New York Personal Injury Lawyers

New York Personal Injury Lawyers

By Richard Romando

The primary objective of your New York personal injury lawyer is to focus on protecting your rights and entitlements when you are unable to defend yourself. When an accident occurs and you suffer serious injuries, a lawyer can help you claim for damages or pursue legal actions to recover compensation that you are entitled to.

What New York personal injury lawyers can do

Insurance companies are required by law to reimburse you with any expenses that were incurred during an accident, but there are technicalities that need to be satisfied. For example, the filing of no-fault benefits needs to be done within 30 days, or benefits could be reduced substantially or totally lost.

Your New York personally injury lawyer will make sure that you will not be bullied by the insurance company and that you receive the compensation you deserve. There are New York lawyers who are on standby 24 hours a day to take your calls and answer any inquiries you may need.

Costs of hiring a lawyer

If you do not have the money to pay for the charges, you do not have to worry. In most cases, you would not be charged unless you are able to collect the compensation due you.

The fee, however, is quite steep - usually a third of your claims. This serves as a reimbursement for the expenses that the lawyers incurred to win your case. There are also other expenses involved in a New York personal injury case, such as a filing fee of $500, deposition transcript for another $500, doctor's testimony which could be anywhere from $300 to as high as $2500, process server's fee, investigator's fee, costs of retrieving medical records, and meals, among many others. But a good New York personal injury lawyer will try to keep these expenses to a minimum.

You have to understand, though, that not all cases are accepted. Your lawyer would try and retrace the incident that happened and try to evaluate if the case is worth fighting for. There are cases wherein the gain is too small to compensate for anything, so it does not make much sense to go to court.

Injury Lawyers provides detailed information on Injury Lawyers, Personal Injury Lawyers, Brain Injury Lawyers, Birth Injury Lawyers and more. Injury Lawyers is affiliated with Brain Injury Attorneys. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Richard_Romando New York Personal Injury Lawyers

Top 10 Reasons Why You Won't Find A New York Injury Lawyer In The Yellow Pages

Top 10 Reasons Why You Won't Find

A New York Injury Lawyer In The Yellow Pages

By Gerry Oginski

Open any yellow pages book in New York under the heading 'lawyer' and you'll be immediately bombarded with every type of injury and claim you could ever make. Full page ads, double page ads, blazing color, unsightly photos, screaming bold headlines...how does an injured victim choose a lawyer among all this clutter?

Here's a sampling of statements found in current yellow pages ads in the Greater New York Metropolitan area:

"Tough, aggressive, experienced."

What does this mean? That you're a pit bull who knows how to bark and bite?

"Serious trial lawyers for the seriously injured."

What does this mean? That if you're not seriously injured you need a trial lawyer who's not serious?

"Over 70 years combined experience."

What this means is that each attorney has limited experience, but if you pool everybody's experience together, we can make is seem like we've been around for hundreds of years.

"Special consideration for senior citizens."

This is an obvious play for cases involving elderly people. Just what special consideration would this firm give to senior citizens that it doesn't give to all its' clients?

"Experienced in obtaining large cash awards quickly."

Does this mean that this firm never takes cases to trial? The only large awards that are resolved quickly are clear cut on liability, causation and damages. Do I want an attorney who is experienced in obtaining large cash awards slowly? What's the rush? If I rush, isn't there a good chance that I'll get less money for my injuries than I deserve?

"You made a mistake once, now choose the right lawyer."

Guess what type of law this firm practices? Divorce.

"Get the money you deserve!"

OK, sign me up and show me the money. What if I deserve more than you can get for me?

"Call the law firm that never sleeps."

That's an interesting way to distinguish oneself. Being up 24 hours a day, bleary eyed, and tired? If you never sleep, how can you adequately represent injured victims?

Photo of lawyer holding briefcase in one hand,
large cardboard check in other, smiling. Client, on crutches, in a leg cast, looking with total glee at the cardboard check, with her hands open wide as if to exclaim "WOW!"
Give me a break. Believe it or not, this violates the disciplinary rules in the State of New York. It's a no-no.

