And I’ll give you an example. I was, uh. So I have kids, uh, that are in college and they’re interning, uh, in our firm. They ultimately, they want to come work with me. And, uh, they’re interning in our firm and they’re. And they’ll. They’re asking questions about this and that. And, you know, I mean, they’ve been doing this is. They’ve been doing it for two weeks and still, like the last night Katie was asking me a question and I’m like, uh, I hadn’t thought, you know, I hadn’t thought about that before. Let me. I gotta, I gotta think about that. I gotta research that. I gotta talk to my guys about that. We gotta. We gotta round table that. And collectively we have. You know, there’s probably 10 lawyers in our firm. And I don’t. I. There might be 200 years of experience, you know, and, uh, collectively. And we still might have to, you know, so the idea that somebody’s going to be able to come off the street and understand how all this works is not. Is not rational. It’s like you. You know, there is a lot going on. And I can also tell you that the insurance adjusters, they’re not. They’re not stupid and they’re not charitable. They are smart. They’re good at their jobs. They’re not. I’m not suggesting that they’re bad people or they’re a criminal. They have a job to do. And we’ve had some of them on this, on the podcast that’ll say to you, my job is to see what’s covered and to pay according to the, uh, you know, coverage that is there. And if you read those policies, you see that they are written in a very conservative way that is designed to protect them. You know, and so, uh, their client is different. Our client is the injured person. Their client is the corporation that provides coverage. And so they are very protective of their, uh, client. And as I am of mine. Thanks for joining us. Don’t forget to subscribe and follow us to stay up to date with our weekly episodes. We’ll see you next time.
