Why Does It Take So Long to Get to Trial?

Transcript: Hi. I’m Indiana personal injury attorney David Holub.

This video discusses the defense tactic, in many cases, which is to delay the plaintiff’s case from getting to trial. This tactic is a tradition that goes back hundreds of years. Imagine that you own an insurance company and you have invested the premiums that you have charged your customers in the stock market, for example.

The last thing you want to do is to give your money to a plaintiff in payment of a lawsuit. You want to hold that money in the stock market where it can make a good return on the investment. Some insurance companies have that particular kind of mindset. Their hope is to delay, delay, delay, in hopes that the plaintiff will get exhausted and give up, or that the plaintiff will be willing to accept a lesser sum in settlement just to get the case resolved.

We aggressively fight delay tactics in every lawsuit in which we are representing the plaintiff. If you’re asking yourself, “What can a plaintiff’s attorney do to avoid a delay?”, one of the most important things to do is to be timely on all of the plaintiff’s obligations in the lawsuit. For example, our policy is to rarely ever ask for additional time to respond to any request for information that the defense requests from a plaintiff and is required to be provided within a set number of days under the trial rules–usually the time period is thirty days. So, we make every effort to respond timely within the thirty day time period so that we can go into court and ask the court for an order directing that the defendant also comply with the requirements of the thirty day time period.

We have found over time that most defense firms realize that we are not going to allow them to get away with delay tactics, and that’s part of our reputation.

Not surprisingly, once the defense firms learn that we are not going to allow them to delay the case, and that we are not going to do anything to delay the case, it takes away part of the weaponry that they have in their arsenal.

The delay tactic falls by the wayside. Now you know why the defense fights so hard to delay your case from getting to trial and what we do to make sure your case moves to trial as quickly as possible.

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