What is the Litigation Process?

Litigation in our firm means starting with the point where we decide to put the case into a lawsuit. There are various reasons we have to do it—for example, if they’re not making a fair offer, or if there is a lot of insurance available, the only way to get full value in the case is to litigate the case, assuming the injuries are significant enough.

So the process starts with just gathering some basic information and putting together what we call a complaint, which is a legal document that needs to be filed in the court where we’re filing the lawsuit. We’re also going to be talking about in that complaint economic and non-economic damages. Non-economic damages aren’t ones that you can really quantify—the impact on your life—whereas economic is something we’re able to quantify. Those are ones that I can give you a definitive number or an estimate.

During the litigation process, we’re enlisting the best experts to help us prove those different things. All these experts, at the end of the day, help us quantify and tell your story about your injury.

The second big part of litigation is the discovery process. That is where we send out requests to the defense called interrogatories—they have to answer these questions that we pose to them. And we send a request for production of documents, which is asking them to produce all the documents that they have that’s relevant to the case.

After that, we schedule depositions, and that’s basically a question-and-answer session done under oath. There’s a court reporter taking down everything that’s said, and it’s made up into a booklet that’s going to be used later in the case.

After depositions are generally taken, the defense usually sends our clients to have a defense medical examination, because the defense gets to pick the doctor of their choice and make our client get an examination. We usually send a nurse with our client to protect our client, because these doctors are hired by the defense solely to minimize our client’s case.

Then we come to a point where we may make an offer or demand to settle the case. Sometimes we’ll go to something called mediation—the defense and us, the plaintiffs, we will agree on a skilled lawyer or retired judge to kind of bring us together and help settle the case.

The other option that’s often used is an arbitration or binding arbitration, which is like a mini trial. So we’ll pick a skilled lawyer again who’s an arbitrator or a retired judge, and that person will then decide the case. Arbitration is sometimes valuable because it gets to a resolution quicker, there’s generally no appeals, and at the end of the day, we’re not stopping until we get the right resolution—and ultimately, the right settlement.