Settlement Loans Can Make Having to File a Personal Injury Lawsuit Easier

It’s no fun to be the plaintiff in a personal injury lawsuit, especially because your life has been turned upside down and you are now facing months or even years of recovery, if you can recover it all. One of the most difficult things about being a victim of someone else’s negligence or carelessness is that you probably have piles of medical bills to pay, and other expenses may as well, even though you’re in, maybe cut drastically. Settlement loans, also called litigation loans, can help with that. Here’s how:

A lawsuit settlement can certainly help alleviate some of that suffering at least in a financial sense, but that, too, has its drawbacks. If you try to handle or negotiate with the offending party’s insurance company yourself, you are likely to get less money than you would if you hired a personal injury attorney. Even then, though, it’s going to be months before you see any kind of outcome that will give you some kind of monetary compensation, either a jury award or settlement. That’s where settlement loans can help.

This kind of settlement funding goes like this: A company that specializes in offering the settlement funding takes a look at your case (with the permission of your lawyer as well as you), determines whether not it is legitimate and is likely to be won, and then offers you a portion of your likely settlement (at your request); usually, they offer you about 10% of your final settlement.

This gives you the money to tide you over while your lawsuit continues the settlement or award, but because you financially more stable, you don’t have to worry so much about getting your bills paid. If you win your case, the litigation financing company reclaims its loan to you in addition to interest and fees, but if you lose, they don’t reclaim their loan, meaning that you are not out anything simply for using their services.

There really is no catch to using litigation financing, except that if you opt for settlement loans, your attorney must agree to it, as well, and your attorney will have to have agreed to take your case on contingency, meaning that if you win, your attorney gets a portion of your settlement or award (usually about a third), but you lose, your lawyer, too, gets nothing, just like the settlement funding company.  If you’re in need of money to pay bills and other obligations so that you can live comfortably, a settlement loan may be the ideal solution.