This video is going to address proposals for settlement and litigation related to automobile accidents, car accidents, motorcycle accidents. A proposal for settlement is a mechanism or a tool allowed by the Florida rules of civil procedure when a case is in suit. That means that after you’ve been injured in an automobile accident, motorcycle accident, and you’ve been unsuccessful and settling your claim before a suit is filed, a suit ultimately has to be filed. This is the time period I’m talking about. The general rule of thumb is a proposal for settlement cannot be filed until 90 days after a lawsuit has been filed. What a proposal for settlement is, is an attempt by a party, whether it be your attorneys won’t work on your behalf to settle the case or the defense attorneys working on their client’s behalf trying to settle the case, and it is a formal notice saying that they’re going to propose to settle the case for x amount of dollars, whatever that amount may be.
You have 30 days to either accept or reject that proposal for settlement. If a proposal is not rejected and the 30 days lapses without acceptance, that’s called constructive rejection, so it’ll count as a rejection. The issue with proposals for settlement that really come into play really only come into play when we go to trial. If we go to trial and a proposal for settlement is not beat by 75% of the value of the proposal, then there’s the ability of the party making the proposal for settlement, collecting their attorney’s fees and costs. So for example, we use simple numbers. Let’s say a proposal for settlement has been filed for $10,000 if that proposal is not accepted by whichever party and you go to trial and the verdict is not more than $7,500 than the proponent of the proposal for settlement or the party making the proposal could potentially go after the party that did not accept the proposal for their attorney’s fees and costs.
It’s a method that parties used to try to leverage their position to try to settle a case. We often see numbers such as between 90 and 95% of all lawsuits that are filed. Don’t ultimately end up in trial. So the real hammer on the proposal for settlement doesn’t actually happen until you get to trial. There’s a verdict and that verdict does not beat, we’re exceeds 75% of the proposal for settlement. There are many other nuances surrounding proposals for settlement. All, for example, are they even enforceable as written? Uh, that would take a lot more time than we have for this video to go over. But I hope this brief overview of what a proposal for settlement is a helps you understand, you know, perhaps this little tool that sometimes we use, sometimes the defense uses to try to settle a case.
*The above has been transcribed by a third party service and has not been checked for accuracy.
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