Are You In Need Of A Personal Injury Attorney?
If you have experienced a major accident of some sort then you are likely to have some questions about what happened. This may include queries about what your road to recovery will be like? If you will be able to go back to work? And what happens next in the process?
However, one of the most common and important questions that are asked is am I in need of a personal injury lawyer. Regardless of what exactly happened to you during your accident or who was to blame for it, the answer is pretty much always going to be, yes. The quicker that you go about appointing a personal injury attorney, such as Golden Personal Injury Attorney, to represent you, the better.
The severity of your injuries
Personal injury can come in the form of a small trip or fall in the store of a local retailer or a catastrophic head-on collision with another driver. Wherever you have experienced considerable pain and/or discomfort from an injury that you have sustained, then it is important that you contact a personal injury attorney as soon as possible. The most severe of injuries can end up leaving you with a large medical bill and even reduced income, leaving you to struggle with paying your household bills.
By working with a fully qualified personal injury attorney you are doing everything that you can to ensure that you are awarded the right level of compensation for the hardship that you have been through. Where your accident was complex and the injuries sustained extensive, then it is likely to be the case that you come up against lots of opposition from the insurance company and so you will need an experienced personal injury lawyer to handle this for you.
The person that caused the accident
In order to proceed with a personal injury claim, you must be able to prove that it was another party that was responsible for the accident that you experienced. A good personal injury attorney will gather the evidence to prove in a court of law that this is in fact the case. However, in most instances of a major accident, it is not the case that just one party is responsible for it happening and there are in fact a number of different parties involved – a personal injury attorney is able to establish exactly who was and was not responsible for any injuries that you have sustained.
For instance, in a case of malpractice within a medical setting, there may be grounds to put a claim in against not only the surgeon/doctor/nurse / or healthcare professional that was responsible for your accident, but also against the hospital or clinic where it happened. This is also true of a collision on the road with a semi-truck – you may have grounds to pursue a claim with both the driver themselves and the company that they were driving for at the time of your accident.
Contact with the liable party or their insurance company
It is usually the case when someone has been in a major accident that the thought of contacting a personal injury attorney does not enter their mind until they have already contacted the responsible party’s insurance company or the party directly themselves. However, you do not have to wait this long and you can and are, in fact, better off by getting in contact with a personal injury attorney as soon as possible after you have been injured. This is because upon making initial contact with an insurance company, they are likely to try and convince you to take a small amount of compensation or to convince you that the accident was not all the fault of the party that they are representing.
After speaking with an insurance company, you may want to get in contact with a personal injury lawyer if…
- They deny your claim – when an insurance company denies your claim it can be very hurtful news and a tough pill to swallow. Not only do you have to get over the after-effects of your accident, but you also then have to worry about how you are going to pay for any medical bills that you have racked up along the road to recovery. Where this happens, a personal injury attorney can dispute your denied claim and work to get you the compensation that you rightly deserve.
- They delay responding to you – a common avoidance technique that is used by many insurance companies is to delay responding to you in the hope that it puts you off from pursuing your claim any further. They do this as they do not want to pay out to you the compensation that you are owed. Using the experience and expertise of a personal injury attorney shows that you are serious about pursuing your claim and forces them to act within the law.
- They provide you with a low amount of compensation – lots of insurance companies provide injured parties with a blanket, minimum level of compensation in the hope that it is accepted. These initial amounts are in no way reflective of what you have gone through or the injuries that you have sustained as a result of your accident. A personal injury attorney can provide advice on what amount of compensation you should expect to receive for your injuries, so armed with this information you can come to a decision on a settlement amount.
- They do not negotiate – some insurance companies will simply refuse to negotiate on what they have offered you in the hope that you eventually give up and accept what it is that they have put forward. Where this does happen, a personal injury attorney will be able to negotiate on your behalf in order to obtain the right level of redress. As part of this process, a good personal injury attorney should keep you and your needs in mind at all times.