How about an ad without any name, or address, just an 800 phone number?

No good. Violates the rules. Would you call a 'no-name' law firm?

All these ads make you feel rushed to get your cash.
Sort of makes you feel "lucky" you got hurt, doesn't it?

So, with all of these great lawyer ads, how does a consumer who's been injured pick the right one? Do you have to call each and every one? That would be extremely time consuming and not very effective.

Do you trust the firm because they show pictures of crashed cars and an ambulance nearby? How about the photo of a worker falling in mid-air from a scaffold? Can you relate to him?

Maybe you can relate to the photo of the elderly woman slipping on ice and another photo of her lying on a stretcher in the hospital? Do these illustrations and photos make you all warm and fuzzy about the law firm you're about to call? I personally don't think so.

Here's the top 10 reasons you won't find a New York Injury Lawyer from an ad in the yellow pages:

1. You can't tell one ad apart from the other.

2. The lawyer ads all say the same thing.

"Call me," "Personal attention," "Large Cash Awards," "Lots of experience," "Pick me, ooh, pick me!"

3. Many ads scream at you, without telling you how they can help.

4. Do you call a firm just because they have a larger ad than someone 20 pages into the book?

5. Every ad says that I can talk to a lawyer for free, but what are the fees to handle my case? None of the ads talk about that.

6. Who pays the legal expenses if I don't win my case? Many ads don't tell you.

7. How do I know if one attorney is any better than the other? I can't tell just from an ad.

8. Aren't these ads just trying to sell me their services? "I don't want a salesman, I want a lawyer who knows how to guide me through the legal system."

9. I don't want to go through 40 pages worth of yellow pages ads- I need help now. Maybe I'll go online instead.

10. Do you really want to pick a lawyer they way you choose a plumber?

Gerry Oginski is an experienced New York medical malpractice and personal injury trial attorney and practices exclusively in the State of New York. He has tirelessly represented injured victims in all types of medical malpractice and injury cases in the last 19 years. As a solo practitioner he is able to devote 100% of his time to each individual client. A client is never a file number in his office. Take a look at Gerry's website http://www.oginski-law.com and read his free special reports on malpractice and accident law. Read actual testimony of real doctors in medical malpractice cases. Learn answers to your legal questions. We have over 200 FAQs to the most interesting legal questions. Read about his success stories. Read the latest injury and malpractice news. I guarantee there's something for you. http://www.oginski-law.com 516-487-8207 Also, take a look at Gerry's FREE NY Medical Malpractice video tutorials at http://medicalmalpracticetutorial.blogspot.com/ Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gerry_Oginski Top 10 Reasons Why You Won't Find A New York Injury Lawyer In The Yellow Pages By Gerry Oginski

5 Reasons Why Your NY Injury Lawyer Will Lose His License

5 Reasons Why Your NY Injury Lawyer Will Lose His License

By Gerry Oginski

1. He steals your money.

2. He steals your money.

3. He steals your money.

4. He steals your money.

5. He steals your money.

OK, enough sarcasm. But really, the main reason a lawyer in New York will lose their license is if they do not give you the money you were to receive as part of a settlement or a jury award.

In a settlement, the insurance company makes the settlement check payable to both you and your lawyer. The lawyer is supposed to have you come into the office to sign (also called endorsing the check). Many lawyers try to avoid having the client come into the office just to sign the check. It's an inconvenience for many clients, and most agree to have the attorney sign their name to the check.

In years past, many lawyers took their client's oral authorization to sign their name to the settlement check. However, the better practice is to get written permission from the client which authorizes the lawyer to sign their name to the check when it comes in. This way the client will have a difficult time saying that they never gave their lawyer permission to sign the check for them.

OK, so what happens then? The check must be deposited into a special "Trust" account, called an "Escrow" account. The check must then clear. Once it has cleared, the lawyer is OBLIGATED to give the client his (or her) money. From the escrow account the lawyer will usually write three checks:

(1) A reimbursement check to his law firm for attorney expenses (known as disbursements),

(2) A check for the earned attorney fee, and

(3) A check to you for your net settlement award.

