What factors you should consider if you’ve been injured in a car accident and you are trying to decide “do I need to hire a lawyer”? Just because you’ve been hurt in a car accident doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to hire a lawyer. That’s going to depend on a whole host of factors. This article addresses some of the most important factors.
Number one: your case involves a disputed liability situation. Maybe it’s a red light/green light dispute or a failure to yield the right-of-way dispute. If you’ve got a situation where the insurance company is claiming that it’s not responsible and that you were at fault but you feel strongly that that’s not true, you should call a lawyer to see if they can help you. Perhaps the lawyer can talk to independent witnesses or, if injuries are severe enough, it may warrant getting an accident reconstructionist involved.
A second factor, and probably the most important one is how severely have you been hurt? The more severe your injuries, the more crucial it is that you hire an experienced law firm to help you deal with the insurance company. For example, if you have to have a surgery as a result of injuries from a car accident, you absolutely need to get a lawyer to help you because of several complicated issues. It could be health insurance company liens or future medical costs you’re having to deal with. These issues will require an experienced attorney to help you determine how you should properly settle your case.
A third factor is when you have a situation where you’ve got problems getting access to appropriate medical treatment. Perhaps you don’t have health insurance. If you’ve been hurt in a car accident, the fact that you don’t have health insurance doesn’t change the fact that you need medical care. A good law firm can help you arrange medical treatment. At the Joye Law Firm, we are very proud of the relationships that we’ve established with a whole host of medical specialists, neurosurgeons to orthopeadic surgeons, to physical therapists, to pain management specialists, to chiropractors. Based on our having done this work for over forty-five years now, we’ve got relationships with top notch doctors who are willing to treat our clients and hold their bills in obeyance until the case is settled.
Another factor to consider, is whether there is any aggravated liability factor involved in the case? Perhaps the driver who caused your accident was arrested for drunk driving. That is the classic example of aggravated liability. Why is that important to determining your need for a lawyer? Because when you have a situation like that, it has a significant impact on the value of your claim. Why? Because not only are you entitled to get a recovery for the actual damages that you sustained, you also can recover for punitive damages. Punitive damages punish someone for recklessness or extreme wrongdoing. Obviously, getting behind the wheel of a car when intoxicated and causing a crash that injures someone is going to warrant punitive damages being assessed. No insurance company is going to voluntarily tell you about, or pay, punitive damages.
That’s not an exhaustive list. Every case is different. If you go to joyelawfirm.com and you look at “our results”, you’ll see impressive results obtained in past cases that we’ve handled for persons who had catastrophic injuries or who lost a loved one as a result of an accident. Every case is different and a previous result can’t be used as any sort of a guarantee that the result in your case would be the same because there are just too many unique factors. I hope that my reviewing some of these factors will help you make a determination about whether you would benefit from at least conferring with a lawyer.
You don’t always need to hire a lawyer if you’ve been hurt in a car accident but you should know that it’s always free to talk to a lawyer at the Joye Law Firm. If you’ve been hurt in a car accident and you think you would benefit from legal representation, please call our law firm at 888-324-3100 or you can fill out the claim form on this website.
