Personal Injury Attorney, Jake Kimball, explains what to expect in personal injury mediation. Jake Kimball is a personal injury lawyer at Springs Law Group LLC. Jake focuses on car accidents, wrongful death and civil litigation. www.springslawgroup.com
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What to expect in a personal injury mediation. Hi I'm attorney Jake Kimball and I wanted to talk to you today about what you can expect in mediation in your personal injury case. If you are in a case in Colorado you can expect that the judge will order that your case be submitted to mediation. Mediation is an opportunity where you have a neutral person called a mediator, usually it's a retired judge or an attorney who has a lot of experience in your area, and that neutral mediator they are tasked with trying to get the parties to compromise.
Typically mediation will take place at the mediator's office so you will go there and you'll be put in separate rooms. We don't want any scenes like you have at the beginning of wedding crashers where people are in each other's face getting mad and yelling at each other. Instead you put the parties in separate rooms, that helps remove emotion from it, that helps people thing rationally about their case rather than getting mad and making emotional decisions.
Once you've been placed in your room you'll be in a room with your own attorney and then the opposing attorney if it's a personal injury then the at fault driver will have an attorney hired by an insurance company that will be in another room and typically they'll have the adjuster there by phone or in person depending on the case. It's rare that you see the actual at fault driver present at the mediation and that's because they typically don't need to chip in any money, it's all insurance money so they don't get to choose how it's spent, that's the insurance company and their lawyer's job to decide how that's spent on your case.
You'll be put in separate rooms and the mediator will go back and forth between the rooms to talk to you about opportunities to settle the case. The way they do that is they'll typically start with the plaintiff, that's the person who brought the lawsuit who is usually the injury victim. They'll start with the plaintiff and talk to the plaintiff, give them a chance to talk about their injuries and their treatment and how they're doing and that kind of thing. Different mediators have different styles, sometimes you'll just talk to the lawyer, sometimes the lawyer will do all the talking, sometimes the mediator wants to talk to the person individually.
One of the important things about talking to the individual is that who you are really matters in your case. Your personality, your character, your credibility, whether a jury's gonna believe you or not is very important in your case and so the mediator's gonna want to get a feel for you, how are you gonna appear in front of a jury. You'll tell your story to the mediator and the mediator will ask questions, what about this treat