There are many times when medical bills must be paid, or medicaid or medicare must be reimbursed as well. Those payments will usually come out of your share, since they relate to your medical care and treatment.

We have all heard about attorneys who steal money from their clients, and wind up losing their license, but also going to jail. How does this happen?

Without going into the motivation for a lawyer to do something so unethical, one of two things will usually trigger the starting point of an investigation:

(1) The lawyer only gives you part of your settlement, and then gives an excuse as to why he can't give you the full amount. That may cause the client to file a complaint with the grievance committee, which then starts to investigate.

(2) The other reason is that if a lawyer writes a check payable to 'cash' from an escrow account, this will send up a red warning flag that something is amiss. Also, if the lawyer overdraws money from his trust account, an automatic warning signal is sent to the grievance committee triggering an investigation.

If a lawyer uses some of your settlement money and puts it into his personal account to pay his bills, (this is known as 'co-mingling' money) there is an excellent chance your lawyer is on the way to lose his (or her) license.

Thankfully, this does not happen often. When it does, there is a fund available for the client to seek the money that was stolen from them by their lawyer. It's called the Client Protection Fund. Every lawyer in New York State pays into it as a way to offset the bad apples from the good ones.

Hopefully you will never suffer the indignity of having a lawyer steal your money, especially when that lawyer is required by law, and by legal ethics to hold your money in trust for you. It's your injury. It's your compensation.

Gerry Oginski is an experienced medical malpractice and personal injury trial attorney practicing law in Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, New York, Staten Island, Nassau & Suffolk. He has tirelessly represented injured victims in all types of medical malpractice and injury cases for over 19 years. As a solo practitioner he is able to devote 100% of his time to each individual client. A client is never a file number in his office. Take a look at Gerry's website http://www.oginski-law.com and read his free special reports on malpractice and accident law. Read actual testimony of real doctors in medical malpractice cases. Learn answers to your legal questions. We have over 200 FAQs to the most interesting legal questions. Read about his success stories. Read the latest injury and malpractice news. I guarantee there's something for you. See Gerry's website at http://www.oginski-law.com Call him at 516-487-8207. Also, go over to http://medicalmalpracticetutorial.blogspot.com for Gerry's free instructional videos on malpractice & accident law. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gerry_Oginski 5 Reasons Why Your NY Injury Lawyer Will Lose His License

6 Secret Tips To Fingding a NY Injury Lawyer Online

6 Secret Tips To Fingding a NY Injury Lawyer Online

By Gerry Oginski

1.You do a 'Google' search for 'injury lawyer in New York' and you get over a million websites.

What good does that do you? No much. But here's what you really need to know:

When you get results from your search, do you realize that the websites listed on the right side of the page, in a slightly different background color are paid, sponsored, ads? It's true. The same is true of the three websites that appear at the very top of the Google search page.

Those are paid ads. In small print to the side, it says "Sponsored links." What does that mean? It means that those websites have paid to be listed in that section of the page. That brings me to tip #2.

2. There is a difference between a paid, sponsored link, and a website that comes to the top of the page on its' own merit.

What's the difference, and why is it important for you, the consumer to know the difference? Here's the distinction: Those websites that appear on the first page are ranked by Google as being the most relevant websites for your particular search. Google has a special proprietary way of determining which websites are important to your search for "injury lawyer in New York".

The paid ads however, represent people who use a program called "Google Ad clicks" to place their ad on pages where certain searches are done. It's a very clever way of making money for Google, and also a good way for a company to have their ad show up on a particular search for say, a medical malpractice lawyer in New York.

3. "But I still don't see the big difference between the search results for paid ads and those that come up on their own. Can you explain further?"

Sure. When you search for "medical malpractice lawyer in Brooklyn," Google will give you the most relevant websites for what you are looking for. Naturally you need to click on each one of the links on the main page to see if those websites give you the information you're looking for.

