- 148 North Broadway, Lexington, KY 40507
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The benefit of hiring Herren & Adams is the personal touch you’ll get and the relationships we have with our clients. What I always say to somebody when I’m talking to them for the first time is you are still the boss of your case. This is a partnership. We’re in this together. We’re here to hold your hand and guide you and advocate for you as much as we possibly can. However, we run everything by you. We make sure you’re involved and we make sure that you’re on top of every issue, you’re a part of your case, you make the final decision. Herren & Adams takes pride in being members of the Lexington and Kentucky community. We care a lot about the people of Kentucky. We try and do everything we can to be involved in our community. We also try and be your friend to the point where you can come up to us years after and we’ll still remember your name on a first name basis and you feel like our relationship never stopped. Even if you think your case is very small or you think you have the biggest case in the world, we’re going to treat you exactly the same. You’re still the boss of your case. You can talk to us at any time. We’re going to give it the attention it deserves and needs.
The bulk of our cases involve some type of accident such as car wrecks. Obviously if you’ve been in a car wreck and you’ve been knocked out of work or not, or you have medical bills, you need immediate economic recovery which you can get through Kentucky’s no-fault system. You need a favorable result with regard to the person at-fault company in that case. We do a lot of those. We do a lot of workers’ compensation work that helps people who are injured on the job. Some have been knocked out of their jobs, some not. Even if you’ve not been eliminated from work, we can compensate you to some extent for your permanent disability. It’s something that an injured worker should look into and should ask us about. We do nursing home cases. People know that unfortunately that’s a traumatic time to put a loved one in a nursing home, and the care in nursing home sometimes is not what it should be. There are falls, there are bed sores, there are other issues that arise in nursing home that may, not always, but may be the result of inadequate care. We’ve handled a number of those successfully for the injured people and or the family if the injured person doesn’t survive. Then finally there’s the medical cases, the medical negligence cases. Those we scrutinize very hard because those are very expensive and very difficult. We’ve had some excellent results in medical cases on the ones that we have tried. Probably the first one that I tried that resulted in a big result was 1.7 million for a person who lost an eye. I also had a case involving a 17-year-old girl that was misdiagnosed as to appendicitis; her appendix burst, and that resulted in a verdict of $1.5 million for her surviving parents. It is a horrible situation. No winners in that situation. Often, there’s no winners in medical cases, but those are cases that we do in the right circumstances with the right experts that we work with over the years.
I have been at this for over 40 years, but the others in my firm, my son Kyle, nine years, Chuck Adams for 30 plus years. We have handled every type of case. Our results have been impressive when we need to try a case. We have tried over 25 to 30 cases to verdict in central Kentucky, all over the state really, over the course of the last 15 to 20 years; reported in Kentucky trial court review, particularly in 2017. You might wonder why that matters. It matters because you want to settle your case. You don’t want to have to go to trial. Most cases do settle, but our background, our results matter to you because the defense and the insurance companies know who can go try a case and who can’t. We’re also competitive on our fees. Our fees are done on a contingency fee basis. Most people know what that means, but that clearly we have to win the case for us to get paid. Then we get a percentage of the ultimate result. That percentage is not set in stone. We can customize our fees based upon the risk, the expense of your individual case, and we do that all the time. We’ve done that for years. Finally, you got to have the ability, you got to have the legal ability, you got to have the knowledge to do the individual case. I know that we have that from many years of doing this type of work in anything from car wrecks to workers’ compensation to falls. The law in the area of what we call premises liability or falls has changed a lot in the last 15 years and you as a lawyer need to be on top of those changes because they favor the injured person.
First with regard to a motor vehicle case, let’s assume that you’ve been taken to the hospital by ambulance, that you’ve been hospitalized for a few days, you’ve got some injuries that are going to cause you to miss some time at work, that you’re going to need medical attention, first of all, you have to get a hold of witnesses, particularly if there’s any contest as to how this happened with regard to the fault. There’s issues of preserving evidence like black boxes in cars these days, which are very important, and it takes experts to do that and you have to get to them timely because they can be destroyed in various ways; not just weather related in towing yards and that type of thing, but through other mechanisms where they continue to run on top of each other where the tape does. Same is true for a fall in a store. You need to get to prompt video before it gets destroyed or any type of accident of that regard. We recently were able to get a video of a scene where a young lady was hit in a crosswalk from the city and it clearly depicts what happened where there was dispute before. Had we not gotten that, we would’ve had a much harder time dealing with the case.
