A lawyer can help you in lots of ways, but here are the top two reasons for me why you need professional legal help after an accident.

A lawyer can ease and speed up the process of your injury claim.

Say you’ve just been in an accident. You are injured. Traumatized. And swamped with paperwork for filing, from police reports to DMV forms and insurance claim papers. How can you effectively do all these things while recovering? How can you focus on getting better if you have to make calls and write reports?

Dealing with these hassles is one of the main reasons why people need an attorney after an accident. A lawyer has experience and knowledge of the laws which you both need to speed up the process of an auto accident lawsuit. When in doubt in this kind of situation, having a lawyer will also help you see all the angles and make the best decision.

A lawyer can deal with the insurance company if the latter is sneaky and tries to force an unfair settlement.

We don’t want to generalize here, but there’s enough reason for us to advise people to be cautious around insurance companies. We’ve heard many stories about insurance companies trying to cheat claimants and they use different tactics to do this.

Some quickly make offers and discourage victims from pursuing a suit by citing accounts of cases that took years to resolve. They do this when they feel that the victim has not had legal counseling and will do anything to settle as soon as possible. Others resort to underhanded tactics, like looking for fault in the victim where there is none or asking them to sign agreements that waive the right to sue.

Having a lawyer on your side will help you see through these things and avoid getting cheated by insurers. Besides those mentioned above, there are other steps in filing a claim with insurance companies that may be difficult to do without a lawyer.