The websites that have paid to have their ads placed on that search page get charged for every time someone clicks on their link. Importantly, Google doesn't recognize those paid advertising websites as being among the most important or relevant to your search. Rather, they appear on that page because someone is paying Google to be placed there whenever someone does a search for a particular product or service.

4. Here's a great example that happened recently.

A lawyer in the Midwest, we'll call him Attorney Jim Jones, was very prominent in his small town. Most people who searched online for a lawyer in that part of town came to Attorney Jones' web site. Interestingly, an enterprising attorney who competed for business with Attorney Jones decided to try something that hadn't been done before.

He decided to take out ads on Google, so that anytime someone did an online search for his competitor Attorney Jones, they would be rewarded with seeing an ad for his own legal services on the same page as Attorney Jones.

Here's the dilemma: If a potential client was searching for a particular lawyer offering a particular service, is it legal, ethical or even moral, to allow a competing attorney to put an ad for his own services on the same page as the one he's competing against?

Last I heard, the lawyer I'm calling 'Attorney Jones' filed a grievance complaint against his competitor with his local Bar association. I don't know what the final outcome was at this point.

5. While the legality of that issue is working itself out, as a consumer looking for information, you need to be aware of how the search results are done and ask yourself whether the website you're looking for is from a paid advertisement, or form an 'organic Google search'.

An 'organic Google search' is one where you type in a search term, say, "Medical malpractice lawyers in Queens." The results that appear on the main part of the page are the results of Google's search engine telling you which sites are most important to your search phrase.

Well, you might ask yourself how those websites got ranked, and why they're in that particular order. Google actually offers some guidance on this issue, and the answer is a topic for an entire class over many weeks. Basically, Google gives each website its' own ranking.

It also looks to see how often other websites refer to the one you're looking at, and what type of websites link to the one you're looking at. If a million quality websites link to the lawyer's website that you're looking at, then Google believes that this is an important site for you to look at.

However, if the other websites are merely directories, or "link farms" designed to try and fool the search engines by showing a large quantity of websites linking to the lawyer's site you're looking at, Google tends to disregard many of those links and doesn't rank that site as highly as some others.

6. Question: "Just because a lawyer's ad shows up in a paid ad at the top of the page, does that mean that the lawyer or his firm isn't relevant or right for me?"

Answer: No. In fact that lawyer might just be the right one you're looking for. However, you must ask yourself why that lawyer's website didn't show up in an ordinary "organic Google search" and why it only showed up on a paid link section of the search page.

That brings me back to another subject I wrote about recently- "How to select a medical malpractice attorney from the yellow pages." Just because one lawyer's ad is full page and in color, does that mean that the lawyer or his law firm is the right one for your case? Not necessarily.

The same is true for any paid advertising on any search engine. Just because a website has paid to appear on the same page as your search results, does that mean that they are the right firm for you? Maybe. Maybe not.

The answer is whether the lawyer's website gives you the information you need to know to make an intelligent choice about your legal options. Remember, being informed is the key to obtaining good legal services. Knowing how to choose an attorney will make you a better consumer and give you greater confidence when speaking to an attorney of your choice.

Gerry Oginski is an experienced New York medical malpractice and personal injury trial attorney and practices exclusively in the State of New York. He has tirelessly represented injured victims in all types of medical malpractice and injury cases in the last 19 years. As a solo practitioner he is able to devote 100% of his time to each individual client. A client is never a file number in his office. Take a look at Gerry's website http://www.oginski-law.com and read his free special reports on malpractice and accident law. Read actual testimony of real doctors in medical malpractice cases. Learn answers to your legal questions. We have over 200 FAQs to the most interesting legal questions. Read about his success stories. Read the latest injury and malpractice news. I guarantee there's something for you. http://www.oginski-law.com 516-487-8207 Also, take a look at Gerry's FREE NY Medical Malpractice video tutorials at http://medicalmalpracticetutorial.blogspot.com Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Gerry_Oginski 6 Secret Tips To Fingding a NY Injury Lawyer Online