Pre-Existing Conditions

Answer:

The question often comes up, if I have a preexisting condition in an accident case in Arizona, will that affect my claim? In fact, when potential clients call our office, they often ask that question, or we’ll ask them, did you have a prior accident before, a work comp accident, or have you injured this area of your body before? Everything that you tell anybody in our law firm, particularly one of our attorneys, is totally confidential. We’re not going to tell an insurance company anything about whatever you tell us unless you give us exact express permission. The reason why this is an important question is because insurance companies keep an index of all prior claims, and they’re looking to catch people who say, “No, I didn’t have any prior accidents.” They go, “Well, that’s strange. What about these three claims before?” In fact, if they catch you not being truthful about that, your value of your case just went down.

Tell us what really happened. Then we can help guide you and determine what disclosures need to be made. There may have been a situation where you had slight injury, no medical treatment. That certainly is a situation that if you didn’t have any ongoing symptoms or anything, one of our attorneys can advise you whether you need to disclose something that minor, likely not. On the other hand, if you made a workers’ comp claim, it’s a public record, an insurance claim, yeah, you want to be able to not only disclose it, but our medical experts will be able to say, yeah, three years ago, but Sally or Jim has been symptom-free or treatment-free for the last year or six months. When the insurance companies try to throw that back in our face, we can go, no way. They were doing fine. Even if you were having some neck problems or back problems before, our attorneys can explain that if there’s a situation, we’ll get you to a medical doctor who can actually differentiate and say, well no, this is an aggravation. This made it worse. We still want compensation for our client. These things are not simple. If you have a preexisting situation, a prior injury, that’s doubly important that you call our law firm speak to one of our attorneys because you’re going to need legal help to resolve your case in your favor. Otherwise, the insurance company is going to say you were definitely injured but not in this accident. Remember, call us. The call is free. The information is free. We’re here to help you.