legal questions

- today we're with john kelly. john kelly is apersonal injury attorney in phoenix, arizona. he's agreed to answersome of the questions that were posted online. for those of you whoposted those questions, you're going to getyour answers right now. if alternatively,you have or if you're looking for a personalinjury attorney,

you can feel freeto give him a call. also, john hasagreed to answer any of the questionsyou have directly by just simply postingthem on the bottom of this youtube video. so with that said,john let me go ahead and start off with someof the questions here. first question we had. person asks, "i had havea work related lawsuit

and i believe it's afairly strong case. i would not likemy employer to know what i'm consideringwhile pursuing the case. if the case doesn't work. just in case the casedoesn't work out. is this something possible? basically to hide itfrom your employer?" - there is a certainamount of the case that you could hide.

the initial stagesof investigation is something thatyou can consult with an attorney. that attorney cantalk to you about what the likelihood of your case being successful is, whether there's somethings the attorney can do to get an investigatorworking on it, or experts evaluatingyou for your injury,

to determine if that'sa pursuable case. at some point, it's notgoing to be a secret, and you can't keep that secret when you want toactually pursue the case in the legal system,in that sense. if you actuallywant to actually get a settlement out of the case, or go in with alawsuit further down, that's going to besomething that going

to take notificationto your employer. another issue with this is sometimes there's general rules with how soon a subject has to, a person has tonotify their employer of an injury thathad happened at work. if we're talking aboutan injury at work, it's a good idea tonotify your employer at least that had that injury

and that you're gettingtreatment for that. then i would recommendtalking to an attorney right away about,at least exploring your possibilitiesof what kind of case you might have. not necessarily needingto inform your employer right away that you'repursuing a law suit. - alright, thatmakes total sense. next question we haveis and i'm sure you get

this one all the time. "if i win my case,how long will it take to collect my money?" - there's two waysto win your case in a personal injury case. i'm assuming one of thoseways that people feel like they've won is ifthey settle out of court. the other way is toactually go to trial and have a jury verdict,and have a verdict

from the jury. those can kind ofmake the answer to it a little bit different. generally it shouldhappen within 30 days that you could get your money. there's a lot of other factors. there's attorneysinvolved on the other side that may need to getyou some documentation or release form.

insurance companies,when we settle, they often haveto write a check. some of these insurancecompanies are very big, so they have a lot of files that they're dealing with and a lot of checksthat they're writing. the other issue isthat your attorney will need to put the funds, once they receive those,

into a client trust account. in arizona, therequirement is that they put that check inan iolta account for ten days atleast to make sure that the check clears. there are some thingsthat prevent you from getting themoney immediately. but it generallyis around 30 days. it can be longer though.

- another question, thisis by extension of that. here's the other one. "will i be able totestify in court, will i be requiredto testify in court, like in a criminal case in a personalinjury type case?". - not always. in most of the time,you would not need to testify in court.

i had talked about earlierabout cases settling outside of trial, andthere's a good majority of the cases thatactually do settle without ever goingbefore a judge. in this instance, it'slikely that you would not have to provide any testimony. that is a separate issue from whether youprovide statements to the adverseinsurance company,

or your own insurance company. those aren't usuallysettings where you would have to be in frontof a judge testifying like people think aboutas a court setting. but you may have toprovide statements. if you go to trial,then you would need to provideyour own testimony in most cases, and you would be in front of a judge and a jury,

and you would provideyour testimony like you see on tvwith criminal cases. it's very unlikelyin a typical case. i would say it's very unlikely, but it's unlikelyin the typical case, but it does happen. - those were the questionsthat were posted online. we have some other questions that will be asked later on.

if you're watchingthis, and like i said, if you have anyquestions for john, john's agreed to answerthe questions online. just post them tothe comments section or obviously you canjust give john a call. john, i want to thankyou for your time. - thank you, ryan.