The Personal Injury Law and COVID-19: Will the Global Pandemic Have a Negative Impact on Your Claim?

Are you in the process of filing a personal injury claim against a third-party? If so, is the process taking longer than normal? Or, is your attorney such as a Seattle personal injury attorney satisfied with its progress?

The first six months of 2020 were taken up with the horror of the novel coronavirus pandemic as countries watched it spread unabated across the globe. National, state, and federal governments shut down non-essential businesses and sent residents home as part of a hard lockdown in a desperate attempt to prevent the virus from causing havoc with the world’s healthcare systems as it spread rampantly across the world.

The worst is behind us, and countries are in the process of rebooting their economies and allowing people to move around again. This virus has not disappeared, and no one knows how long it will stay around or when a vaccine will be found to immunize the bulk of the world’s population. And individual states and regions are attempting to fight localized flareups while keeping the economy open.

As a result, the question that must be asked and answered is whether the impact of the pandemic will slow down or negatively impact your personal injury claim?

By way of answering this question, let’s consider the following reasons why COVID-19 could slow down your claim’s finalization:

People are working from home

Most people, including attorneys and court officials, have been, and are still working from home. Technically, this should not make a difference; however, it is reasonable to assume that during the pandemic’s peak, where all non-essential businesses were closed, that there could be a backlog of cases in the civil court. Therefore, it could slow down your case’s finalization.

On the other hand, most personal injury claims are settled out of court between the plaintiff’s attorney and the defendant’s legal team. Therefore, your case could have been expedited if both sets of lawyers were able to work from home and hold digital meetings via a communication tool like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, or Google Meetups.

As a result, the answer to the question of whether legal experts working from home will negatively impact the outcome of your claim or not is that it depends on external circumstances linked to the pandemic, and each case has to be considered individually. There is no simple answer to this question.

The responsible parties are off sick with COVID-19 symptoms

During the peak of the virus’s spread through the USA, many people contracted the contagious illness associated with this virus. And, many of these people ended up in hospital with moderate to severe COVID-19 symptoms. Therefore, it is reasonable to assume that legal experts were not able to work, even from home, because they were off sick. The number of infections in the USA continues to rise.

Current figures show that there are 4.635 million cases across the US, resulting in a potentially high number of lawyers and court officials off work due to the virus. In this case, your claim’s progress will slow right down or even come to a grinding halt while the people involved overcome the effects of contracting the virus.