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Do you know what a lump sum payout is? Would you like to learn what that is? Come join
me as I share with you this great information. Hi. I’m Gerry Oginski. I’m a New York
medical malpractice and personal injury trial attorney practicing law here in the state
of New York. A lump sum payment is where you get your entire settlement amount in one payment.
Now if you take your case to trial, in a medical malpractice case if a jury awards you money,
what will happen is that you will only get a small percentage of the amount that you
were awarded a lump sum. The remaining amount of money will then be paid out over the course
of years. Why? Because that’s known as a ‘periodic payment.’ And why do they do
that? They do that because the insurance companies lobbied the state legislature that they did
not want to pay out a big lump sum of money all at one time. Now why is this important
for you? Well when you have a settlement, you will get the money all in one lump sum.
In all likelihood, your attorney is going to describe something to you where you get
the money to you not in one lump sum but rather you take the payments in periodic payments.
Now why would you want to do that? Well, for two reasons. Most people are not familiar
with handling large sums of money and if you’re not familiar with how to handle or invest
large sums of money, it’s quite possible that you’re going to lose it very quickly.
And in fact, studies have been done – especially for lottery winners, where they get lump sums
of money all at one time - studies have shown that people who come into a large amount of
money all at once tend to get rid of it, tend to lose it within a period of 4 to 5 years.
So in order to prevent that from happening, one of the things that you’ll be told about
is the opportunity to invest your money in something known as ‘annuities’ or ‘structured
settlements’. And what that does is it allows you to take the money in periodic payments,
over many different years. So why do I share this great information with you? I share it
with you just to give you an insight and an understanding into how the litigation process
works here in the state of New York. You know, I recognize that you probably have questions
or concerns about your own particular matter. And if your matter happened here in New York
and you do have legal questions, what I encourage you to do is pick up the phone and call me.
I can answer your legal questions. I do this every single day and I welcome your call.
You can reach me at 516-487-8207 or by email at lawmed10@yahoo.com. I’m Gerry Oginski,
here in New York. Thanks so much for watching.