Accepting pre medical offers is NOT advisable – and this advice is coming from a firm of specialist personal injury lawyers. The reason for this is that the valuation of your claim cannot be determined without proper medical evidence. You need to attend an appointment and have a suitable expert produce a Medico-legal report; so nipping to see your own GP doesn’t count! A pre medical offer is just that – an offer before medical evidence is obtained. Hence: pre medical.
Put it this way – would you buy a car without having a test drive or even knowing what it looks like? Would you buy a house without knowing where it is, or the condition of the premises? Would you as a football manager buy a striker without any background knowledge of whether they can even manage to put the ball in the net? Would you buy a Christmas tree without knowing what it looks like? I could go on forever…
The relevance of this is – would you accept money for an injury claim when you don’t know how much is it actually worth? Well, if the answer to all the questions in the paragraph above is no, the answer to this question should also be no!
Ultimately:
- You do not know how long you will be suffering for.
- You do not know whether there will be any lasting or long term effects.
- You do not know whether this will affect your earnings and result in losing money.
- You do not know whether you need any specialist treatment.
- And importantly: without medical evidence, neither you nor the insurer knows how much your claim is worth!
We really can’t stress this enough – if you settle a claim without medical evidence, you are settling the claim based on no evidence whatsoever. You can guess, estimate, or take a shot in the dark; but you leave yourself open to the very real danger of under settling your claim.
You may think you are being clever by bartering with the insurers directly and getting more than their original offer, which is easy to do as they set their initial offers as low as possible to take this in to consideration. You may think you’re being clever by cutting out the lawyer and getting this done and dusted with straight away, and getting your cheque within days of the injury. But you won’t be so clever when you are still suffering 6 months down the line, and the £500, £750, or perhaps £1,000 you settled for is less than what you should have got.
We get a lot of calls from people who have settled directly with the insurers, and months down the line they are asking for our help to start a claim because they are still suffering. Sadly, you’ve more than likely settled in full and final settlement – which means reopening a claim is nigh impossible.
A lot of people accept pre medical offers around Christmas because the insurers pray on the need people have for more money in the festive season. Ultimately, it’s your claim, your life, and your decision; but hindsight is a wonderful thing, and the amount of times we have had to turn people down for a claim because they have already settled directly for less than the claim is with is insane.
Don’t be a fool – take our advice and settle the claim the proper way – or face the consequences in a few months time knowing you could have received thousands of pounds more, leaving the insurance companies with the last laugh…
