Personal Injury
If you have a personal injury matter and you decide to retain Akin & Herron to protect all of your legal interests, here are some activities you can anticipate:
On initial contact, our staff will take some basic information from you over the phone or through our website or email. The matter will be promptly reviewed by our personal injury attorneys and you will be called back right away. At that time, some additional information will be requested, and a personal free consultation will be scheduled in our offices or some other convenient location. For that initial interview, it would be helpful to bring insurance information, copies of medical records collected to date, a police report (if you have one) and other relevant information.
At the end of the consultation, the firm will enter into a written agreement with you to represent you in the matter. That agreement will contain all information pertinent to our engagement.
Typically, our firm handles personal injury cases on a "contingency" basis. As with most other law firms in this area, our legal fee will be one-third of any amount recovered through settlement or verdict. If no recovery is gained in your favor, there is no attorney's fee and you may be expected to pay only the basic costs incurred by us in securing documents, filing the lawsuit and certain other modest charges.
The attorney with whom you meet will give you an overview of what you can expect. If the matter is one appropriate for litigation, our attorneys will continue to collect medical information as well as the details of the accident. If the matter cannot be settled early without resource to the courts, a complaint will be prepared and will be shared with you in draft form.
Once the case is filed, the Court will likely schedule a non-binding arbitration. That will be an early opportunity to have an experienced, neutral individual consider the liability and injury aspects of the case, and to make a ruling on fault and the level of monetary damages. We will have input into the selection of the neutral arbitrator. If the case does not settle before or shortly after arbitration, the case will move forward to the "discovery" process. In that phase of litigation, each party will have an opportunity to direct written questions to and collect documents from the adverse party. Sworn depositions will be taken. The case will then move on toward trial at the earliest date which the Court will provide to us.
Please call 302-427-6990 to schedule your initial consultation. You may also contact us at or by filling out and submitting our online form.