What Is Personal Injury Law?
Personal injury, or "tort" law, involves the right to recover damages for injury cased by the negligence or willful acts of another. Tort law is simply a way of determining who is responsible for a loss. Tort law has a double purpose - one is to compensate people who have suffered a loss caused by someone else - the other is to affect people's conduct. If people (or corporations) know they will be held responsible for their careless acts that harm others, they will change that conduct to avoid the harm. Our legal system holds people and businesses responsible for careless acts even where they have great wealth and power. Our system does a good job of that, but it is constantly under fire from advocates of "tort reform" who are usually businesses and corporations seeking to avoid responsibility for harm they cause.

Do I Have a Case?
The real question is, "What chance do I have of recovering adequate compensation for my loss?" The answer to that question involves many variables, such as the type of loss, legal principles such as negligence and liability, and the sources of recovery.

How Does Forrest & Bourne Determine Whether to Take My Case?
We are a "no recovery, no fee" law firm. As such, we do not get paid unless we are successful. We evaluate three things before accepting a case. First, we evaluate the probability of a successful recovery. Second, we evaluate the time and effort required to resolve the case. Third, we evaluate how much money we will have to spend to bring the case to conclusion. Because we handle serious cases involving catastrophic injury, our cases require large expenditures on expert witnesses, depositions and preparation of exhibits.  The client is not normally responsible for expenses unless we are successful. We evaluate every case as though it will be tried. While many cases settle, most are not settled for full value until very close to trial. If after reviewing all of those factors we decide not to take a case, the prospective client owes us nothing.

On attorney referral matters, we work with other attorneys to handle all or part of a case that requires our expertise in medical malpractice, wrongful death or personal injury. 

What Can Forrest & Bourne Do For Me?

While obtaining just compensation is the most important part of our services, we also help people obtain appropriate advice to assure their future financial health after an award of damages. We work with banks, life insurance companies and structured settlement consultants to make certain the recovery is invested properly, and the client is protected.