Video Summary
In this video transcript, attorney Clark Speaks outlines critical elements for accident victims to consider when selecting legal representation. He emphasizes that extensive experience is vital because it allows a lawyer to refine their processes and learn from previous mistakes. Furthermore, a firm’s access to resources and professional networks, such as medical specialists and accident reconstruction experienced, ensures a more comprehensive presentation of a client’s story. Speaks also highlights the importance of a firm’s willingness to litigate, arguing that insurance companies only offer fair settlements when they know an attorney is prepared for trial. By using tools like victim impact videos, legal teams can more effectively demonstrate the profound physical and financial toll an injury takes on a family. Ultimately, the source defines a successful practice by its commitment to holistic recovery, helping victims heal emotionally and financially.
FAQs
Why is experience important when choosing a personal injury lawyer?
Extensive experience allows a legal team to develop more efficient processes and gain insights from decades of past cases. Over 27 years of practice provides a lawyer with a broader perspective on how to handle various challenges and tell a client’s story more effectively to help them recover.
What resources does a large personal injury firm provide?
Large firms typically offer access to a broad network of medical authorities and technical consultants. These resources include orthopedic professionals, accident reconstruction engineers, and economic consultants who help forecast the long-term financial impact of an injury.
How does video help my personal injury claim?
Victim impact videos provide a deeper, more effective description of how an accident has affected an individual or a family. Because a video can be more impactful than words alone, it serves as a powerful tool for telling the complete story of an accident’s consequences during the legal process.
Will my case have to go to a jury trial?
Most personal injury cases are resolved before reaching a jury trial if they are thoroughly prepared. By building every case with a focus on trial strategy, a law firm can often encourage insurance companies to pay the actual value of a claim to avoid the costs of a court battle.
What is the goal of the personal injury legal process?
The primary mission of the process is to help accident victims recover physically, financially, and emotionally. This involves holding the responsible party accountable for the damage caused and ensuring the insurance company pays the true value of the claim.
When should you call a lawyer after an accident, and how do you know who to trust? Today, we continue our Road to Recovery series by breaking down the critical factors to consider when choosing a personal injury attorney. From experience and resources to relationships and courtroom credibility, find out what sets a great legal advocate apart. This video we’ll also take you insider our firm’s mission to help accident victims recover physically, financially, and emotionally drives everything we do, from building trial-ready cases to leveraging expert relationships that improve client outcomes.
Here’s what we discuss in this episode:
🧠 Experience matters—look for a lawyer who’s seen it all and learned from it
🏥 Relationships with medical and legal experts can make or break your case
💼 Big resources = better results in complex injury cases
⚖️ Trial readiness leads to better settlements—even if you never go to court
0:00 – Intro
Featured Keyword & Other Tags
Recover, catastrophic injury, attorney, experience, legal experts, relationships, victims
Client Links
Learn more about how Speaks Law Firm can help you: https://www.speakslaw.com/
Schedule your FREE case review: https://www.speakslaw.com/our-attorney/r-clarke-speaks/#contactFormTarget
Find us on YouTube: https://bit.ly/3R40YMP
Transcript (Click To Read)
When Should You Call a Personal Injury Attorney?
Clark: I’m Clark Speaks, the catastrophic injury lawyer. Welcome to the verdict.
Carson Grace Toomer: Now, what factors say I have been in an accident? What factors do I consider when I’m making the decision to call a lawyer? Somebody like you?
Clark: I think that’s a good question. The factors that I would want to know if I would think about if I were making, uh, if I were looking for somebody to call, is I would want to know, uh, first of all, does somebody have this experience, you know, and, uh, for example, you know, I’ve been doing this for 27 years. I think it is so. 27 years. So I am better at it now than I was 20 years ago. I have seen more, I have done more, I have had more experiences. I’ve made mistakes. I have learned from those mistakes. You know, I have, uh, we have a better process. I know what I’m good at, I know what I’m not good at. And if the things that I’m not good at, we have people who are really, really good at it. And so experience is a huge part of it. Resources are part of it. Um, there are big firms and there are small firms, and for a lot of things, man, I might, uh, you know, like, I like to go, uh, to a mom and pop kind of restaurant, right? Like a breakfast house or whatever that might be. Um, the same families run it for a year. Small place. There’s only a few people that work there and all that. But in this case, it’s different. In this case, if we get involved in a case, the resources that a firm has become important, uh, because it’s the relationships that we have. Like, we have better relationships because of the size of our operation than we would if we were when it was just me and a secretary that I worked with for years and years and years. Um, and so I can help people get in to see specialists, orthopedic specialists, neurological specialists, some of whom have been on our podcast. You know, I can help them. And then also we have the relationships with experts, whether they’re medical, uh, experts like the two I just described, or whether they’re experts like accident reconstructionists, engineers, biomechanical engineers, future, uh, medical analysis people, People, economic experts. We use economic experts all the time to forecast, hey, how’s this going to cost money for this? You know, because that’s the objective in this whole process. I’m not going to do a better job for somebody because I’m going to make up evidence or make up, uh, a fact that somebody else wouldn’t have access to, but we’re going to be able to do more to help people, I think, because we’re going to do a more complete job of telling this story right, and the resources that we have available to us in terms of relationships and skills and uh, uh, for example, video, like we do a lot with video and in certain cases we’ll do a victim impact video which allows us to show a deeper, uh, uh, description of what happened in a better view of what happened and tell a story more effectively of what happened and how a person or a family is affected by an accident. And that has an impact. That’s hard. A, uh, picture’s worth a thousand words and a video is worth a thousand pictures. And so I think that, that uh, those things are very important. And then also you want somebody who uh, is committed. And so our mission in this world is to help accident victims recover physically, financially and emotionally. And so that’s what we do. And in fact this is a part of that. And that doesn’t necessarily mean just the people we represent, there might be somebody in another place that watches this that we might never have any contact with. And that’s fine, you know, because our mission is to help people, accident victims, recover physically and financially and emotionally. And so that commitment is important. Uh, uh, the other piece of the commitment thing is the ability to try cases. The ability to go to. If I go to an insurance company and I say to an insurance company, my client was injured and I need you to pay for the damage that you caused, and I don’t ever go to court, they’re not going to respond to that very, I mean they’re going to give just enough money to make me go away. And it’s like if somebody breaks in your house and you say, hey, I need you to leave, you know, they may leave, they may not leave. Or if a bully comes to you and says, hey, uh, you know, give me your toy, like we talked about earlier, uh, they may leave. But if I have the ability to go to court and fight in court, and we have the process and the commitment to do that, and we do, um, in this firm, then they are going to assess that and include that in their analysis and recognize we need to pay these people full value or we’re going to go to court and lose that, plus we’re going to have to pay all the costs of going to trial. So we need to go ahead and pay this claim, its actual true value. It’s just like in self
00:05:00
Clark: self defense classes you learn self defense classes, uh, karate, jiu jitsu or whatever you learn not so that you can fight and so that you, because you love to fight, you learn those things so you don’t have to fight. And so the reason why we spend so much time developing, uh, trial skills, and the reason we spend so much time, uh, focusing on trial strategy and building trial, uh, building cases for trial is so that we don’t have to. And so, as a result, very few of our cases ever end up in actual jury trials. But, but they’re all prepared as if they were. Does that make sense?
Carson Grace Toomer: Very much so.
Clark: 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.
