BEFORE YOU SIGN

An insurance adjuster calls with a number. A release arrives a few days later with a line at the bottom waiting for your signature. That signature is usually the end. Once a valid release is signed and the check clears, the claim is over — including the parts of it nobody has looked at yet.

Michigan attorney Joseph Dedvukaj has represented injured people in this state since 1994. BEFORE YOU SIGN is the explanation he gives at the kitchen table, written down: what actually creates settlement value under Michigan law, what the release permanently gives up, and what is left after the fee, the costs, the unpaid providers, and the reimbursement claims.

There is no settlement calculator in this book. No multiplier, no invented average, and no promise of a particular result, because none of those things exist in a real Michigan claim.

Inside

• What builds and limits value: the serious impairment threshold, comparative fault, medical proof, and lost earning capacity
• How Michigan no-fault really works, and why one collision creates several claims with separate deadlines
• The one-year-back rule, and how a timely case can still lose a year of unpaid benefits
• Fighting your own insurer: benefit cutoffs, overdue benefits, penalty interest, and attorney fees
• Attendant care and replacement services, the two benefits most often left unclaimed
• Finding every dollar of coverage, including the underinsured motorist consent trap
• The release itself, and the indemnity clause almost nobody reads
• Gross versus net: fees, case costs, provider balances, Medicare, Medicaid and ERISA

Forty-seven chapters, twelve worksheets

Twelve checklists and worksheets you can print and fill in, including a twenty-question checklist to take to the meeting and a gross-to-net worksheet to run before you give anyone settlement authority. A Quick Start page for readers whose crash was recent.

Written for injured people, their families, and anyone helping someone decide whether an offer is one they can live with.

Where this book ends at the release, WHAT THE LAWYER TAKES opens the settlement statement itself line by line, and CRASH TO VERDICT follows a single Michigan car accident from the intersection through PIP benefits, lawsuit, deposition, mediation, and trial.

Joseph Dedvukaj founded The Joseph Dedvukaj Firm, P.C. in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan in 1994 and handles Michigan no-fault, motor vehicle, and catastrophic injury matters. See all titles →