Hi, I’m Roger Ghai and I practice here in Kennesaw, Georgia, Calm County, Marietta, Acworth. We happen to have a good portion of our business, which is automobile accidents, trucking accidents, slip and falls, those types of cases and many times question, clients I should say, ask me questions about what is a demand? And what’s entailed with that? And can I get a copy of my demand? Let’s talk about that.
First of all, a demand is basically a document, a preparation of all the medical records, lost wages, documentation of your payments, suffering, mileage, prescription records, all of your medical records, whether it’s a chiropractor, medical doctor, physical therapy that you’ve gone to. At the conclusion of your treatment, we will prepare and have all of those documents in. What we do is we send it in a demand to the insurance company. The demand will include all of your medical expenses, all of your lost wages, any other damages that you might’ve sustained.
How do we send that out? Well, in Georgia, an insurance company has 30 days under the law to review, in most instances, sometimes there’s an exception, they have 60 days, but it’s usually 30 days to review any of the settlement documents that we send to the insurance company. It doesn’t mean that they have to accept the demand that we make. They’re not going to just accept the demand typically. There are some instances where they might, and we don’t have enough time in this particular video to go into those instances, but generally speaking, we’ll send out a demand, let’s say for $30,000. It begins the negotiation process.
Again, the insurance company has 30 days from the date they actually receive it. These demands have to be sent out certified mail and sometimes clients are calling me on the very 30th day and it is a practical matter, it doesn’t quite work like that because what happens is these adjusters have hundreds of cases. They are pretty prompt on responding within that 30 day time period. Sometimes are a little bit off, they could’ve gone on maternity leave. Sometimes it’s happened or vacation or what have you. And so, as a professional courtesy, we will go ahead and give them additional time.
The reason we give them additional time is because your options are, yeah, you’re right, they didn’t file, they didn’t respond to us right on the dot on that 30th at midnight of that 30th day. But if we file a lawsuit, then you’re looking at between two and four years of litigation. Sometimes I’ve had auto accident cases run for four years. We’re not happy with that result, but sometimes the client has had to continue to get medical treatment in cases just going on for that time period.
It’s much better from everybody’s perspective all around, to try and to, to work with the insurance adjuster if that need does arise, whenever possible. That’s usually what happens in the demand, like I said, that just begins the negotiation process. You’re not, usually the lawyer should send you a copy of your demand so that you can see that review and if you have any questions or concerns about what’s being put in the demand on your behalf, you can contact the lawyers office and then discuss it and perhaps make a change, amendments, changes, whatever.
But if you have questions about what is involved in handling these automobile cases from a legal perspective in this automobile accident type area, just call me. But if the case doesn’t get resolved by way of a demand, which a large portion of the cases do, then that only leaves you one option. And that option is to go ahead and file a lawsuit and we’ll talk about what’s involved in filing the lawsuit and the pros and cons of doing that in the next video. In the meantime, if you have any questions, call me at (770) 792-1000.