Nate

“When I came to, I couldn’t figure out what had happened, because I was still wearing my seatbelt but I was lying in the back seat,” he says. The force of impact had snapped the hinges on the driver’s seat.

Nate tried to shake it off: “I didn’t report the pain. Nobody wants to be that guy that gets out of the car and says, ‘Oh, my neck, my neck!’ I just wanted to go home and go to bed.”

In fact, Nate wanted to shake off the whole thing. “I wanted to say, ‘Hey, accidents happen, let’s just get the cars fixed and we’ll go our separate ways, and life moves on.’ I hoped that it would be maybe a week of discomfort, maybe a month of discomfort.”

But it wasn’t so simple. “It’s been three and a half years now and I’m still in pain. I didn’t really understand the long-term impact that it would have on my life at the time of the accident.”

In the weeks after the accident, Nate was overwhelmed. “We had a colicky baby and a mom that needed extra help and I’d just been in an accident. I mean, people don’t really…those are some of the worst times that I can remember in my life. It was rough.”

“Within the first week, I sat down with the insurance adjuster for the other company, the at fault party. He asked if he could come see me, and see the car. I’d just had my neck massage work done, and the combination of the pain and the emotion of the situation made it impossible for me to talk. It sounds silly now, but he’d ask me questions and I’d start bawling. I had to just shake my head yes or no. Finally he said, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it. We’ll get things taken care of,’ and kind of left it at that.”

But soon the stress of dealing with the insurance company became too much. “That’s not something you want to deal with while you try to heal. The amount of mail that you get alone can be daunting. You’re dealing with something that you just can’t understand, unless you have that experience.”

“I didn’t get too far into the process before some friends of ours recommended that I find a lawyer, saying that, ‘It would be easier to work with the insurance company if you had representation.'”

“My friend had been involved in an accident himself. He didn’t get representation and he settled for a relatively small amount. His medical problems persisted and he couldn’t get the needed surgery, or other things that he needed because he never recovered anything from the insurance company.”  Nate’s friend suggested that he find a lawyer. “From my experience looking back, it was probably the best decision that I could have made. I don’t think that I would have been able to find the time or the knowledge of the law that I needed to deal with the insurance company.

“I think they would have said, ‘Here’s what we’re going to offer you, take it or leave it,’ and I would have needed to just go with that. I think I could have really done myself a disservice.”

Nate’s settlement has helped him get the medical care he needs and has covered what he lost while he wasn’t able to work. It has also provided some compensation for pain and suffering.

“Having a lawyer on my side has meant so much to me. My family has had to make a lot of sacrifices financially as well as time-wise, and as much as I would have liked to avoid it, it feels right to say that I needed to be compensated for that. It was too much to ask for my family to have to deal with that.”

“If you’ve been involved in an accident and are hurt, I would most certainly recommend that you find a lawyer that can help you deal with the insurance company.”

“Tom has been wonderful to work with. I’ve been fortunate to have a good friend there. I don’t think I could have gone to a better place.”