Hi. My name is Joe Moses, and I’m a personal injury attorney based outside of Chicago. I’m a founding partner in the law office of Kass and Moses. For the last 30 years, we’ve been representing injured motorcyclists and injured bicycle riders when they’ve gottten in accidents and gotten them full compensation.
Signing Documents
Today I want to talk to you about a circumstance one of my clients was recently in. He was sent a document to sign, and I was very happy that he asked me first before he signed it. But I want to highlight it so that nobody ever signs this again. It’s very important that my clients don’t sign these documents. What they were trying to do was to get him to sign a lien. And the end result of this was that he would end up with less money in his pocket when we’re done with the case. It would choke off our ability to negotiate down some of his medical bills. So in short what happened is when he was life flighted and in the ICU for seven days, he encountered very large bills. The medical providers did not want to send these bills to his Medicaid because they knew there would be an automatic large deduction due to their contract with Medicaid. Instead what they did is they sent this document to the client and they said, “We won’t send your bills to collections in exchange for you signing this document.”
But what the document does is it signs a lien and what that means is they don’t have to send the bills to Medicaid for payment. They will come after him and his case and they’re in the ability to negotiate. We lose the ability to have Medicaid negotiate those bills. We lose that ability to use that as a power to get those bills down. And so when we are able to negotiate these bills without that signature, we’re able to get them down a great amount. When they do have that signature, the problem is we’re stuck with that signature. So, I highly advise my clients never to sign a lien or any documents sent to them without asking us first. It can be very crucial and very much affect the full amount of recovery we’re able to get for them. If you have any questions or any paperwork that you get in the mail, my name is Joe Moses and I’m at 1-877-292-5344. Thank you.