I believe that they know that we’re no nonsense and that we command respect. However, we command respect in a way that we are able to work with insurance companies, not push people away. We bring people to the table to have an open and honest conversation that is objective and comprehensive.
I showed you upstairs before we came down here today a stack probably that thick of thank you notes I have from clients who without any requests, without reviews online, that type of thing, took the time to write me a note appreciating what we’ve done for them. Obviously, it restores immediate economic needs to people who have lost income or have tremendous bills for things, but it also gives them certain financial security to have peace of mind and compensation for what’s happened to them regardless of whether it’s from an injury, a termination, or the death of a loved one.
I tried a case down in Garrard County, Kentucky, which is a very rural county with a very disputed liability situation where two cars collided in one lane and came across into our client’s vehicle but it was disputed as to the fault between those two drivers, and it really made a difference as to that particular case revolved around technology, black boxes, experts. You can’t just go pick an expert out of a book. You’ve got to know these people. You’ve got to interview these people. You’ve got to make sure they can communicate and deal with juries. With regard to other types of cases, I tried a case involving an electrocution a few years ago that was very contested. There are cases involving as simple as a fall in a grocery store where videotape was present of the fall but they destroyed it. There were no witnesses to the fall and it became very important as to the mechanism of how this injury occurred. That matter was litigated to a successful result. Nursing homes had a fellow that went into a nursing home. It’s difficult to put your loved one in a nursing home, so difficult. This particular family did a tremendous job of interviewing different nursing homes, totally relied on these people. Within two days, that nursing home had completely ignored the medication list for that particular patient, changed medication without notifying the family. Within two more days, their father, patriarch of this family, was in critical care at the hospital and ultimately died. That was a case that we successfully tried and resulted in over seven figures in a jury verdict here in Fayette County.
First thing you need to do is take care of yourself. Take care of your health. Take care of your mental health. Oftentimes, you don’t understand the comprehensive nature of your injuries until several months after the accident. Immediately after the wreck, you should avoid talking to an insurance agent because they will record your statement. They’ll hold you to that statement. You need to contact us as soon as you feel like you’re capable. We’ll hold your hand and guide you through the insurance process and advocate for you every step of the way.
Technology helps us so much these days. With emails we can copy people on email or with texts and keep them informed of everything we’re doing and why. It allows us to also ask them for information on a convenient basis to when they can respond and send us papers. They might get bills. They might get things of that nature. However, you don’t want to be dependent on email and text. A lot of this we lawyers might assume people understand, just like in the medical field, doctors might assume you understand why they’re doing a certain thing, and you don’t. That’s why we need to pick up the phone and explain certain things, which we will do at our firm. You don’t get passed along to a clerk or something. You get a lawyer, you get me, you get Chuck Adams, you get Kyle Herren on your case. Any of us can discuss it because we all work on all the cases together.
Just in 2017, a year where we got certain recognitions by our peers for some cases that we tried, our client went through a very difficult time. He had multiple surgeries. The verdict from a conservative county was over $2 million. That same year we had a young fellow who was working on a waterline over here on a rural street in Lexington who was hit by a car while he was working in a construction zone. There were disputes in that case about whether or not his own employer had done the right things to protect him. That case had to be tried because the offer that we received at that was just totally inadequate, totally unrepresented of what this man went through. We received a verdict of $1, 050,000 for that young man. We’ve had some very successful results that give us a lot of pride.
You might ask, what difference does it make if you’ve had impressive results? It’s like the David versus Goliath. You have to know that the firm that you’re hiring has the ability to go in and try a case and has those results. If you hire a firm that’s just running you through a mill, you’re not going to get the same result as a firm like ours that’s had impressive results known to the insurance companies, known to defense lawyers. That’s what drives you to get a fair price; not an exorbitant price or a result, just a fair price. That’s what you want, a fair result in a prompt amount of time.
We handle a wide range of cases all involving personal injury, but to get specific, we handle car wreck cases, worker compensation, premises liability, slip and falls, trip and falls, any type of injury in a business or home. We also handle medical cases, including nursing home and some products liability cases.
(859) 254-0024
Taking the first steps can be the most challenging, but it must be done. Learn where to start and the directions your case could go by calling 859-254-0024 or request a complimentary consultation by completing our form below.
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