The Importance Of Keeping Solid Documentation

It is important to make a strategy for keeping your case relevant documentation. Pictures, recordings, written statements, bills, police reports, emails and much more are all documentation that can be used and will very likely be asked for in many legal cases.

Say you were in a car accident, it may take many months before anything goes to court. Once it does with all that has happened from the accident until the court appearance it is often very difficult to keep track of it all without having a plan.

Here are some tips that will help you make sure you have the right documentation when you need it.

When In Doubt Keep It- If you are unsure of whether not to keep an item or not keep it. Especially if you haven't yet talked to a lawyer about your case strategy. It may be something useful that can be used. You want a professional to make those decisions.

Always Make Multiple Copies- Remember that your lawyer is going to need copies, you will need at least 2 copies (in case one gets lost) and your insurance company will need copies and that's just for the people on your side.

Make A Digital Copy- Scanning your documents onto the computer make it easy to organize them and keep them together. It also makes it convenient for creating copies, say at a law office by using a flash disk. Email is another great way to do this and is often quite secure. The great thing about emails is that they have time stamps demonstrating a time-line becomes very easy if you use emails.

Use Your Email For Responses- This is a great way to demonstrate what communication was taking place over time. If you were called and talked to by someone who is involved with the case you may want to make a habit of emailing them back what you felt was talked about it and asking for a confirming response, even if you were on the same page on the phone. Its funny, people have more of a habit of doing what they say when they write it down.

Have Them Write Down Your Goals- When working with attorneys, union reps, and insurance agents ask them to right down their goals and strategy for your situation so you can use that as a benchmark for performance later as well as make sure everyone is on the same page.

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Why Everyone Should Have Uninsured Motorist Coverage (UIM)

Un-insured motorist coverage is perhaps one of the more obscure lines of insurance applications but it is often the most needed insurance. In fact this it is the policy they don't want you to pick out because it is the one that they have to payout on most and is some of the cheaper insurance policies you can buy.

Yes, here in California we use insurance to minimize our liability to others while we drive. With everyone required to be insured before they can drive, that should cover everyone, making it so you don't have to worry about the liability of a car accident right? Wrong, when in a car accident you are going to be facing bills. With these bills coming up you may find that California minimum required policy is $15,000 and that is nowhere near enough. If the crash wasn't your fault your insurance will do everything they can to pass on the liability to the other company, rather than take care of their client and then ask for the bills to be paid later. Sadly, this is how it works. and the insurance companies certainly give you the runaround prolonging payouts as much as they can which is what you can expect from them. There is a way to get your insurance on your team when you have been hit by someone else, and it is actually pretty cheap.

There is only one way to have this done and that is with UIM. UIM ( uninsured or underinsured coverage) is useful for two reasons, first the obvious one: if you are hit by someone who does not have auto insurance you will still be insured. The other reason is if they do not have enough insurance coverage. If you you are in a car accident and injured it is more than likely that your medical expenses will well pass the minimum requirements for CA insurance liability which is $15,000. To ensure that this does not occur all insurance companies are mandated to offer UnInsured Motorist insurance at a reduced rate even. How UIM works is on top of the existing insurances. So if you are hit by a person who has the minimum insurance policy of $15,000 and you are injured. That $15,000 is going to be a plink in the bucket but you can be saved by the UIM. Say you got a policy for 100,000, that will then take effect on top of the insurance policy of the person who collided with you so now you have 115,000 worth of coverage and that is quite a bit more realistic for the cost medical care and bills while you are laid up recovering. The other amazing part of this is that now your insurance has a vested interest in making sure the other insurance company pays so that they don't have to. Suddenly the insurance is actually starting to work for you and sooner because of their liability for payout. What a great product UIM is right?!

The thing is, these insurance companies present this option as an extra when this should be a mandatory fixture, especially if you plan on driving more than one person often. Insurance companies play down the importance of UIM because it is where they loose most of their money. You will often see a pop up screen asking if you want the extra coverage and having decline highlighted, the insurance companies do this because you are trained to dislike and close pop ups especially when asking for money. Ignore the temptation to close the page and look it over, purchasing UIM could be one of the best decisions you have ever made.

The Backgound: Law Office Of Ball And Yorke

Ball & Yorke

From 1989 through 1997, Ball & Yorke successfully represented the interests of large corporations, including the Vons Companies, Food4Less and Fedco, as well as multinational insurance interests State Farm, Hartford Mutual, CNA, Chubb Insurance and Allstate.

Changes in their philosophy, however, moved the firm to abandon their representation of these powerful interests. The partners found insurance defense work to be unfulfilling and impersonal. Having entered the field in the hopes of serving justice, Allen and Brian parted ways with its corporate clientele and turned their focus on the interests of injured individuals on a full time basis.

To this day, the firm continues to represent the interests of individuals whether they are plaintiffs or defendants.

Since 1998, Ball & Yorke has represented thousands of individuals and their families in a wide variety of civil matters, from personal injury to real estate. Allen and Brian have helped people hurt in car accidents, stood with the victims of insurance bad faith and fraud, represented employees wrongfully terminated, and assisted those afflicted with catastrophic personal injury matters. Ball & Yorke has handled complex business litigation on behalf of small business owners, successfully represented consumers from defects in faulty products, and has masterfully resolved complex real estate transactions.

www.ballandyorke.com