Even though it is nearly impossible -without looking at every single detail of your case -to tell whether or not your attorney ensured that every “i” is dotted and “t” is crossed before he/she asked you to sign-off on your structured settlement, we have listed below some of the most important subject matters that most attorneys would make their clients fully cognizant of before asking them to accept a structured settlement agreement.

If your attorney had arranged for the professional services of a duly certified independent structured settlement broker, it is more than likely that you were made fully aware of the following. If you did not have access to your own structured settlements broker, however, and had to rely on your opponent's (defendant-loyal) settlement broker, it is quite possible that your attorney may have missed an opportunity to properly advise you on the following important matters -before all responsible parties (defendant, and all his agents) were let off the hook for everything, and forever.

It should be no surprise that self-insured defendants (or annuity insurers representing those defendants) would try to do everything possible to minimize their cost of annuity products needed to guarantee periodic payments that are to be paid to their plaintiffs.

No plaintiff can fault a defendant for trying to keep his/her costs down to the absolute minimum possible -as long as it does not result in the plaintiff getting the short end of the stick.

One of the oldest tricks in the book that many defendants try to pull on plaintiffs is to somehow make their cost of providing those periodic payments appear to be larger than the actual. There are many (underhanded) ways that some (not all) defendants employ in their pursuit of inflating their "apparent" cost of financing your structured settlement payments.