After sustaining an injury in a serious car accident, pursuing a legal remedy doesn’t have to make a difficult situation even more stressful. On the contrary, it could alleviate your worries considerably. A remedy could facilitate comprehensive medical care, compensate you for lost wages, and allow you to focus on your physical rehabilitation instead of the financial ramifications of what has happened to you. Here are a few important things that you should keep in mind about the logistics of advancing your legal rights after a major injury.
Experience Matters When You’re Choosing a Lawyer
Getting the right representation can improve your chances of getting a meaningful remedy, and it can certainly make the process of initiating a claim much easier to navigate. In particular, you need to hire a lawyer who has experience successfully representing personal injury clients.
Ideally, your lawyer’s practice should be located in the jurisdiction and county where you’ll be making your claim. If you need to find a personal injury lawyer to handle a claim in Tampa, seek out a locally based practitioner such as Burnett Law, P.A., a litigation firm with extensive experience representing accident victims in that region. Someone with local experience is likely to have a strong professional network in the area and a fair amount of know-how about local procedure.
Opting for an attorney who doesn’t specialize in the area of the law that you need assistance with is going to be a gamble. You don’t want your counsel to be learning what they have to do to represent you at the start of the representation. You’d probably be more confident about your claim if you go with someone who has already cultivated an outstanding legal skill set over the course of their experience.
There Isn’t a One-Size-Fits-All Formula for Damages
One of the first questions for an attorney that you may ask might be about the value of your claim. There isn’t a bright line law assigning fixed amounts of compensation for specific types of injuries because the same injury isn’t going to bring about the same consequences for everyone. Numerous factors that are unique to your individual situation bear on the types of damages you can seek and their values.
The damages that you seek should be proportionate to the harm that you have experienced. In general, the more severe your injuries are, the greater the compensation you may seek. Very serious injuries may merit compensation for pain and suffering. This is also true of injuries that hinder mobility or interfere with your ability to perform basic activities.
If your injury prevents you from working for a protracted length of time, you should probably seek a remedy that includes restitution for your lost wages. Short-term and long-term disability coverages commonly pay proceeds that represent a fraction of an insured’s wages, so it may still be advisable to pursue this form of damages even if you have received some alternative compensation for the time that you’re away from work.
Taking Timely Action Is Crucial
Waiting too long to initiate a claim after a car accident can be problematic for several reasons. Bear in mind that you’ll need to prove fault in order for your claim to be successful. To do this, you’ll need evidentiary materials showing that another driver’s negligence was the cause of the accident. You don’t have to prove this beyond a reasonable doubt like a prosecutor in a criminal trial. Instead, you must establish that your account of what transpired has probable accuracy. In legal terms, this burden of proof is referred to as a preponderance of the evidence.
Evidentiary support for your claim is critical, and it becomes harder to identify and collect as time elapses. Witnesses may be unavailable or might not remember events clearly, and physical evidence such as video footage could be lost.
Lastly, it is important to be aware that your standing to make a claim is not indefinite. To protect your legal rights, you have to seek a remedy within the applicable statute of limitations.
